Filling In the Facts in Kerry and Bush’s War of Words

At the close of a long and blistering campaign, President Bush and Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts are still skewering each other on issues as divergent as taxes and terrorism.

Their final speeches and TV commercials paint starkly opposed visions of conditions in the U.S. and Iraq and of the security challenges the two nations face.

One trait the Republican incumbent and the Democratic challenger share, though, is a tendency to omit facts that would contradict their claims.

Here are late claims from the two rivals and their allies, and some of the missing context.

* Bush said Sunday in Miami: “America’s economy is strong and it’s getting stronger. We added 1.9 million jobs in the last 13 months.... The national unemployment rate is 5.4%. That’s lower than the average rate of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. And the unemployment rate in the state of Florida is 4.5%. Our economic plans are working.”

Bush omitted the overall job-creation figure since he took office in January 2001: a net loss of 821,000, counting public and private jobs, according to Labor Department data. He is likely to be the first president to finish a four-year term with a net loss in more than 70 years.

The unemployment figures Bush cites are accurate, and it is true that Florida’s economy is in better shape than the national norm. But independent economists say that the recovery from the 2001 recession has been uneven, at best, and weaker than previous economic upturns.

* On Friday in Orlando, Fla., Kerry said: “The middle class is paying a larger share of the tax burden, but the wealthiest individuals making an average of $1.2 million are getting $89 billion in tax cuts. American families are earning less but paying more. Healthcare’s up 64%. College tuition’s up 46%. Medicare premiums are up 56%. Five million more Americans don’t have healthcare.”

Kerry’s figures omit this conclusion from a recent report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office: The total federal tax burden has decreased for all income groups, due to tax cuts enacted under Bush. But Kerry’s basic point about the wealthy is true: The top 1% got a bigger share of the tax cuts -- seeing their effective rate drop 6.8%.

The nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation estimated in September that employer-sponsored health insurance premiums had risen 11.2% over the previous year -- the fourth consecutive year of double-digit increases -- and 59% overall since 2000. But the rate of increase slowed a bit. In 2003, the increase was 13.9%.

On college tuition, it is unclear what data Kerry is citing. The College Board reported last month that average tuition and fees had risen 51% over the past decade at public four-year colleges -- in inflation-adjusted dollars -- and 36% at private four-year colleges. The board pointed out that about 60% of undergraduates get grants or loans.

On Medicare, Kerry does not mention that premiums are rising in large part through formulas he supported in Senate votes. His charge about healthcare access is based on Census Bureau figures that show 45 million people lack insurance this year and 40 million lacked it in 2000.

* Of Kerry’s record, Bush said: “He voted to raise taxes 98 times. That’s five times every year he’s been in the Senate.... In this campaign he’s also pledged to spend 2.2 trillion new dollars.”

Kerry has backed tax increases -- including some significant ones in the name of balancing the budget. Bush, by contrast, has stood by his statement that taxes would be increased “over [his] dead body.”

But the votes tallied by Bush include many on procedural matters in the Senate, and dozens connected to budget resolutions that had no force of law.

Bush’s total for Kerry’s spending comes from the GOP’s analysis. Kerry claims his initiatives would cost far less, and he says he would weigh any new spending against the size of the deficit.

* Kerry said Bush “thought it was a good idea to give the big drug companies $139 billion in windfall profits, and Halliburton a $7-billion no-bid contract.”

While the 2003 Medicare prescription drug law protected pharmaceutical companies from government price controls, Kerry neglected to mention that Bush was the first president to enact a government-sponsored drug benefit. The law, which Kerry opposed, broke a years-long impasse in Congress.

Kerry is correct that the energy company once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney received a lucrative no-bid contract for work related to the Iraq war. But the head of the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office told Congress in June that the contract might have been justified due to wartime urgency.

* Bush said in Miami that Kerry would “federalize healthcare.”

Many independent experts quarrel with that assessment. Kerry’s healthcare plan -- estimated to cost from $650 billion to twice that over 10 years -- would use existing programs like Medicaid to expand access to about 27 million uninsured. But Kerry has said the program would be voluntary.

* Kerry said in a late commercial that Bush and the GOP had “a plan to privatize Social Security that cuts Social Security benefits by 30% to 45%.”

Bush has said it would be a second-term priority to enact Social Security reform to let younger workers have privately owned retirement accounts. But he has said he would not cut benefits for people already at retirement age.

Bush has not said how he would pay for $1 trillion to $2 trillion in transition costs for his plan. But Kerry also has not given specifics on what he would do to shore up the finances of a system badly in need of repair.

* Bush said Sunday in Tampa that Kerry “would only appoint judges who pass a liberal litmus test.”

Kerry has not promised specifically to appoint liberal judges, but he has said he would not appoint anyone to the Supreme Court who would overturn Roe vs. Wade, the case that established abortion rights.

Bush has said he would appoint “strict constructionists” who would closely follow the Constitution. A number of Bush’s judicial appointees have been on record as opposing abortion rights.

* Kerry said Saturday in Appleton, Wis., that Bush had fumbled a chance to take out Al Qaeda’s terrorist leader. “When Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda were cornered in the mountains of Tora Bora, it was wrong to outsource the job of capturing them to Afghan warlords who a week earlier were fighting against us,” Kerry said, echoing earlier allegations.

Retired Gen. Tommy Franks, a Bush supporter who commanded U.S. forces in the Afghan war, disputes Kerry’s claim. Franks wrote Oct. 19 in the New York Times that Kerry’s rendition of the late 2001 battle along the Afghan-Pakistan border “doesn’t square with reality.” Franks said there was no definitive proof that Bin Laden was on the scene at the time. And he said some U.S. forces were present to help direct the battle.

Some newspaper accounts from April 2002 support Kerry’s view. The Washington Post reported that the Bush administration had concluded that Bin Laden was at Tora Bora and that “the failure to commit U.S. ground troops to hunt him was its gravest error in the war against al Qaeda.”

The Los Angeles Times reported: “Some U.S. officials have lamented the decision to fight the battle of Tora Bora with bombs and Afghan foot soldiers instead of sending in U.S. ground troops.” The account said that at the height of combat, about 100 members of the U.S. and British special forces were in Tora Bora. “Otherwise, the U.S. kept an eye on the battle from the distant vantage of Tampa, Fla.”

* Bush said: “Only a year after the first bombing of the World Trade Center, the senator proposed massive cuts in America’s intelligence budget.”

It is true that Kerry proposed cutting intelligence funding by several billion dollars in 1994. But Kerry’s proposal was part of a larger bipartisan effort to cut the federal deficit. Bush’s new CIA director, Porter J. Goss, also proposed cuts in intelligence funding as a congressman at the time.

Kerry has voted for many intelligence funding bills since he joined the Senate in 1985.

* On Iraq, Kerry said in the Saturday Democratic radio address that Bush’s “mistakes and misjudgments have hurt our troops, driven away allies, diverted our focus from Osama bin Laden and the real war on terror.”

Kerry frequently cites casualty figures from Iraq: more than 1,100 U.S. defense personnel killed and more than 8,000 wounded. He has referred directly to Bin Laden more than Bush has. But the Democrat did not mention in the address that he had voted for the congressional resolution that authorized Bush to invade Iraq.

Times staff writer Maura Reynolds in Tampa, Fla., contributed to this report.