OUT OF BOUNDS!
McCain Misstates Obama Sex-ed Record
By Margaret Talev | McClatchy Newspapers  (9/9/08)

WASHINGTON — Throw the flag against: The McCain-Palin campaign.

Call: Unsportsmanlike conduct.

What happened: A new 30-second TV ad attacks Barack Obama's record on education, saying that Obama backed legislation to teach "'comprehensive sex education' to kindergartners." The announcer then says, "Learning about sex before learning to read? Barack Obama. Wrong on education. Wrong for your family."

Why that's wrong: This is a deliberately misleading accusation. It came hours after the Obama campaign released a TV ad critical of McCain's votes on public education. As a state senator in Illinois, Obama did vote for but was not a sponsor of legislation dealing with sex ed for grades K-12.

But the legislation allowed local school boards to teach "age-appropriate" sex education, not comprehensive lessons to kindergartners, and it gave schools the ability to warn young children about inappropriate touching and sexual predators.

Republican Alan Keyes tried to use Obama's vote against him in the 2004 U.S. Senate race. At the time, Obama spoke about wanting to protect young children from abuse. He made clear then that he was not supporting teaching kindergartners about explicit details of sex.

Obama spokesman Bill Burton said Tuesday of McCain's ad: "It is shameful and downright perverse for the McCain campaign to use a bill that was written to protect young children from sexual predators as a recycled and discredited political attack against a father of two young girls."

Penalty: 15 yards for the McCain campaign's deliberate low blow.

Margaret Talev covers Congress and national politics. She joined the McClatchy Washington Bureau in 2005. Before that, she covered California politics, including the 2003 recall election and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's first year in office, for The Sacramento Bee. She previously reported for the Los Angeles Times, where she was part of a team named as Pulitzer finalists in 2001 for breaking news coverage of the crash of Alaska Airlines Flight 261. She has also covered Florida politics for The Tampa Tribune. In 2008, she, along with Greg Gordon and Marisa Taylor, won a McClatchy ``President’s Award’’ and Scripps Howard’s Raymond Clapper Memorial Award for Washington reporting for exposing the Bush administration’s politicization of the Justice Department.