Fact check: McCain ads low on truth; Obama's not much better

WASHINGTON -- Cut through the din of this presidential campaign and you will find something new this year besides the usual record spending: candidate ads divorced from facts, and a platoon of fact checkers trying to keep up.

Veteran campaign watchers say they have never seen ads quite like some from Republican John McCain. The spots contend that Democrat Barack Obama caused high gasoline prices, called McCain running mate Sarah Palin a pig, plans to raise taxes on the middle class and — in an ad called Education that's emblematic of the trend — wants to teach graphic sex to kindergartners. All the claims are false.

Education "is a terribly misleading ad, designed to deceive voters," says Brooks Jackson, director of the non-partisan Factcheck.org.

Obama, of course, is running plenty of his own negative ads. In a reversal of earlier weeks, the Wisconsin Advertising Project says he aired more of them than McCain in the week following the GOP convention, 77%-56%.

Some of Obama's assertions have drawn censure, such as that McCain favors a 100-year war in Iraq (McCain was talking about a peacetime presence) or has plans that would halve Social Security benefits ("a gross distortion," The Washington Post said Monday).

So far, several analysts say, most of Obama's ads mislead and misrepresent in familiar ways — twisting a statistic or a snippet of video to make a questionable point, for instance. They say McCain has been in a different league, epitomized by Education.

"McCain is making no effort to be truthful," says Farhad Manjoo, author of True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society. "The lies aren't routine political lies where they stretch the truth of what a candidate might have said, or take a candidate out of context."

PolitiFact.com, a fact-check team from the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times and Congressional Quarterly, rates 22 statements and ads from McCain as barely true, 23 as false and six as "pants on fire" (absurdly, ridiculously false) out of 117 analyzed. For Obama, the score is 14 barely true, 18 false and one "pants on fire" out of 120 analyzed.