In a recent column, Richard Cohen correctly criticizes Barack Obama for getting his facts wrong (the number of black people in college actually exceeds the number of people in jail), but then links it to questions about the accuracy of Obama’s first book and suggests that the Democratic presidential candidate may have a truth-telling problem. Given Cohen’s ugly record in hyping a similar narrative about Al Gore, we should be very wary of pundits manufacturing such a storyline about Obama as he comes under more scrutiny post-Iowa.

Update 1/4 10:05 PM: Via a commenter below, Mark Kleiman says Obama’s claim is right — looks like I was right to distrust Cohen:

There were 534,000 black men in prison at year-end 2006. (P. 6.)

There were another 296,000 blacks in jail (as opposed to prison)

Since about 85% of jail inmates are male
that means roughly 240,000 black males in jail.

Another 36,000 black males were held in “secure” (i.e., locked) juvenile facilities:

That gives a total of 810,000 black males behind bars at any one time.

By contrast, according to the Census Bureau there are 370,000 black men enrolled full-time in four-year colleges, plus another 40,000 in graduate school.

As always, the number you get depends on the definition you use. Iain Murray, from whom Dobbs copied, arbitrarily decided that only those under the age of 24 counted as “young.” He also counted part-time and community-college students as “enrolled in college.” So it’s not fair to accuse Murray of “mendacity”: he merely chose the numbers he wanted to make the point he wanted to make.

If you restrict both the inmate population and the college population to the under-35s, the comparable figures are 400,000 behind bars and 380,000 in college.

So Obama’s claim is perfectly defensible, and your reference to his “mendacity” had no basis. You owe your readers a public retraction and, and Sen. Obama an apology.