By Walter V. Robinson and Anne E. Kornblut, Globe Staff, 10/05/2000

The first presidential debate concluded on time Tuesday night. But it quickly resumed yesterday, with both the Bush and Gore campaigns accusing each other's candidate of misstating the facts the night before.

Early yesterday, for example, aides to Vice President Al Gore acknowledged he misspoke when he told the national television audience that he had accompanied the US emergency management czar on a trip to a Texas disaster site. But Gore's aides called further attention to two apparent Bush gaffes that had already been reported. And they were significant, at least arithmetically: Bush may have made a trillion-dollar error in accounting on Social Security costs.

What's more, Bush's statement during the debate that Gore has outspent him may have been the head-scratcher of the night. It's the other way around, and it has been widely reported: Bush has spent $121 million so far, and the Gore campaign has spent $60 million.

On two other issues yesterday, there was new squabbling.

During the debate, Bush appeared to soften his opposition to the new abortion drug, RU-486, compared with last January, when he was seeking conservative Republican votes while fending off charges that he was not fervent enough in his opposition to abortion.

And Gore, alluding to school overcrowding, cited a 15-year-old Sarasota girl who, he said, has been standing in class for lack of a desk. But he was relying on a Sept. 10 news article, and the girl has long since been given a desk.

Of the two men, Bush sought to take fuller advantage of his opponent's miscues, especially Gore's most puzzling assertion. At one point in the debate, Gore volunteered that several years earlier he'd gotten a firsthand look at disastrous Texas wildfires with the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. "I accompanied James Lee Witt to Texas when those fires broke out," Gore said.

Yesterday, FEMA officials and Gore aides said Gore has never accompanied Witt to Texas. In 1998, Gore held a news conference in Houston on the fires. But he was already in Texas for a political event.

Bush, in an interview on Fox News, said he nearly called Gore on that assertion during the debate.

Bush continued: "This is a man who's got a record, you know, of sometimes exaggerating to make a point. I don't know if the people or the press corps are going to hold him accountable."

Asked whether he thought Gore's exaggerations were a legitimate campaign issue, Bush replied, "I think it's just a pattern - a disturbing pattern."

But Bush, too, came uder fire for his answer to one question from Jim Lehrer: whether he would try to overturn the Food and Drug Administration's decision last week to approve the abortion drug RU-486. "I don't think a president can do that," Bush said, though he added that he found the ruling "disappointing."

Asked twice for clarification, Bush said: "I don't think a president can even overturn it. The FDA has made its decision."

Would he ask the FDA to reappraise the decision? "I think once the decision's made, it's been made, unless it's proven to be unsafe to women."

In Iowa last January, after a fellow Republican called Bush an antiabortion pacifist, Bush was asked how he would respond if the FDA approved the drug while he was president. According to news reports, the tone of his answer was different: "I would not be inclined to accept that ruling by the FDA. That's abortion." Asked whether he would reverse the approval if it were made before he took office, Bush declared: "That's too hypothetical."

Jano Cabrera, a Gore campaign spokesman, said yesterday that it appears that in January, Bush was trying to appease his party's antiabortion wing by implying he would reverse the decision. "Now, in the general election, he says he'll do nothing about it," Cabrera said.

In contrast, Gore's assertion that Kailey Ellis has no place to sit in her Sarasota biology class, an example he used to cite school overcrowding nationwide, was based on a 4-week-old newspaper clipping; the Gore campaign apparently made no attempt to verify whether Ellis was still standing, or whether she ever did.

In a radio interview in Sarasota yesterday, the school's principal, Daniel Kennedy, said Gore was inaccurate, because no students are standing during classes. Kennedy said Ellis might have been without a desk - but not without a lab stool - for just one day. The Sarasota Herald-Tribune, which reported the overcrowding on Sept. 10, said yesterday that Ellis was without a desk and was "forced to stand her first few days."

Cabrera, the Gore spokesman, acknowledged that Gore got the tense wrong by saying that Ellis was still standing, but he said it does not change the fact, cited by Gore, that Sarasota and other communities have seriously overcrowded schools.