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by Politex, Bush Watch, www.bushwatch.com

1.
Bush: "I brought Republicans and Democrats together...in the state of Texas, to get a patients' bill of rights through."

Fact: "In 1995 Bush vetoed a patient's bill of rights in Texas, one that contained many of the provisions that he praised last night: report cards on health maintenance organizations, liberal emergency room access, and the elimination of a gag clause forbidding doctors from telling patients about more costly treatment options than HMO coverage. At the time, Bush said these provisions would be too costly to business. Bush did sign some of the provisions into law two years later. But he opposed the right to sue HMOs in court, a right last night he termed ''interesting.'' But a bipartisan, veto-proof majority in the Texas Legislature supported the right to sue. Bush let the provision go into law without his signature." (Robinson and Mishra, Boston Globe, 10/18/00. RM below.)

2.
Bush: "We're one of the first states that said you can sue an HMO for denying you proper coverage."

Fact: "He did not say that he strongly considered vetoing the bill that subjected HMOs to malpractice suits and eventually, facing the prospect of having his veto overridden, allowed the measure to become law without his signature." (Kessler, Wash. Post, 10/18/00. KWP below.)

3.
Bush: Stated that "prescription drug coverage should be "an integral part of Medicare."

Fact: "An odd description of his plan, which is notable for encouraging private-sector choices that may be outside the Medicare system." (Woodward, Washington Post, 10/18/00. WOOD below.)

4.
Bush: "Bush, who opposes a national health insurance program, says the Clinton administration pushed such a plan in 1993."

Fact: "While the Clinton administration did propose an overhaul of the nation's health care system, it would not have been a national health care system like the government-run programs in other countries. Instead, it would have required employers to offer workers insurance, or pay into a fund to cover them, while creating a system of purchasing pools for businesses and individuals to buy coverage." (Welch and Drinkard, USA Today, 10/18/00.)

5.
Bush: "Bush said the number of uninsured Americans has been rising for seven years."

Fact: "The number declined in 1999 for the first time since the Census Bureau began collecting data in 1987, according to a federal report last month. About 42.5 million people, or 15.5 percent of the population, lacked insurance in 1999, compared with 44.2 million, or 16.3 percent, in 1998, the Census Bureau reported." WOOD)

6.
Bush: "50 million Americans get no tax relief under his [Gore's] plan."

Fact: "Although a precise figure is very difficult to determine, this number is reached by labeling roughly half of Gore's tax cuts as spending programs." (ABC, 10/18/00. ABC below.)

7.
Bush:"Bush...repeated a charge from Republican ads that Gore is proposing to spend three times as much as President Clinton.

Fact: "The Clinton spending he is talking about, however, dates to the president's first budget proposal for 1993. Back then, the budget deficit was near its peak; today there are huge surpluses that allow for higher spending. And on paper, Bush would use up more of the surplus with his tax cuts and spending than Gore." (WOOD)

8.
Bush" "You propose more [spending] than Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis combined."

"This charge--which manages to lump Gore with a pair of liberal Democrats--is a fine example of fuzzy math. Bush came up with these facts by taking inflation-adjusted estimates for Mondale and Dukakis proposals--on average $127 billion a year--and then comparing that figure with estimates of Gore's spending proposals by organizations that the Gore campaign has dismissed as partisan, such as the Republican staff of the Senate Budget Committee and the National Taxpayers Union. The Gore campaign figures that it spends only about $88 billion a year--far less than the Bush camp's assertion. There is another, more accurate way to look at government spending--as a percentage of gross domestic product, the broadest measure of the economy. By that method, both Gore and Bush are rather meager spenders--not surprising, because they are trying to balance a budget while their successors felt free to run up big deficits. Gore's budget would amount to growth of about 3 percent of GDP, and much of that growth stems not from Gore's initiatives, but from simply letting government spending keep pace with inflation. In fact, Bush's spending plans would amount to about 2.6 percent of GDP, not significantly different from Gore's." (KWP)

9.
Bush:" "Bush said the wealthiest Americans will pay a higher percentage of taxes under his proposal. This is technically true, but barely." Fact: "As Bush's tax plan is structured, there is a slight increase in the percentage of taxes paid by the wealthiest Americans.

"This occurs because Bush opts not to address a looming problem with a part of the tax code called the alternative minimum tax, which is affecting growing numbers of taxpayers as incomes rise. Because Bush lowers tax rates but does not adjust the alternative minimum tax, some 27 million middle-class and wealthy taxpayers would receive less in tax cuts than expected. Many experts agree Congress will eventually have to address the problem if a tax cut along the lines of the Bush plan is implemented." (KWP)

10.
Bush: "Bush suggested the largest percentage [of tax] reductions under his plan would go to the lowest-income earners."

Fact: "This is misleading. People making $22,000 may get a 100 percent reduction in taxes, but they only pay $110 in federal income taxes. Unlike Gore, Bush in general would not give additional tax refunds once a tax liability had been erased. Meanwhile, someone with $200,000 in tax liability might get a 10 percent reduction in taxes, but that would mean $20,000 in tax cuts." (KWP)

11.
Bush: "Bush is correct that Gore's spending proposals exceed his."

Fact: "However, the combination of Bush's spending plans and tax cuts would eat up more of the surplus than Gore would with his more modest tax cut and his larger spending plans." (RM)

12.
Bush: "In response to one question, Bush embraced diversity, finishing his answer by declaring his support for ''affirmative access.'' When Gore accused Bush of opposing affirmative action, Bush said he is against only quotas."

Fact: "Bush has opposed racial preferences. And he endorses the GOP platform, which opposes affirmative action programs." (RM)

13.
Bush: "Bush boasted that since he has been governor, violent crime in Texas has gone down."

Fact: "Just this week, the latest federal statistics, comparing 1999 with 1998 crime, show that all crime increased in 12 large Texas cities." (RM)

14.
Bush: "Vouchers are up to states. If you want to do a voucher program in Missouri, fine."

Fact: " Bush's education plan forces states to divert money to vouchers at federal discretion." (ABC.)

15.
Bush Investing some Social Security money "under safe guidelines...get a better rate of return than the paltry 2 percent that the federal governmen gets for you today."

Fact: According to Paul Krugman in the 9/13/00 NYT, that rate of return "ignores a multitrillion-dollar debt [created from taking that money out of Social Security] that somebody has to pay" and Bush has not accounted for. (Bush Watch, 10/18/00)

16.
Bush: "Bush also got himself onto shaky ground when he accused the Clinton-Gore administration of failing to deliver a middle-class tax cut."

Fact: "The administration negotiated a budget bill with the Republican Congress in 1997 that included a children's tax credit that reduced taxes for the middle class." (E.J. Dionne, Jr., Houston Chronicle, 10/18/00) --Politex, 10/19/00

1.
Bush: "We went into Russia, we said, 'Here's some IMF money,' and it ended up in Viktor Chernomyrdin's pocket and others."

Fact: "Bush appears to have tangled up whispers about possible wrongdoing by Chernomyrdin--who co-chaired a commission with Gore on U.S.-Russian relations--with other unrelated allegations concerning the diversion of International Monetary Fund money. While there has been speculation that Chernomyrdin profited from his relationship with Gazprom, a big Russian energy concern, there have been no allegations that he stole IMF money." Washingon Post, 10/12/00

2.
Bush:"We got one [a hate crime law] in Texas, and guess what? The three men who murdered James Byrd, guess what's going to happen to them? They're going to be put to death... It's going to be hard to punish them any worse after they get put to death....We're happy with our laws on our books."

Fact: "The three were convicted under Texas' capital murder statute...The state has a hate crime statute, but it is vague." LA Times, 10/12/00. "The original Texas hate-crimes bill, signed into law by Democrat Ann Richards, boosted penalties for crimes motivated by bigotry. As Gore correctly noted, Bush maneuvered to make sure a new hate-crimes law related to the Byrd killing did not make it to his desk. The new bill would have included homosexuals among the groups covered, which would have been anathema to social conservatives in the state." Washington Post, 10/12/00

3.
Bush: "Bragged that in Texas he was signing up children for the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) as "fast as any other state."

Fact: "As governor he fought to unsuccessfully to limit access to the program. He would have limited its coverage to children with family incomes up to 150 percent of the poverty level, though federal law permitted up to 200 percent. The practical effect of Bush's efforts would have been to exclude 200,000 of the 500,000 possible enrollees." Washington Post, 1012/00

4.
Bush: "He [Gore] is for registration of guns."

Fact: "Gore actually favors licensing for new handgun purchasers but nothing as vast as registering all guns." Salon, 10/12/00

5.
Bush: Said he found Gore's tendency to exaggerate "an issue in trying to defend my tax relief package. There was some exaggeration about the numbers" in the first debate.

Fact: "No, there wasn't, and Bush himself acknowledged that the next day on ABC's "Good Morning America" when Charlie Gibson pinned him on it." Salon, 10/12/00

6.
Bush: "I felt during his debate with Senator [Bill] Bradley saying he [Gore] authored the EITC [earned-income tax credit] when it didn't happen."

Fact: "Actually, Gore had claimed to have authored an "expansion of the earned-income tax credit," which he did in 1991." Salon, 10/12/00

7.
Fact: Gore noted that "Texas "ranks 49th out of the 50 states in healthcare in children with healthcare, 49th for women with healthcare and 50th for families with healthcare"

Bush: "You can quote all the numbers you want but I'm telling you we care about our people in Texas. We spent a lot of money to make sure people get healthcare in the state of Texas."

8.
Fact: Gore said, ""I'm no expert on the Texas procedures, but what my friends there tell me is that the governor opposed a measure put forward by Democrats in the Legislature to expand the number of children that would be covered....And instead [he] directed the money toward a tax cut, a significant part of which went to wealthy interests."

Bush: "If he's trying to allege I'm a hardhearted person and don't care about children, he's absolutely wrong."

9.
Bush: "The three men who murdered James Byrd, guess what's going to happen to them? They'll be put to death. A jury found them guilty."

Fact: Two of the three are being put to death. The other was given life. Bush Watch, 10/12/00

10.
Bush: said he favored "equal" rights for gays and lesbians, bu not "special" rights.

Fact: "Bush has supported a Texas law that allows the state to take adopted children from gay and lesbian couples to place the kids with straight couples." Salon, 10/12/00. "Bush supports hate crime protections for other minorities! So Bush doesn't believe that gays should have the same "special" rights in this regard as blacks, Jews, Wiccans and others. Employment discrimination? Again, Bush supports those rights for other Americans, but not gays. Military service? Bush again supports the right to military service for all qualified people--as long as they don't tell anyone they're gay. Marriage? How on earth is that a special right when every heterosexual in America already has it? But again, Bush thinks it should be out-of-bounds for gays. What else is there? The right to privacy? Nuh-huh. Bush supports a gays-only sodomy law in his own state that criminalizes consensual sex in private between two homosexuals. New Republic, 10/13/00

11.
Bush. "We ought to do everything we can to end racial profiling."

Fact: The Texas Department of Public Safety has just this year begun keeping detailed information about the race and sex of all people stopped by its troopers, the sixth year Bush has been in office. Salon, 10/12/00

12.
Bush: "Got caught not giving the full story on Texas air pollution laws. He was correct in saying the 1999 utility deregulation bill he signed into law had mandatory emissions standards.

Fact: "What was missing, as Gore's campaign pointed out, was that many more non-utility industrial plants are not mandated to reduce air quality. The issue is an important one because Texas ranks near the bottom in air-quality standards. Bush instead approved a voluntary program allowing grandfathered oil, coal, and other industrial plants to cut down on pollution." Boston Globe, 10/12/00

13.
Bush: About the Balkans, "I think it ought to be one of our priorities to work with our European friends to convince them to put troops on the ground."

Fact: "European forces already make up a large majority of the peacekeeping forces in Bosnia and Kosovo." Washington Post, 10/12/00

14.
Bush: "One of the problems we have in the military is we're in a lot of places around the world" and cited Haiti as an example.

"Though approximately 20,000 U.S. troops went to Haiti in 1994, as of late August this year, there were only 109 U.S. troops in Haiti and most were rotating through as part of an exercise." Washington Post, 10/12/00

15.
Bush: "I don't think we ought to be selling guns to people who shouldn't have them. That's why I support instant background checks at gun shows. One of the reasons we have an instant background check is so that we instantly know whether or not someone should have a gun or not."

Fact: "Bush overstates the effectiveness of instant background checks for people trying to buy guns.... The Los Angeles Times reported on Oct. 3 that during Bush's term as governor, Texas granted licenses for carrying concealed guns to hundreds of people with criminal records and histories of drug problems, violence or psychological disorders." Washington Post, 10/12/00 "He didn't mention that Texas failed to perform full background checks on 407 people who had prior criminal convictions but were granted concealed handgun licenses under a law he signed in 1995. Of those, 71 had convictions that should have excluded them from having a concealed gun permit, the Texas Department of Public Safety acknowledged." AP, 10/12/00

16.
Bush:"Said the number of Texans without health insurance had declined while the number in the United States had risen."

Fact: " A new Census Bureau report says the number of uninsured Americans declined last year for the first time since statistics were kept in 1987. About 42.5 million people, or 15.5 percent of the population, lacked insurance in 1999, compared with 44.2 million, or 16.3 percent, in 1998, the agency reported. Texas ranked next-to-last in the nation last year with 23.3 percent of its residents uninsured. But that was an improvement from 1998, when it ranked 50th at 24.5 percent." AP, 10/12/00

17.
Bush:"Some of the scientists, I believe, Mr. Vice President, haven't they been changing their opinion a little bit on global warming?"

Fact: "Bush's dismissive comments about global warming could bolster the charge that he and fellow oilman Dick Cheney are in the pocket of the oil industry, which likewise pooh-poohs the issue. [While] there is no consensus about the impact of global warming,...most scientists agree that humans are contributing to the rising global temperature. "Most climate experts are certain that global warming is real and that it threatens ecology and human prosperity, and a growing number say it is well under way," wrote New York Times science writer Andrew Revkin." Salon, 10/13/00

18.
Bush: When Jim Lehrer asked Bush if he approved of the U.S. intervention in Lebanon during the Reagan years, Bush answered a quick "yes" and moved on.

Fact: "Lebanon was a disaster in the history of American foreign affairs. Next to Iran-Contra, it was the Reagan administration's greatest overseas fiasco. Quoting from the Encyclopedia of the American Presidency: '[In 1983] Reagan stumbled into a disastrous intervention in the Middle East when he sent U.S. Marines into Lebanon on an ill-defined mission as part of an international peacekeeping force.' In December, according to Reagan biographer Edmund Morris, 'two days before Christmas, a Pentagon commission of inquiry into the Beirut barracks bombing humiliated [Secretary of State] Shultz [who had backed the intervention], and embarrassed Reagan, by concluding that the dead Marines had been victims of a myopic Middle Eastern policy.'" Tom Paine, 10/11/00

19.
Bush: "I thought the president made the right decision in joining NATO and bombing Serbia. I supported him when they did so."

Fact: The bombing of Serbia began on March 24, 1999, and Bush did not express even measured support until April 8, 1999 - nearly two weeks later. Prior to April 8, 1999, every comment by Bush about the bombing was non-committal. Finally, he offered a measured endorsement: "It's important for the United States to be slow to engage the military, but once the military is engaged, it must be engaged with one thing in mind, and that is victory," he said after being pressed by reporters. A Houston Chronicle story documented the Governor’s statements on the crisis and reported that "Bush has been widely criticized for being slow to adopt a position on Kosovo and then for making vague statements on the subject." Houston Chronicle, 4/9/99

20.
Bush: Discussing International Loans: "And there's some pretty egregious examples recently, one being Russia where we had IMF loans that ended up in the pockets of a lot of powerful people and didn't help the nation."

Fact: Bush’s own vice presidential candidate, Dick Cheney, lobbied for U.S.-backed loan to Russia that helped his own company. "Halliburton Co. lobbied for and received $ 292 million in loan guarantees to develop one of the world's largest oil fields in Russia. Cheney said: 'This is exactly the type of project we should be encouraging if Russia is to succeed in reforming its economy...We at Halliburton appreciate the support of the Export-Import Bank and look forward to beginning work on this important project.’" PR Newswire 4/6/2000. The State Department, armed with a CIA report detailing corruption by Halliburton’s Russian partner, invoked a seldom-used prerogative and ordered suspension of the loan. The loan guarantee "ran counter to America's ‘national interest,’" the State Department ruled. New Republic, 8/7/00

21.
Bush "There's a lot of talk about trigger locks being on guns sold in the future. I support that."

Fact: When asked in 1999, if he was in support of mandatory safety locks, Bush said, "No, I'm not, I'm for voluntary safety locks on guns." In March of 2000, Bush said he would not push for trigger lock legislation, but would sign it if it passed. [Washington Post, 3/3/00;ABC, "Good Morning America," 5/10/99] Bush Let Trigger Locks Bill Die in Texas. When Bush was asked, "when two bills were introduced in the Texas legislature to require the sale of child safety locks with newly purchased handguns, and you never addressed the issue with the legislature, and both bills died. If you support it, why did that happen?" Bush said, "Because those bills had no votes in committee." When asked again if he supported the bills, Bush said, "I wasn't even aware of those bills because they never even got out of committee." NBC, "Today Show," 5/12/00

22.
Bush: "Africa is important and we've got to do a lot of work in Africa to promote democracy and trade."

Fact "While Africa may be important, it doesn't fit into the national strategic interests, as far as I can see them," Bush said earlier. When he was asked for his vision of the U.S. national interests, he named every continent except Africa. According to Time magazine, "[Bush] focused exclusively on big ticket issues ... Huge chunks of the globe -- Africa and Latin America, for example -- were not addressed at all." Time, 12/6/99; PBS "News Hour," 2/16/00; Toronto Star, 2/16/00

23.
Bush: "There's only been one governor ever elected to back-to-back four year terms and that was me."

Fact: Prior to Bill Clements, whose first term as governor ran from Jan. 1979 to Jan. 1983, governors of Texas served, by law, 2 year terms, not four year terms. Alan Shivers, for example, was elected governor three times to Bush's two, and served an additional 1 1/2 years of a previous governor's term. Bill Clements was elected to two four year terms, but not consecutively. Since the four year term was instituted, there have only been four governors, Clements, Mark White, Ann Richards, and Bush, and two of the four have been elected to serve twice. Bush, however, is the only governor of the four whose initials are GWB. The governors who served three consecutive two-year terms are: Coke R. Stevenson August 4, 1941-January 21, 1947. Allan Shivers July 11, 1949-January 15, 1957. Price Daniel January 15, 1957-January 15, 1963. John Connally January 15, 1963-January 21, 1969. Dolph Briscoe January 16, 1973-January 16, 1979. Texas State Libraries and Archives Commission.

24.
Bush: "We spend $4.7 billion a year on the uninsured in the state of Texas."

Fact: The state of Texas came up with less than $1B for this purpose. $3.5 came from local governments, private providers, and charities, $198M from the federal government, and just less than $1B from Texas state agencies. Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts

25.
Bush: ""Our CHIPS (children's health insurance) program got a late start because our government meets only four months out of every two years, Mr. Vice President. May come for a shock for somebody's been in Washington for so long, but actually limited government can work in the second largest state in the Union, and therefore Congress passes the bill after our session in 1970 --'97 ended. We passed the enabling legislation in '99."

Fact: Texas governors can call special sessions of the legislature to pass specific legislation at any time. Bush could have done so with CHIPS. "But more important is that Bush could have gotten CHIP sign-ups under way without the Legislature. As governor, Bush could have drawn up plans for enrolling kids, lined up providers and filed an amendment to Texas' Medicaid Plan with the Health Care Finance Administration, which handles Medicaid and CHIP nationally. With HCFA's approval, he could have started enrollment at once.Instead he waited for the Legislature to convene in January 1999. Then, Bush failed to exercise another gubernatorial option to speed things up. CHIP would have been among the first things considered by the Legislature had he declared it "an emergency," as he did with his tax cut for oil producers. Instead, Bush sparred with legislators about how much a family could earn for their kids to qualify for the program. His first proposal was to make CHIP available to families whose earnings are between 100 percent and 133 percent of the poverty level. Those whose earnings are at or below the poverty level supposedly qualify for Medicaid, but Texas' record in enrolling those eligible has been so bad federal courts have twice ordered the state to clean up its act. When even the Republican legislators balked at Bush's miserly eligibility proposal, he raised it to 150 percent, which would have made about 280,000 kids CHIP-eligible. It was well into the 1999 Legislature that the 200 percent of the poverty level eligibility was approved, which expanded the number of eligible kids to 500,000.Now that it is a national embarrassment, state officials are rushing to sign them up, but at last count, only 100,000 kids have CHIP.Bush could have started signing up poor kids 15 months earlier." San Antonio Express News, 10/15/00

26.
Bush: "We need to make sure that if we decontrol our plants that there's mandatory - that plants must conform to clean air standards, to grandfather plants. That's what we did in Texas, no excuses. I mean, you must conform." (Also, claims credit for the "landmark" Texas Clean Air Act of 1999, http://www.georgewbush.com)

Fact: The legislation he supported calls for only "voluntary compliance" by the old plants that were grandfathered in the Clean Air Act of 1971 (Houston Chronicle 6/19/99). Efforts by concerned legislators to mandate pollution reductions on grandfathered non-utility plants in the 1999 session of the legislature were thwarted by the Governor's support of SB 766 that he allowed the big oil and chemical companies to draft. This voluntary approach has failed. An Environmental Defense Fund analysis of the data compiled by the Texas Natural Resource Conservation concerning SB 766 found that the Governor's bill had resulted in these plants implementing and promising to implement reductions of less than 1% of their grandfathered emissions. http://www.texascenter.org/aircrisis/index.htm

27.
Bush: "If you want a trigger lock to make your gun safe, come to--come and get one for free. And so we're distributing in our state of Texas for free."

Fact: The gun locks are not being distributed in Texas. Although the freee trigger lock program started in May and plans are to hand out one million free trigger locks each year for five years, only 10% of this year's locks have actually been handed out to Texas law enforcement agencies to date, and those have gone to only 15 of the thousands of lawy enforcement agencies in Texas. Reports from those 15 agencies show that few of the locks have actually been given to Texas citizens, and there are two problems with those locks. First, they can only be used on unloaded guns. Secondly, according to the AP, "the locks spring open when bounced or hit in a particular manner," rendering the locks useless for the purpose intended. Distribution of the gun locks has been halted. This information was found at thegovernor's web site.

Note: Thanks go out to the many Bush Watchers who contributed to this report. Politex, Bush Watch, www.bushwatch.com

Gail Collins of the New York Times performs a wonderful public service in today's Times by simply reprinting Bush's Tuesday night statement on the Middle East: "It's also important to keep a strong ties in the Middle East with credible ties because of the energy crisis we're now in. After all, all the energy is produced from - from the Middle East. And so I - I appreciate what the administration is doing. I - I hope to get a sense of, should I be fortunate enough to be the president, how my administration will react to the Middle East." Glory be! We have a genius among us! Quick, let's make him President!

It is that kind of dangerous ignorance, the blind recitation of vapid, vacuous platitudes, that Bush has made his forte. And yet precisely because they know Bush is so intellectually thin, the media grades him on a curve: not judging him by what a President should know and say, but rather by asking: Did he do better than a not-so-bright frat boy after cramming all night for a mid-term? No serious person describes Bush as intelligent or engaged. They just say he's brighter than he seems, or that he's bright enough. Kinda like telling your date, "You don't sweat too much for a fat chick." --Paul Begala, 10/13/00