McCain was speaking to Fox so he thought it would be all right to distort. Or maybe he just got mixed up. This Week With Barack Obama points out an interesting fact, Obama is staying out of the press, campaigning locally and loving it, cause he knows it's all about the ground game. Let McCain have his whirlwind.
AP: In the same interview, McCain continued the theme, noting that "when she was in government, he was a community organizer."
That's incorrect. When Palin was first elected to the town council in Wasilla, Alaska, in the fall of 1992, Obama was wrapping up work in Chicago on a voter-registration drive. When that job ended, he joined a Chicago law firm and became a lecturer at the University of Chicago law school, and the Chicago Tribune picked him as one of "25 Chicagoans on the road to making a difference."
Obama's community organizing career had come years earlier, in 1985-88.
McCain also highlighted what he termed Palin's independent streak, praising her for often bucking her own party leaders.
"When she was taking tough positions against her own party, Senator Obama was voting 'present' 130 times in the state legislature, on every tough issue, whatever it was," McCain said.
That charge was reminiscent of attacks waged on Obama by his fellow Democrats during this year's primary campaign, including Hillary Clinton and John Edwards.
It's true that Obama voted "present" dozens of times, part of the thousands of votes he cast in an eight-year span in Springfield. Illinois lawmakers commonly vote that way on a variety of issues, and he has countered that many of those votes were cast because of technical or legal considerations about the underlying legislation.
Often, Obama voted "present" with large groups of other Democrats to protest what they saw as Republican trickery or abuse of power. Other times, voting that way sends a message that a lawmaker supports a bill's intent, but has concerns about how the legislation is drafted. Voting this way also can be a way to duck a difficult issue, as McCain charged, although that's difficult to prove.
