Bob McCarty Writes

Many reporters have, in recent weeks, taken it upon themselves to write almost-glowing reports about Barack Obama’s mastery of the spoken word. In a Wall Street Journal article, Obama and the Power of Words, writer Stephen F. Hayes went so far as to compare the Democrat presidential candidate to Ronald Reagan. When it comes to Obama’s mastery of numbers, however, the reviews aren’t so bright.

On Saturday, The Boston Globe reported this about the junior senator from Illinois:

“The failure of the Iraqi state would be a disaster,” (Obama) said at a lunch sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor, according to an audiotape of the session. “It would dishonor the 900-plus men and women who have already died. . . . It would be a betrayal of the promise that we made to the Iraqi people, and it would be hugely destabilizing from a national security perspective.”

Obama’s gaffe — underestimating by almost 3,600, according to DoD casualty reports, the number of American military and civilian deaths in the Middle East — comes less than a year after he told an audience in Richmond, Va., that 10,000 people had died in a Kansas tornado when, in fact, the real figure was 12, according to Associated Press (see Barack Obama: Kansas Tornado Killed 10,000 for more details).

Such a loose approach with numbers makes me wonder whether or not other figures tossed around by Obama are even remotely close to being accurate.

More on this later, I’m sure.

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