RNC 2008 WTF September 5, 2008
Posted by Conrad Hubbard in : The Chip , add a commentArkansas ex-governor Huckabee got a cheap laugh from the 2008 Republican National Convention crowd when he said that Sarah Palin got more votes running for mayor of Wasilla in Alaska than Joe Biden got running for president of the United States.
Uh, yeah. Why would he say this when it is so clearly bullshit? Biden collected more than 15,000 votes during the Democratic primary in Florida alone (see NY Times list of results). Palin became mayor of Wasilla in 1996. When the US census was conducted four years later, in 2000, Wasilla had grown to 5,469 people. Even if the entire town population was composed of voting adults (which is clearly not the case) and she got every single vote (which is unlikely), that would still only be about one-third of the votes Biden gained from Florida alone, much less the rest of the states where Biden was on the ballot during the Presidential primary.
With weak math like that, no wonder 8 years of George W Bush and 6 years of Republican Congress have wracked up more debt than any other President and promoted the biggest government ever in USA history while Republican convention speeches keep suggesting that “the liberals” were in charge of Washington throughout that period. I guess they think George W Bush and the Republican Congress are liberals?
Followup: It turns out that Palin only got 651 votes in her first mayorial election. Check out FactCheck.org if you want to see a detailed list of other inaccurate claims the RNC made that evening.