Campaign Fact Check: Flu Vaccine, Draft, Terrorism

WASHINGTON, Oct. 19, 2004 — -- In the homestretch of the presidential race, both candidates are launching attacks that bear little resemblance to reality here on God's green Earth. Both sides accuse the other of fear-mongering; both sides are right.

President Bush launched a new attack against Sen. John Kerry this week. To resounding boos in Marlton, N.J., on Monday, the president said, "Senator Kerry believes that fighting (Iraqi insurgency leader Abu Musab al-) Zarqawi and other terrorists in Iraq is a 'diversion' from the war on terror."

But Kerry never said that. "That's a distortion of what Senator Kerry said or meant," says Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute. "Senator Kerry has said we need to go after terrorists, and that taking on Saddam Hussein in a war was a diversion from the central goal of taking on terrorists."

The idea that because Zarqawi is in Iraq right now Kerry thinks it's a diversion to pursue him "is misleading at best and flatly untrue at worst," Ornstein says.

A new Kerry television advertisement attacks Bush for the flu vaccine shortage. "Instead of fixing the problem, production of the vaccine was sent to a factory overseas," the ad says, noting that's where "the vaccines were contaminated."

But though the Food and Drug Administration is being blamed for not adequately supervising flu production -- a subject Kerry showed no apparent interest in until the recent shortage -- it was the private company Chiron Corp. that decided to produce the flu vaccine in the United Kingdom, not Bush or his administration.

Kerry told the "Des Moines Register" last week that a Bush re-election brings "great potential" for a military draft.

"The Pentagon says it doesn't want a draft, that volunteer soldiers make better soldiers and they don't need drafted soldiers," says Brooks Jackson of FactCheck.org. "What Kerry says is a matter of opinion, but I'm not sure what he is basing that opinion on."

Then there is this line from Bush on Monday, which he repeats every chance he gets. "As part of his foreign policy, Senator Kerry has talked about applying a 'global test,' " Bush said. "As far as I can tell, it comes down to this: before we act to defend ourselves, he thinks we need permission from foreign capitals."