US Senator John Kerry used suspect accounting in sizing up the cost of the Iraq war and President George W. Bush got his opponent's position wrong on withdrawing troops as the two men rushed to knock each other down as many pegs as possible in their first debate.
Sometimes, one candidate had a chance to take on the wayward claim of the other, as when Bush suggested he went to war in Iraq because "the enemy attacked us" and Kerry pointed out Saddam Hussein did no such thing.
Often, wrongful assertions or oversimplifications went unanswered, as when Kerry attacked Bush for spending too little on protecting the country from terrorism and declared, "That's why they had to close down the subway in New York when the Republican convention was there."
The subway didn't close; some exits near the convention did.
"The format made it difficult for the candidates to rebut some distortions by their opponents," said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. "Viewers should not assume that just because a fact was not rebutted it is true."
Bush, twice during Thursday's debate, suggested al-Qaeda is a vastly diminished terrorist force at the top, saying at one point that "75 percent of known al-Qaeda leaders have been brought to justice," and at another, Osama bin Laden is "isolated -- 75 percent of his people have been brought to justice."
But al-Qaeda is still considered a mortal danger in part because it refills its ranks and leadership. The president was actually referring to deaths or arrests of operatives who powered al-Qaeda when it mounted the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, not those behind the organization today.
Earlier this year, the CIA estimated two-thirds of those leaders were gone. Bush upped the proportion to three-quarters in his Republican Party national convention speech, based on intelligence findings that were not publicly detailed.
Bush also misrepresented Kerry on withdrawing troops from Iraq: "My opponent at one time said, well, get me elected, I'll have them out of there in six months."
In fact, Kerry's position has been that he would hope to begin a withdrawal in six months, not complete it. His aim would be to finish the withdrawal in four years if conditions allowed.
Kerry stretched in accusing Bush of spending too little on homeland security and too much in giving tax cuts to the rich.
"This president thought it was more important to give the wealthiest people in America a tax cut rather than invest in homeland security," the senator said. "And long before President Bush and I get a tax cut -- and that's who gets it -- long before we do, I'm going to invest in homeland security."
Bush's tax cuts were across the board, not just for rich people like Kerry and himself. And much of the money Kerry wants to save by raising taxes on the rich is already spoken for; he'd use it for healthcare and middle-income tax relief.
Kerry, as he often does, said America has spent US$200 billion on the Iraq war.
An analysis by Annenberg's FactCheck.org found the true cost to be under US$120 billion so far, and that Kerry reaches his figure by counting money scheduled to be spent next year, money that hasn't been requested yet and money for Afghanistan operations and US cities.
Bush blasted Kerry for calling the Iraq invasion the wrong war at the wrong time and said foreign leaders would never follow a president who talked that way. But major US allies thought the war was wrong before it started.
RSS