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  • 2008-06-19 (xsd:date)
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  • Did Barack Obama Say He Had Visited 57 (Islamic) States? (en)
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  • On the campaign trail in Beaverton, Oregon, in May 2008, an obviously tired Barack Obama mistakenly told a crowd that over the course of the long campaign he had been to fifty-seven states in the U.S., with one left to go: Talking with reporters at a later campaign stop, Senator Obama expressed concern that he'd recently misstated both the number of potential victims of a recent cyclone in Burma and the number of states he'd visited, saying: I hope I said 100 thousand people the first time instead of 100 million. I understand I said there were 57 states today. It's a sign that my numeracy is getting a little, uh ... Quickly enough, based on the (spurious) rumor that Barack Obama is a Muslim, someone came up with the fanciful idea that his mention of fifty-seven states was not a dog-tired campaigner's simply misstating forty-seven as fifty-seven, but a reference to the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), which has 57 member states: (Actually, the OIC encompasses 60 countries altogether: 57 member states and 3 observer states.) The actual intent behind Senator Obama's misstatement was easy to discern without the need to invoke an obscure international organization. He was trying to express the thought that in all the time he had spent on the campaign trail so far in 2007-08, he had visited all (48) of the states in the continental U.S. save for one (i.e., one left to go, excluding Alaska and Hawaii), but in his weariness he slipped up and started off with fifty instead of forty. (Note the long pause in the video clip between the words fifty and seven.) As for the next obvious question, depending upon the definitional criteria used, there are more or less than 57 Islamic countries/nations/states in the world. If an Islamic state is defined to mean any country in which a majority of the indigenous population is Muslim, then the total number of Islamic states is actually a little lower (about 52). All such numbers are estimates, however, and are subject to additional definitional criteria. As for Barack Obama's fifty-seven states verbal slip-up, it wasn't long before some wags also spoofed a previous controversy over the senator's eschewing the wearing of a U.S. flag lapel pin by coming up with a revised version of that familiar adornment: (en)
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