Facts Sometimes Get Lost Amid Swift Rhetoric

There they went again.

The furious pace of Tuesday’s vice presidential debate left a welter of unanswered questions and unsubstantiated charges hanging in the rhetoric-sodden air of the Georgia Tech auditorium.

Sen. Al Gore of Tennessee accused the Bush Administration of subsidizing the export of American jobs. Vice President Dan Quayle charged Gore with advocating the spending of $100 billion of American taxpayer money to fund environmental cleanup overseas. Retired Vice Adm. James B. Stockdale described independent Ross Perot’s defense spending plan as closer to Bush’s than that of Bill Clinton’s.

These and other statements, tossed off in the heat of the debate, were questionable, misleading or downright false.

Even before the debate ended, Quayle and Gore staffers were busy distributing photocopied documents to reporters aimed at refuting allegations made by their rivals and shoring up the arguments of their candidates.

Here is a look at some of the charges to see how they square with the facts.

In response to the second question from moderator Hal Bruno, about how each candidate proposed to create jobs and solve the nation’s economic problems, Gore charged that the Bush Administration was using public funds to encourage the closing of American factories and relocating the jobs abroad.

Although he did not elaborate on it, Gore was referring to a program sponsored by the U.S. Agency for International Development to promote industrial development in Latin America. The AID program pays for job training for foreign workers, as well as advertisements in trade magazines aimed at U.S. companies to make them aware of opportunities for finding cheap labor overseas.

So the charge had some merit.

But the Quayle camp responded immediately with a release stating that the program had created “more than a million new jobs” in the United States by fostering the growth in U.S. exports to Latin America and the Caribbean.

The Quayle document sought to refute Gore’s contention that a Decaturville, Tenn., plant closed its operations to shift jobs to El Salvador. “In fact, the company . . . has never closed down a U.S. factory and has increased its U.S. employment 20% since expanding to Central America in 1984,” the paper stated.

However, the company Quayle was apparently referring to--Marcade Group Inc.--shut down in 1991 an apparel subsidiary operating in Decaturville, eliminating 306 jobs.

A few minutes later in the debate, Quayle said that “one of the proposals that Sen. Gore has suggested is to have the taxpayers of America spend $100 billion a year on environmental projects in foreign countries,” citing page 304 of Gore’s book on the environment, “Earth in the Balance.”

Quayle’s charge was a misrepresentation of Gore’s position.

In the book, Gore argues that the task of preserving the Earth is at least as important as the Marshall Plan for rebuilding Europe after World War II. He says that, in today’s dollars, the Marshall Plan would cost $100 billion a year.

Nowhere does he say that the United States ought to shovel $100 billion out of its treasury to pay for environmental projects overseas.

At another point in the debate, Quayle alleged that Clinton’s economic plan would require a tax increase for families earning more than $36,000 a year.

The economic plan that is the centerpiece of Clinton’s presidential campaign calls for tax hikes on only those families with incomes above $200,000 annually.

The Quayle charge is based on an extrapolation from the Arkansas governor’s plan to increase government revenues by $150 billion to pay for a variety of economic development and social programs. Quayle’s statement mirrored a Bush campaign ad that makes a similar claim.

The ad--and Quayle’s remark--are based on questionable analyses of Clinton’s tax proposals and hypothetical assumptions, including one that the Clinton camp has flatly disputed. The claim that middle-class families would pay higher taxes during a Clinton Administration stems from an assumption of what the Democrat would do if his economic plan fell short of its revenue estimates.

The Bush campaign cannot know with any real confidence how far off those estimates might be. Nor can it know how a Clinton Administration would react to shortfalls. Aides to the Democrat have said he would cut spending rather than raise taxes on the middle class.

Stockdale, a former prisoner of war in North Vietnam, jumbled his facts in one of his few statements that contained any specifics.

Responding to a question about how much defense spending could safely be cut in the post-Cold War era, Perot’s running mate said: “The numbers in terms of the dollar cuts as they stand on our plans now show us almost the same as the vice president’s, but we note that Gov. Clinton’s plan is almost twice as much a cut as either one of us.”

That is incorrect.

Perot, in his book, “United We Stand,” advocates defense cuts of $40 billion more than the Bush Administration’s plan over a five-year period. Clinton proposes cutting defense spending by $37.5 billion more than the Administration over four years.

So the Perot and Clinton plans are almost identical, both cutting military outlays by considerably more than Bush plans.

Also during the debate, Gore delivered an impassioned plea on behalf of abortion rights, twice challenging Quayle to say that he supported a woman’s right to choose to end a pregnancy.

But Quayle responded that Gore had recently changed positions on abortion, which Gore denied.

Supporting Quayle’s contention, however, is a 1987 letter to a constituent in which Gore expressed opposition to abortion, saying he viewed it as “arguably the taking of human life.”

In the letter, Gore said that he had consistently opposed federal funding for abortions. Gore has since said that he supports public funding of abortions only as part of a comprehensive national health care program and that he fully supports Clinton’s strong abortion-rights position.

On health care reform, both Quayle and Gore landed telling blows.

Quayle noted that Clinton’s plan has evolved during the campaign season. In the economic plan Clinton released in June, the Democrat proposed requiring employers to insure their workers or buy into a public plan----the so-called “pay or play” plan. In his latest version, Clinton would simply impose government mandates requiring businesses to provide employees health insurance. In contrast, Bush’s health care reforms would rely on giving tax credits for the uninsured to buy their own health insurance.

Gore noted accurately that Bush did not send his package of reforms to Congress until earlier this year. And the President still has not sent to Capitol Hill legislation providing the funding mechanism to make the tax credits a reality.

But Quayle was right when he insisted that some aspects of the Bush health care reform agenda have been before Congress “for years.”

Times staff writers Sam Fulwood in Atlanta and Ronald J. Brownstein in Los Angeles contributed to this story.

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