week ago, Vice President Al Gore and Governor George W. Bush learned the perils of using numbers to challenge each other's proposals: Fact checkers found both to have misused data to score political points.
Last night, both men avoided numbers. And Gore, stung by charges that he embroidered some facts in their first debate, seemed especially careful.
But 90 minutes is a long time - long enough, for instance, for Bush to declare that Texas will execute all three men convicted in a grisly racial murder. Only two were sentenced to die; the third received a life sentence.
And enough foreign policy questions that even Gore, with the greater experience with worldwide issues, mistook Serbia for Yugoslavia.
But the night's most contentious issue was over health coverage for uninsured children. Each man accused the other of poor performance. And both were correct, to a point.
Overall, Bush appeared to misspeak with more frequency than the vice president.
Health Care.
The most substantive health care exchange of the evening was on the issue of children without health insurance. Gore accused Bush of neglecting the issue and instead focusing on giving the Texas oil industry a tax break.
Gore asserted, with no Bush rebuttal, that Texas ranks 49th in the percentage of uninsured children. Bush's counterattack: The number of uninsured has risen nationally during the Clinton-Gore administration.
Gore attacked Bush for ''the choice he made to give a tax cut for the oil companies and others before addressing this.''
It is true that Bush speedily enacted an oil tax break. But it is untrue that it caused him to neglect children's health insurance.
In early 1999, Bush deemed a $45 million tax break for small oil producers to be an ''emergency'' need. It would help this crucial Texas industry whenever oil prices were low. The emergency status put the tax break on a fast legislative track, and Bush was able to quickly sign it into law.
But a proposal to expand children's health insurance was not put on fast track by Bush. It got stuck in the Legislature and Texas Democrats accused Bush of favoring oil over children.
However, the slowdown in passing the proposal appeared to be more due to a partisan clash between Republicans and Democrats in the Legislature than any neglect by Bush. Democrats wanted to make the program more generous than Republicans wanted it to be. Eventually they compromised, and Bush approved it.
In fact, the same program that Texas legislators argued over was at the center of Gore's proposal last night to cut the number of uninsured children. He stated one of his top priorities would be to insure all children by expanding funding for the Child Health Insurance Program, known as CHIP.
But money is hardly a problem. CHIP gives money to state governments. It's up to them to sign up children for health insurance. But 40 states have been unable to sign up enough children, and, as a consequence, will lose hundreds of millions of dollars the federal government gave them under CHIP.
So the problem is not money, as Gore framed the issue last night. The real problem is finding uninsured youths. States have more money than they can spend.
Hate Crimes
In a slip-up on hate crimes in Texas, Bush said that Texas juries had sentenced to death the three men convicted in the 1998 death of James Byrd Jr. The men, all white, chained Byrd - who was black - to the back of a truck and dragged him to death.
The juries sentenced two of the convicted killers to death. The third received a life sentence. The Bush campaign sought to immediately correct the governor's error, issuing a statement saying prosecutors sought the death penalty for all three.
The reference to Byrd's murder came during one of the few episodes of sparring in last night's debate, over hate crimes.
Gore said he would support tough hate crimes penalties, and chided Bush for not supporting a tough hate crimes law in Texas. In his initial comments, Gore said ''the [Texas] hate crimes law ... failed'' in part because Bush did not support such legislation. Bush pointed out that Texas has had a hate crimes law since 1993 - before Bush took office.
But Bush argued that the law worked well in the Byrd case. ''The crime is hate. And they got the ultimate punishment. I'm not exactly sure you enhance the penalty any more than the death penalty,'' Bush said. ''But we happen to have a statute on the books that's a hate crime statute in Texas.''
Yugoslavia
The Balkans, complex enough to confound any politician, produced a slip by Gore.
The vice president said some of those who support deposed Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic have been ignoring orders from Vojislav Kostunica, who Gore called Serbia's new president. Serbia is but Yugoslavia's largest republic.
The environment
Not all the debate took place on the air. Minutes after any point was made by either candidate, supporters of the other would hit the send button on an e-mail challenging everything from health care to education utterances.
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. But 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.
Beth Daley and Walter V. Robinson of the Globe Staff contributed to this report.
