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September 30, 2009

More evidence of Obama fatuous fabrications of his 'work' experience

Ed Lasky
I would be remiss if I did not supplement my column today regarding Obama's Work Ethic with additional information that has come to my attention via our readers and my own research.

Obama claimed during the campaign to have worked his way through school. That was meant to bring him down to earth -- as a person who pulled himself up by his own bootstraps and was able to pass through Occidental College, Columbia University and Harvard Law School, while working! Barack Obama: the personification of the American dream.

Except that it is a false image.

Newsweek published an article during the campaign that found his claims regarding his working his way through school false:
We know Obama took out loans to get himself through school. But the campaign at first provided information on just two jobs Obama had in those years, and they were both in the summer.

Newsweek described it as a "stretch" to say he ‘worked his way through college. Well, he does have an elastic definition of the truth so stretching it is par for the course.

Newsweek expands the inquiry regarding Obama's campaign claims of having passed legislation and finds them not credible.

During the campaign, advertisements touted that Obama "passed" three bills, without identifying where they were passed (U.S. Senate, Illinois Senate?). In fact, Obama did not pass three bills. That is what a legislature does and in this case, the three bills were passed by the Illinois Senate-a far less notable accomplishment than had the bills been passed in the U.S. Senate.

Newsweek details the fabrication:

The first bill that's cited is the 1997 law that created the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program in Illinois. The ad claims Obama "passed a law to move people from welfare to work, slashed the rolls by 80 percent." That's going too far. First, the law in question wasn't dreamed up out of thin air by its sponsors. It was the follow-up to the welfare reform act, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, that President Clinton signed on Aug. 26, 1996. That law gave states the ability to design their own welfare programs as long as they met certain federal requirements, including limits on how long recipients could get benefits. The bill that Obama cosponsored was Illinois' version.

And far from having "passed" the bill single-handedly, Obama was among five Senate sponsors of the measure, as we said previously. It was passed by both chambers of the Illinois Legislature and signed into law by the governor.

Welfare reform was successful in moving people off public assistance. There was about a 78 percent drop in the number of families receiving public assistance in Illinois between 1998 and 2006. But we don't think Obama alone, or even Obama and the four other sponsors of the Illinois law, can take credit for all of this. It was the federal law, hammered out by Clinton and the Republican Congress, that set the wheels in motion and forced states to act. Nationwide, the number of families on welfare declined quite a bit as well, going from 3,146,870 in '98 to 1,805,900 in '06, a decrease of almost 43 percent.

Also, our friends at PolitiFact talked to an expert who said part of the steep drop in Illinois' numbers was due to other factors, such as a state bureaucracy that took an aggressive approach to ejecting people from the rolls, sometimes erroneously.

Newsweek outlines the "stretching" behind the other two bills he claims credit for here.

Posted at 05:33 PM | Email | | | Share Share
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