Neil Munro at The Daily Caller is pointing out that Barack Obama has a truth-telling problem when it comes to being outspent on his previous campaigns. Someone should alert Politifact and its users in the press corps.
“I got outspent when I ran [the] first time for Senate,” the president claimed in his campaign speech Thursday in Maumee, Ohio. Munro found "Obama was misleading." Yeah, that's one word you could use.
The Federal Election Committee’s website shows that Obama’s campaign claimed $14,807,432 in donations by December 2004.
In contrast, his opponent, Alan Keyes, had only $2,545,325, according to the FEC.
That’s a six-fold advantage for Obama, not a deficit.
The imbalance in funding was the largest in that year’s Senate races, according to a 2006 book, “In The Election After Reform: Money, Politics, and the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act.”
Munro explained that Obama did look like he would be outspent in the 2004 primary by Blair Hull, but his campaign imploded. I'd add that came in part after the Chicago Tribune picked apart his nasty divorce, just as the Tribune later pressed GOP candidate Jack Ryan out of the fall election over his nasty divorce. But Keyes was never a serious challenger. Then came 2008:
“The thing that I want everybody here to understand – each of you personally — is that back in 2008, everybody said we couldn’t do it because we were outspent,” he said during a 4.12 p.m. speech in Sandusky, Ohio.
