Tonight we will witness the third and final debate between the two presidential candidates as each man makes a concerted grab for the momentum of the tightly contested race.
Very little is certain about tomorrow night save the general topic of the evening - domestic policy. One thing is reasonably certain about tomorrow night's showdown in Arizona: the candidates will at best grossly exaggerate, and at worst straight out lie. One can be assured of this because we have seen nothing less than this in each of the three past debates.
In introducing the American public to the wonders of nonpartisan think tanks to which his wife, Lynne, is so often opposed, Vice President Dick Cheney plugged "factcheck.com." Unfortunately for the Veep, he got the URL wrong: it is factcheck.org (check it out).
Even worse, the site mistakenly plugged by Cheney linked itself to a Web site run by billionaire financier and ardent anti-Bush activist George Soros.
More to the point, John Edwards' statement the vice president used the Web site to rebut turned out to be, in the words of the nonpartisan group, "mostly right."
The first presidential debate was, disappointingly enough, rife with exaggerations and mistruths, disturbing especially since the two candidates were speaking about foreign policy and national security.
As evidence of progress on the ground in Iraq, Bush stated we have trained 100,000 Iraqi security forces. While this is the official figure, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage testified to a house committee that these people are not always soldiers, and many of them are policemen who have received nothing more than a three-week "shake and bake" training to date - not quite finely trained security machines.
On the other side of the aisle, and the podium, Kerry referred to the cost of the war in Iraq as $200 billion. The cost to date of the war has been $120 billion, and much of the figure that the Democrat referred to has not even been requested by the Bush administration for the war effort.
The second debate's town hall format led itself to plenty of big-fish tales from the gentlemen on stage. Kerry claimed that the Bush administration has presided over a loss of 1.6 million jobs, when in fact he was referring only to jobs lost in the private sector.
When the Bureau of Labor Statistics benchmark revisions that are predicted are taken into account, the best estimate of jobs lost to date under the current administration is 585,000. The difference is staggering.
To return the favor of misleading, Bush claimed that Kerry voted 98 times to raise taxes, a claim oft-repeated by the GOP and its followers. Unfortunately for the folks in red, almost half those votes merely set tax targets without legislating actual changes, and the tally includes multiple votes on the same tax bills, including 16 on a single 1993 Clinton plan to raise taxes and cut spending. It is the GOP claims, not Kerry's record, that seem truly taxing here.
The presidential debates are supposed to be an opportunity for the men who aspire to the highest office in the land (and perhaps the world) to make their case before the American people. The lying and exaggerations of this year, however, do not flatter either man or this democracy.
