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A report on CNN recently caught my eye because of the catchy headline, “The Lie of the Year”. Knowing that CNN is rudderless without a Republican president or Congress to attack, I took a peek to see what Conservative they were going to lionize with their ‘award’.  It turns out that the award is not CNN’s, but a group called Politifact.

The lie of the year, according to this group, belongs to… Sarah Palin.  No real surprise.  Her comments have been more thoroughly vetted than any other politician in modern history, and she’s technically not even a politician at the moment.

But I’ve got to give some credit where credit is due.  While I expected to find just another Democrat-water carrying site, Politifact.com actually delivers some interesting analysis.  The folks behind this Pulitzer Prize winning project (according to their site, anyway – I didn’t fact check the fact checkers) have broken down Candidate Obama’s campaign pledges into 513 distinct  promises and are running ongoing tallies on his performance.

By their numbers, President Obama has kept 72 of his promises.  By my math, that’s an abysmal 14%.  Another 9 promises are listed as “Broken”, with 18 more listed as “Compromise”, which to me sounds a lot like “Broken”.  If he compromised on doing what he promised, then by definition, he didn’t do what he promised.

I’m a statistics guy, and this site got me excited because I saw it as an opportunity to run some numbers on President Obama’s record.  However, it didn’t take long to realize that any statistics drawn from their analysis would be useless because of one glaring number: 182.  That’s the number of Obama campaign promises that are labeled as “Not Yet Rated”.  If the good folks at Politifact have yet to rate 35% of the promises, and I have no way of knowing if they have an agenda behind WHICH 35%, there is nothing to do but look at their ratings on an individual basis.

All considered, it is an interesting site with what appears on the surface to be factual and unbiased ratings.  I’ll keep my eye on this one and keep you updated if they ever get to the point where all 513 promises are considered.  Then we’ll have some fun with statistics.