In Bush, Kerry ads, truth is up for debate

WASHINGTON -- In a flurry of ads and public statements in recent weeks, the Bush campaign has painted an especially dark portrait of John F. Kerry that suggests he would "raise taxes by $900 billion," permit off-shore drilling in Florida, impose a $657-per-family gas tax, and weaken US defenses in the fight against terrorism if he were president.

The Massachusetts senator and his Democratic allies, meanwhile, have accused Bush of hiding the true costs of continuing the war in Iraq, of policies that cost the US millions of jobs in the past four years, and of recklessly endangering Social Security.

Each charge, for both sides, is derived from a grain of truth.

In the seven weeks since the general election began, the Bush campaign has put out a striking number of ads and statements that either make dubious assumptions about Kerry's positions or fail to put claims about him in their broader framework.

The Kerry campaign has offered up iffy claims of its own, accusing Bush, for example, of cutting off veterans from health care when the budget for veterans has actually increased under his watch. Bush advisers mostly complain that Kerry's ads are personal attacks, as well as untrue.

While Kerry began a drumbeat of attacks on Bush during the nominating contest, Bush did not start returning direct fire until March, leading him to work doubly hard to define his opponent -- sometimes in arguably disingenuous ways -- in the two months since.

Although there is nothing unusual about distortions in politics, the current race is now witness to nonstop disputes over statements by both sides -- in a campaign that is already more intense than any other at this early stage and has taken a sharp turn toward the negative, according to political analysts and advisers to both the Bush and Kerry campaigns.

Yesterday, for instance, a Democratic group announced a new "Database of Lies" that purports to chart "conservatives' lies, distortions, and dishonesty" -- adding to the "D-Bunker" feature on the Kerry website, which "debunks" Bush claims.

D-Bunker's claims, in turn, are being countered by the "D-Bunker-buster" on the Bush campaign site.

"There's so much bogus stuff popping up, you can't take a swing at everything" -- on both sides, said former reporter Brooks Jackson, who analyzes ads for the Factcheck.org website, sponsored by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. "This has turned negative sooner than any election campaign that I can recall, primarily because it started sooner."

In its latest advertising blitz, the Bush campaign makes one of its most serious accusations so far: That Kerry "repeatedly opposed weapons vital to winning the war on terror" and "voted against body armor for our troops on the front line," implications that, set to ominous music, imply he would make a dangerous president.

Some of the specifics are indisputably true. But in a universe where every "fact" is subjective, the ads touched off a furious exchange between the campaigns over the context -- and intellectual honesty -- of the message.

Kerry campaign advisers argued that the Bush team "cherry-picked" certain votes to reach the conclusion that the Massachusetts senator had voted against Cold War-era weaponry. And while Kerry did vote frequently against defense systems in the 1980s, some of the same weaponry could just as easily have been axed by Dick Cheney, who as defense secretary advocated similar cuts in the years that followed.

But Kerry actually did seek to reduce defense spending in the final decade of the Cold War -- a point Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie made yesterday. In a memo, Gillespie said Kerry's weapons cuts were part of an "overall defense strategy" -- a question of definition that remains up for debate.

In daily e-mails, phone calls, and postings on their websites, the two campaigns are issuing an unprecedented, constant flood of charges and countercharges. "What you're watching . . . as a story breaks is that both sides are putting out a huge volume of information because they're trying to define that initial story as it develops on cable," Republican pollster Dave Winston said.

Virtually no item has gone undisputed. When a college newspaper in Florida reported last week that Kerry made remarks indicating he supported offshore drilling in the state, the Bush campaign seized on it, issuing a statement that flatly declared: "Kerry supports offshore drilling in Florida," knowing just how unpopular that position is there.

A Kerry campaign spokesman quickly denied it, saying Kerry is firmly opposed to offshore drilling -- a basic policy that would ordinarily be difficult to intepret, but is made harder in this case by Kerry's often complicated language. A frenzied back-and-forth ensued, as the Kerry campaign convinced the paper, the Independent Florida Alligator, to run a correction on its website -- which the Bush campaign then knocked down, arguing that Kerry's quotes in the news article were vague enough to make his position an open question.

The two sides still refuse to budge, on the record, on which aspects of the article were true and what the basic Kerry policy is.

In a recent campaign ad, Kerry says his first step on Iraq would be to "reach out to the international community" -- a point that Republicans, correctly, counter is misleading because more than two dozen nations are already participating.

Another persistent disagreement revolves around a Bush campaign ad that warns Kerry would raise gas taxes. In one ad, the narrator says, "If Kerry's tax increase were law, the average family would pay $657 more a year," implying that Kerry has a gas tax proposal on the table.

In fact, the only evidence that Kerry ever advocated that particular increase is from 1984. When the antideficit group the Concord Coalition gave Kerry a negative rating that year, he countered, "It doesn't reflect my $43 billion package of cuts or my support for a 50-cent increase in the gas tax."

Bush campaign officials insist Kerry has voted 11 times to increase gas taxes; most were simply to restore taxes to their previous levels or balance the budget.

Context and perspective, however, are not central to any of the advertising produced so far.

"You find very few ads that are just flat-out factually innaccurate," Kenneth M. Goldstein, director of the Wisconsin Advertising Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said. But he added, "Are things taken out of context? Do they put people in the most negative light? Of course."

Even the percentage of negative ads is in dispute. According to Bill Benoit, a communications professor at the University of Missouri who examined ads from 1952 to today, said Bush produced more negative ads than Kerry in the first weeks of the general election -- and that 52 percent of his ads have been negative, compared with 32 percent for Kerry and the 39 percent historic average.

The Bush campaign has its own figures, claiming 78 percent of Kerry's ad spending in the primary was negative toward Bush.