THE PINOCCHIO TEST

[metta 0]

THE PINOCCHIO TEST

Washington Post

The bottom line is that it has taken four days to drag something approaching the full story out of the Canadian Embassy and the Obama campaign. As I suggested before, both Obama and his opponent, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, have exaggerated their opposition to NAFTA in order to win votes in economically depressed Ohio. This is a case where the technical parsing of the truth by the Obama campaign falls well short of the whole truth.

Two Pinocchios.

ONE PINOCCHIO: Some shading of the facts. TWO PINOCCHIOS: Significant omissions or exaggerations. THREE PINOCCHIOS: Significant factual errors. FOUR PINOCCHIOS: Real whoppers. THE GEPPETTO CHECK MARK: Statements and claims contain the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Two Canadian Diplomats, One Evasion by Obama

Tuesday, March 4, 2008; Page A09

For the past four days, Sen. Barack Obama and his campaign staff members have been strenuously denying a story first aired by Canadian television on Feb. 27. The story has gone through several versions. In its original form, CTV said that a "top staffer" from the Obama campaign had telephoned the Canadian ambassador to warn him that the candidate would soon be speaking out against the North American Free Trade Agreement, the 1993 pact between the United States, Canada and Mexico. The staff member allegedly told the ambassador that "the criticisms would only be campaign rhetoric and should not be taken at face value."

The Canadian Embassy in Washington flatly denied the story, and Obama repeated the embassy's denials. It now turns out that, while there were errors in the original CTV story, a senior Obama campaign staffer did talk about NAFTA with a senior Canadian diplomat.

THE FACTS

Courtesy of Nedra Pickler of the Associated Press, we now have a contemporaneous account of what took place at the Feb. 8 meeting between a senior Obama campaign official, Austan Goolsbee, and the Canadian consul general in Chicago, Georges Rioux. The AP obtained a 1,300-word memo describing the meeting that was written by a Canadian consulate official, Joseph DeMora.

In an interview with the AP, Goolsbee contested a portion of the memo that quotes him as saying that campaign rhetoric "that may be perceived to be protectionist is more reflective of political maneuvering than policy." He acknowledged telling the Canadians that Obama's position on NAFTA "is less about fundamentally changing the agreement and more in favor of strengthening/clarifying language on labor mobility and environment and trying to establish these as more 'core' principles of the agreement."

DeMora's memo is more nuanced and subtle than the initial CTV report. Both the Canadian Embassy and the Obama campaign seized on the inaccuracies in the report to try to knock down the story. This is a classic news-management technique known as "parsing": Focus on a detail that you can safely say is untrue, aggressively deny it, and create the impression that the entire story is inaccurate.

In this case, the detail about the Obama staff member telephoning the Canadian ambassador in Washington was inaccurate. There was no contact between the embassy and the Obama campaign on NAFTA. But the denials omitted an important part of the story: An Obama campaign staff member had discussed NAFTA with a senior Canadian diplomat. While a consulate general is a different entity from an embassy, they are both staffed by Canadian diplomats.

Obama spokesman Bill Burton insisted yesterday that the campaign had not misled reporters. He said that Goolsbee, who serves as Obama's senior economic adviser, had gone to the Canadian consulate in Chicago for an "informal" meeting, rather than as an authorized emissary of the campaign. He said that there was "nothing inconsistent" between what Goolsbee told the Canadians privately and Obama's promises on the campaign trail to renegotiate the NAFTA agreement.

THE PINOCCHIO TEST

The bottom line is that it has taken four days to drag something approaching the full story out of the Canadian Embassy and the Obama campaign. As I suggested before, both Obama and his opponent, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, have exaggerated their opposition to NAFTA in order to win votes in economically depressed Ohio. This is a case where the technical parsing of the truth by the Obama campaign falls well short of the whole truth.

Two Pinocchios.

ONE PINOCCHIO: Some shading of the facts. TWO PINOCCHIOS: Significant omissions or exaggerations. THREE PINOCCHIOS: Significant factual errors. FOUR PINOCCHIOS: Real whoppers. THE GEPPETTO CHECK MARK: Statements and claims contain the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.