T. LOUIS - During the last presidential debate, George W. Bush misstated the number of men facing the death penalty in a Texas murder case, confused two types of discrimination faced by Arab-Americans, and implied that the state of Texas spends more on health care for the uninsured than it really does.
But Bush suffered little for those missteps, dismissed by aides as honest mistakes. Instead, as the candidates head into their third and final encounter tonight, it is Vice President Al Gore who remains under a microscope.
That Gore has been successfully cast as the accident-prone debater is an ironic turnabout for both campaigns, which entered the debate season with predictions that Bush would display a weaker command of both word and fact. But it is also a frustration to many Democrats who believe Gore has allowed his gaffes to define him, without aggressively turning the tables when Bush errs himself.
''I don't understand it. I'm baffled,'' said former Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis. ''In the misstatement department, Bush has beaten us all, including during the debates. ... Why isn't he being called on this stuff? I don't know. There's nothing about his bumbles and stumbles and misstatements.''
Gore campaign chairman William Daley also was shaking his head yesterday.
''I think it's been there, for a very long time, a kind of attitude that `Bush makes mistakes. He does things that may not make sense, but that's OK. So what?''' Daley said with equal measures of amazement and disdain.
Bush aides say the answer is simple. ''If Governor Bush makes a mistake, you don't get the sense it's a window onto his soul as you do with Gore,'' Bush media adviser Stuart Stevens said.
The final chance for Gore to alter his image as a ''serial exaggerater'' - or at least level the playing field - before a wide audience comes tonight, when he and Bush meet for the last time before the election, now just 21 days away. Yet the challenge may involve more than simply sticking to incontrovertible facts. Gore has played this part for so long that each new gaffe, serious or silly, now feeds a preconceived notion about him.
Bush, on the other hand, has used the debates to limit his main image problem: that he is intellectually unprepared for the presidency and not as bright as Gore. Had he mispronounced a word, for example, or misidentified a foreign leader, the Texas governor might have underscored a caricature of himself. Isolated incidents of confusion over policy or detail have not seemed to have that effect.
Bush may have learned a lesson from his father, who in a 1992 town hall debate against Bill Clinton and Ross Perot glanced at his wristwatch twice, reinforcing a perception that he was out of touch with the electorate. The Texas governor has even joked about not repeating that incident, suggesting he is aware that small gestures can take on giant significance against such a vivid backdrop as a nationally broadcast debate.
To the chagrin of the Gore campaign, however, Bush made several errors in the last debate that they do not deem trivial, but which have not seemed to count heavily against the GOP nominee. Although the Bush campaign immediately corrected the Texas governor's mistake in saying that three men, rather than two, were condemned to die for the killing of James Byrd, Gore aides insist the error was a sign of his feeble grasp of important matters.
The same could be said of his assessment of the plight of Arab-Americans. Bush failed to distinguish between racial profiling, in which Arab-Americans and other minorities are stopped at airport security checkpoints because of the color of their skin, and ''secret evidence'' cases, in which suspected terrorists are brought to trial without learning the charges against them. Fusing the two notions awkwardly the Texas governor said: ''Arab-Americans are racially profiled in what's called `secret evidence'... people are stopped, and we've got to do something about that.''
In both cases, Bush aides were ready with a response. Asked to clarify Bush's statement on Arab-Americans, spokesman Dan Bartlett said that ''what he was referencing, in his two minutes allotted, is that Arab-Americans are often the target of racial profiling.'' Bush, he said, is well aware of the difference between racial profiling and ''secret evidence'' cases, but was simply pointing out that Arab-Americans are unfairly affected by both.
The death penalty remark, Bartlett said, was quickly defused by the campaign's admission that Bush had erred. ''That's just a misstatement of fact,'' he said. The difference for Gore, Bartlett said, is that ''people are more sensitive because he has a longer history of exaggeration and embellishment.''
''The difference is, what Gore does is he embellishes or distorts mainly his role in events,'' Bartlett said. ''It's embellishing, it's not a clear misstatement of facts.''
But if Gore exaggerated in the first debate, claiming he once flew to Texas with Emergency Management director James Lee Witt to see fire and flood victims, what did Bush do in claiming Texas spends $4.7 billion on health care for the uninsured?
In fact, the state of Texas only spends about one-quarter of that amount on the uninsured - a detail the Bush campaign did not volunteer until several days after the debate, and only after it was first disclosed by three Democratic state legislators from Texas.
Most of the funding, about $3.5 billion, comes from charitable institutions and local governments that pay doctors and hospitals to provide free care.
The Bush campaign argued that his remark was technically accurate. During the debate, Bush's precise statement was: ''We spent $4.7 billion a year in the state of Texas for uninsured people.'' According to Bartlett, Bush was not trying to imply that all the funding actually came from the state.
''He said, `We, in the state of Texas,''' Bartlett said. ''He didn't say, `State spending for the uninsured is $4.7 billion.' He said, `We in Texas.'''
Yesterday, the Gore campaign flew three Democratic Texas state legislators here to complain about Bush's statement before the vice president's traveling press corps.
The three, Elliott Naishtat, Glen Maxey, and Garnet Coleman, have been authors or driving forces behind most efforts in the state to expand health insurance. They said that not only was Bush's claim ''outrageous,'' it was, in the words of Maxey, ''carefully memorized and scripted.''
Coleman said Bush has been dragged into health insurance reforms throughout his two terms in office, yet his campaign Web site brags that he has signed legislation that was, in fact, drafted and pushed by others.
''When you take credit for other people's work, that's called plagiarism, and I think the governor has taken credit for a lot of other people's work,'' the legislator said.
Democratic strategist Dane Strother said Bush has ''got a pass on this stuff, and I don't quite understand why. The problem is that Al Gore has made gaffes the American people understand, whereas George Bush is making mistakes on technical issues.''
Yesterday's effort by the Gore campaign, coming five days after the last debate, hardly matched the onslaught against Gore launched by the Bush campaign immediately after the Boston debate.
Gore aides said they had failed to pursue Bush aggressively enough, and said they planned to do so this week. They partly blamed last week's deluge of foreign news, saying the bombing attack on the USS Cole in Yemen and the renewed fighting in the Middle East overshadowed domestic politics for days.
But Gore workers also fretted about their candidate's treatment by both the news media and the other side. ''To some extent, there's been a double standard in holding Bush's misstatements under the same microscope,'' said Gore spokesman Doug Hattaway.
The Gore campaign hopes to remedy the situation somewhat tonight, in a setting that plays to the strengths and weaknesses of both. Although President Bush did not feel at home in the town meeting setting, his son has participated in many throughout the year, as has Gore.
Moreover, the town hall format has been significantly modified since the 1992 event. This year, the candidates negotiated a much tighter set of rules that require members of the audience to submit their questions to moderator Jim Lehrer, who will then choose questioners and know the questions in advance. The members of the audience are not supposed to follow up with a second question, and there is less opportunity for the second candidate to join in.
