In an interview with Hugh Hewitt this week, we both expressed the fear that Barack Obama is offering so many blatant whoppers, half-truths, radical proposals, and uninformed statements that many of them will blow by the public, and an all-too-credulous press, without much scrutiny.

Illustrating this point, Hugh finds five jaw-droppers, all of which John McCain should mention, ridicule and refute in the first available speech. Right now, Obama’s statements are getting scrutiny from all of the usual suspects – Fox News, talk radio, righty blogs, etc. In the mainstream press, we can salute ABC News’ fact-checking Army of One Jake Tapper, my old boss Nina Easton, and the Washington Post and CNN on some days. Maybe I’ve missed a few, but examinations of Obama’s rhetoric and its sometimes distant relationship to the truth seem far and few between.

Hugh’s list:

In the course of a single speech Obama asserted that offshore oil exploration would –in the very best scenario– take five years to drive down the cost of gas 3 or 4 cents, but that an investment of 250 billion dollars five years ago would have produced an engine that didn’t require fossil fuels.Obama asserted that we could move to 40 MPG fuel standards for cars, and at another point asserted that the technology existed for 100 MPG cars, even as he asserted that exploration on the outer continental shelf and Alaska would cause permanent environmental damage.
Obama extolled a high school he had visited that –he firmly stated– was majority Hispanic, and which had gone from a 50% drop-out rate to a 100% graduation and college enrollment rate in one year by using an Afro-American centric curriculum that focused on African music, then blues and jazz. Obama held out this school as an example of what could be achieved when students “were engaged in a curriculum that was interesting to them and seemed relevant to them.”
The school he visited is Mapleton Expeditionary School of the Arts (here’s a report of the speech Obama gave.) “MESA”, as it is called, is indeed sending all of its class of 2008 to college next year. Obama was simply wrong to assert that the previous year had seen a drop-out rate of 50% for a predecessor school, and neglected to tell the Pennsylvania audience that the graduating class totalled 44 students, that the school and district were special projects of the Gates Foundation, and that a sister school to MESA failed. I cannot find any evidence online to back-up Obama’s claim that the school is majority Hispanic, and I can’t find any details on the African-American-centric curriculum that Obama credits with fueling the school’s success.

It’s unfortunate, but John McCain is going to have to fact-check Obama himself in speeches. It’s the only way this will break through into the mainstream coverage. Otherwise, the story of the day will be that Michelle Obama went on The View and everyone had a swell time.

UPDATE: A reader sends me a June 4, 2007 story from the Denver Post describing MESA as 64 percent Hispanic. The article also describes the school as grades 7 through 12, “568 students this past year.” Assuming the students are roughly evenly distributed through the grades, we’re dealing with a class size of about 95; maybe MESA’s 44-member senior class of 2008 was particularly small. The article describes MESA as using “visual arts, drama and music to teach the core subjects of English, social studies, science and math.” That’s swell, but I didn’t know there was an African-American-centric way of teaching math and science. The argument seems to be inching closer to Jeremiah Wright’s contentions about the differences between the brains of black children and white children.

The article notes that the changes at MESA were part of a sweeping reform that broke one high school into three and added 14 new smaller schools, each one specializing and taking a different approach. There are probably valuable lessons to be learned from the dramatic overhaul of the Mapleton school district, but seems weird for Obama to tout this as a success, when days earlier he said school choice “would be overall bad for most kids.”