On the July 6 edition of Fox News Sunday, NPR news analyst Juan Williams asserted of a recent campaign ad from Sen. Barack Obama: “He makes himself out to be born in Kansas, Kansas values. He's in Hawaii.” However, as Media Matters for America has noted, in the ad, Obama does not “make[] himself out to be born in Kansas”; rather, he makes clear he was “raised” by his mother and grandparents, who “grew up” in Kansas. Obama stated: “I was raised by a single mom and my grandparents. We didn't have much money, but they taught me values straight from the Kansas heartland where they grew up” [emphasis added].
Williams statement echoes Fox News contributor Karl Rove's assertion in a July 3 Wall Street Journal op-ed that Obama's “bio ad says he was raised with 'values straight from the Kansas heartland,' though he grew up in Hawaii.”
From Obama's ad, “The Country I Love”:
OBAMA: I was raised by a single mom and my grandparents. We didn't have much money, but they taught me values straight from the Kansas heartland where they grew up. Accountability and self-reliance. Love of country. Working hard without making excuses. Treating your neighbor as you'd like to be treated. It's what guided me as I worked my way up, taking jobs and loans to make it through college.
From the July 6 edition of Fox News Sunday:
WILLIAM KRISTOL (The Weekly Standard editor): I mean, the good news, as you -- you suggest that well, it's closer than people thought it would be, and it is closer than it might be, and that shows Obama's weakness. The great myth of this campaign for months has been Barack Obama is a strong presidential candidate. He's an impressive politician. He's an impressive man in many ways. But the fact is Hillary Clinton beat him week after week in the late Democratic primaries when she was outspent, when the media had anointed Obama as the inevitable nominee, and he was pretty much the inevitable nominee, and Democratic voters -- Democratic voters -- were still resistant to anointing him. And now some Democrats and a lot of independents are resistant to him in the general election. He is too liberal. He should not win. No one with his profile has won the presidency, period.
Clinton won as a new Democrat. Carter won as a moderately conservative Democrat. All the liberal Democratic senators who have been nominated have lost, especially if you're only a one-term Democratic senator who's consistently voted with the liberal part of the party. Now, he's trying -- he learned -- the great irony of Obama is he beat Hillary Clinton, but he learned a lot from Bill Clinton. And he has spent the last month in a Clintonian way trying to move to the center. But still, people have the sense that, “Gee, he's awfully liberal and awfully untested.” So it is winnable for McCain. McCain can beat Obama. But the McCain campaign as currently constituted, I think, cannot beat the Obama campaign. The McCain campaign is not as good as McCain the candidate.
WILLIAMS: Well, what you're seeing, though, is -- I mean, is Senator Obama speaking just to the concern you have, which is not only changing positions, refining, however you want to put it, but also running ads that put him more towards the middle. Now, some of these ads include things that are of question. He says that he was for welfare reform when he wasn't for welfare reform. He makes himself out to be born in Kansas, Kansas values. He's in Hawaii. This kind of thing -- I think people are going to get uneasy when they look at his record in the Senate -- very liberal.
