WASHINGTON -Whether it was Dick Cheney's faux-pas about never meeting his rival or John Edwards' oversimplifications about troops in Iraq, the vice-presidential debaters stretched facts even as they claimed the high ground in setting the record straight. Technicalities were cast aside on both sides.
The vice president said Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry voted for the Iraq war, but the reality was more complex. The senator backed a resolution that allowed it to happen but said he took President Bush's word that he would exhaust weapons inspections and build a true coalition first.
Edwards turned a complicated matter involving allowances for troops into a height of hypocrisy effort by Bush to cut their combat pay even as they fought in Iraq.
The accusations flew. Sometimes the target had a chance to swat them down. Often they went unanswered.
A lot of factual inaccuracies were left standing
said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, who monitors the campaign for distortion as director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
Cheney declared Saddam Hussein's Iraq had an established relationship with al-Qaida despite the prevailing theory by U.S. intelligence that such a link was tenuous and did not amount to state sponsorship of the terrorist organization or any link to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Edwards asserted the connection was minimal or nonexistent. The recent Senate Intelligence Committee report on flawed Iraqi intelligence did conclude, however, that the CIA was reasonable in thinking there were probably several contacts between Iraq and al-Qaida throughout the 1990s, though they did not add up to a formal relationship.
In perhaps the most awkward blooper of the evening, Cheney told Edwards to his face that they had never met before the debate.
Edwards' campaign later provided a transcript of a February 2001 prayer breakfast at which Cheney began his remarks by acknowledging the North Carolina senator. The campaign said the two also met when Edwards accompanied the other North Carolina senator, Elizabeth Dole, to her swearing-in ceremony.
Cheney was trying to make the point that Edwards was an absentee senator. The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight.
At one point, Edwards attacked Cheney for the administration's decision to give billions of dollars in new contracts in Iraq to Halliburton Co., which the vice president once headed. But congressional auditors recently concluded U.S. officials met legal guidelines in awarding the business without competition -in part because Halliburton was the only company capable of doing some of the work.
Edwards also asserted, They sent 40 000 American troops into Iraq without the body armor they needed a comment that might suggest they had no body armor at all, when in fact they did.
Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said 40,000 troops did not have the brand-new, improved armor but, every soldier and Marine on the ground had body armor.
Cheney accused Kerry of voting for higher taxes 98 times. That's down from the 350 times wrongly claimed by Republicans, but it is still iffy. Those 98 votes include times when many procedural votes were cast on a single tax increase or package, according to an analysis by Annenberg's FactCheck.org.
Cheney meant to cite FactCheck.org on another occasion during the debate, but he got it wrong and unintentionally steered Web surfers to FactCheck.com, which in turn redirected users to a site run by anti-Bush billionaire George Soros. Yesterday, a spokesman said Soros did not know of the switching.
17
Archives
The Associated Press
20041007338midsize.jpg
Democratic vice-presidential candidate Sen. John Edwards, right, answers a question as Vice President Dick Cheney listens during the vice-presidential debate in Cleveland on Tuesday. Accusations from both parties crossed the table constantly, bringing up
