McCain and Obama Trade Ads, Disinformation.

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Ads from the AFL-CIO and the Obama campaign claim that McCain is partly to blame for the loss of more than 8,000 jobs in Ohio. They paint a false picture.

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There’s at least some truth in both ads: German-based DHL announced a deal that could result in 8,200 lost jobs in Wilmington, Ohio. And McCain did in fact oppose an amendment that would have kept DHL from buying Wilmington-based Airborne Express. McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, was also a DHL lobbyist charged with easing the merger through the Senate.

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But the ads go too far. Some statements about McCain are misleading and some of the inferences the ads invite are unsubstantiated:

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The ads also imply that the DHL merger is a direct cause of the job losses in Ohio, which we find to be both unlikely and unsubstantiated. Airborne Express had laid off 2,000 employees before the merger, and analysts at the time said that the struggling carrier would need to make expensive investments in its international infrastructure to remain competitive.

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*It’s Obama’s taxes that will hurt Ohio families. *

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Higher taxes on your paycheck, your life savings, your electric bills

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A senior policy analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation, Rea Hederman Jr., praised Mr. Obama for proposing a 20 percent tax rate on dividends and capital gains, lower than a 28 percent rate he had initially floated, though still more than the current 15 percent rate. “That’s a great step in the right direction,” Mr. Hederman said. “It’s a big change from what we thought the Obama tax plan would be at the beginning of the summer.”

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Mr. Hederman said the middle class would likely pay less under Mr. Obama’s plan than Mr. McCain’s but that the Democrat was excessively reliant on complicated tax breaks that would make the tax code more confusing. “Instead of a grab bag of tax credits, lower the marginal rates,” Mr. Hederman said.