If you go by the actual numbers, yes, Barack Obama has been caught in a lie. Or at least an obvious mischaracterization of the facts.

Barack Obama suggested Friday that he has more foreign policy experts from the Clinton administration backing his candidacy over Hillary Rodham Clinton’s, but lists provided by both campaigns show hers is nearly twice as long.

Clinton’s campaign provided more than 80 names of her husband’s former foreign policy advisers who are publicly backing her, while Obama’s campaign provided 47.

So he fudges.

Asked how Obama backs up the claim of greater support, campaign spokesman Bill Burton said the senator was referring to an article that ran in The New York Times Magazine last month, which quoted an anonymous foreign policy expert saying most of the community was backing Obama.

Obama might as well cite the number of unicorns who support him to be elected fairy princess. That would have about as much meaning as citing people who won’t put their names forward to support him and therefore for political purposes might as well not exist.

Obama also mischaracterizes Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy experience prior to being elected president.

Obama began his response by saying he’s been on the Foreign Relations Committee while serving in the Senate the past three years, “so even by the standards of Washington I have dealt more with foreign policy than, let’s say, Bill Clinton had when he became president, or Ronald Reagan, who was a governor at the time. And these same arguments were made about them.”

Unlike Obama, Reagan actually had a couple of terms as governor of California. That’s serious executive experience. And unlike Obama, Reagan had spent decades thinking and writing and speaking about the Communist threat, so his foreign policy views on the most important question of his time were well known. All we know of Obama’s views is that he opposes what we’re doing and would try to make nice with the Iranians. Beyond that, he’s a cypher. And that’s a feature, not a bug of our current craptacular politics.

The bottom line on this is that no one’s going to care. Obama is being accused of lying or whatever by the co-president of an administration that was known for, among other things, its ability to lie effectively. And when so accused, he can just cite his phantom supporters. Nobody is going to gravitate to Clinton from Obama over this. If lies mattered in the Democrat primary, Clinton wouldn’t be a contender.