ASHINGTON - After Steve Forbes zinged him with a flurry of accusations about Texas state spending, education, and taxes in Wednesday night's debate, Governor George W. Bush replied in defense, ''So many half-stories. So little time.''
With five candidates swinging freely in a 90-minute debate, the truth often gets batted about like a shuttlecock in badminton.
Yet a review of the exchange between Bush and Forbes shows that the magazine publisher did not employ any outright fibs in challenging the Texas governor. Forbes zeroed in on demonstrable flaws in Bush's record with accurate, albeit highly selective, statistics.
The Forbes campaign continued to press the attack on Bush's record yesterday and was planning a news conference today in New Hampshire with members of the Texas board of education who are critical of the governor's performance.
But credit should also be given to Bush, who accurately characterized his opponent's attacks as relaying only half the story. The real achievements of Bush's governorship are more subtle than Forbes's selective use of statistics. Here is a look at the issues raised during the debate.
SAT SCORES. The issue of SAT scores is illustrative and took up much of the exchange between the candidates. Forbes noted accurately that with Bush as governor, his state's ranking for college board scores dropped to 46th from 40th from 1994 to 1999.
''Bush talks that he is the education governor. But by this measure, a measure of what is really going on, which parents look at, it's not there,'' Forbes's campaign manager, William Dal Col, said yesterday in an interview.
Though Texas SAT scores dropped when compared with other states, numerically they stayed about the same. And the Forbes campaign had to switch to different years - 1995 to 1998 - to back up its assertion that the SAT scores for Texas minority students have slipped as well. When 1994 is used as the base year, then Bush is right and Forbes is wrong: Minority scores have gone up.
And all the talk about SAT scores may be irrelevant. Voters in New Hampshire, which traditionally is at or near the top of the national rankings, know what high SAT scores signify, and it isn't necessarily the quality of a state's schools, much less the performance of a governor.
''Forbes is mixing up a lot of stuff and being intellectually dishonest,'' said Nicholas Lemann, the author of ''The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy,'' a new book on the SATs. ''But Bush, you know, doesn't think well on his feet or have the policy mastery to give the answer he could have given.''
The SATs were never designed to measure a school system's performance, but rather to gauge students' ''academic ability irrespective of their high school education,'' said Lemann.
And the SATs, as Bush noted during the debate, generally are taken by students who hope to go to college. States with a lot of college-bound middle-class high school students and small urban populations usually do better than states with large cities.
One thing Bush has done as governor is to challenge more minority students to consider college and take the SATs. In Bush's years in office, the number of students taking the SATs increased overall by 22 percent, and by 24 percent among Hispanics and 29 percent among African-Americans.
''Unlike many states, we make sure as many kids can take the SAT as possible. We include all kinds of children,'' Bush said at the debate.
The College Board Web site notes, ''In general, the higher the percentage of students taking the test, the lower the average scores.''
But Dal Col dismissed Bush's policy and said Texas is cruelly raising the expectations of minority students. ''Encouraging them without giving them the tools to succeed is providing false hope at best,'' he said.
EDUCATION. Forbes also made sport of a Texas education accountability program - the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills - alleging it ''dumbed down'' standards. In one case, said Forbes, students were given pictures of four insects and asked to choose which one was the fly.
Donna Ballard, a member of the Texas board of education, said the test question about insects does exist, and she supported Forbes's claim that the tests have been simplified.
''They have been dumbed down substantially every year,'' said Ballard, who is expected to appear at the Forbes news conference today.
But during Wednesday's debate Bush parried by citing his state's ratings on a federal exam, the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
Texas fourth-graders led the nation in elementary math skills in the 1996 federal tests and were 14th in reading skills when tested last year. And black students in Texas were first among African-Americans nationwide on the math exams.
''The NAEP is a really good measure,'' said Lemann. ''It gives a pretty good picture of how a state is doing, and Texas has gone up. It is wrong to give Bush sole credit, because this is an ongoing effort that started well before he became governor, but Bush has been very supportive.''
TAXES. There is no difference between the candidates on the size of the two tax-cut bills that Bush signed as governor; the debate is over how many Texans actually benefited.
In the 1997 tax cut, Bush signed legislation shifting $1 billion in state funds to the local school districts so they could cut their property taxes. Many taxpayers didn't get the tax break, however, because the assessed value of their property was rising quickly in the booming economy, or because local officials raised their rate. To a lesser extent, a similar phenomenon diluted the impact of the $2 billion tax cut in 1999.
SPENDING. As Forbes noted, Bush criticized former governor Ann Richards in the 1994 campaign for having 13,000 more state employees than New York. And indeed, during the Bush years, that gap has widened as New York reduced the size of its government and the Texas state government grew. According to the Dallas Morning News, aggregate state spending under Bush increased 36 percent, as Forbes said.
The Bush campaign argues, however, that the growth of the Texas population is what drove spending and state employment higher. When measured in per capita terms, the Texas state government has been relatively stingy, Bush says, growing by less than 3 percent.
