President Obama had no shortage of things to say at yesterday’s Twitter town hall meeting, even if he didn’t always have firm grasp of the facts or reality.
A reader ran the numbers: Obama used a total number of 8,519 words in his answers — or roughly 38,703 characters. At 140 characters each, that’s about 276 tweets (excluding space for @replies, links or hashtags).
In the course of the conversation, Obama didn’t let the facts get in the way of his answers. Heritage investigative reporter Lachlan Markay noted Obama’s false claim about the federal pay freeze. Turns out Obama also grossly misrepresented the size of the defense and education budgets. Obama said yesterday:
The nice thing about the defense budget is it’s so big, it’s so huge, that a 1 percent reduction is the equivalent of the education budget. Not — I’m exaggerating, but it’s so big that you can make relatively modest changes to defense that end up giving you a lot of head room to fund things like basic research or student loans or things like that.
Heritage did the math. Contrary to Obama’s exaggerated assertion, a 1 percent reduction to the Pentagon’s proposed fiscal 2012 base budget would be $5.5 billion — or 7 percent of the Department of Education’s proposed budget.
He did say one notable thing about education that’s sure to disappoint the union bosses at the National Education Association, which just endorsed him for re-election. Obama touted the life-changing significance of school choice while growing up in Hawaii. Unfortunately for America’s school children, Obama has done little to help.
