WASHINGTON – In their third and last face-off before the election last night, President Bush and Democrat presidential nominee John Kerry were as selective about the facts as they were in their previous debates.

In his effort to paint his opponent as a political extremist and lifelong liberal bent on raising taxes and government spending, the president claimed Mr. Kerry’s voting record is to the left of Senator Kennedy’s.

“There’s a mainstream in American politics and you sit right on the far left bank. Your record is such that Ted Kennedy, your colleague, is the conservative senator from Massachusetts,” Mr. Bush said.

Mr. Kerry may have been the most liberal senator in 2003, according to rankings by the nonpartisan National Journal magazine that have been touted by the Bush campaign, but when you take Mr. Kerry’s entire Senate career into account, he comes in closer to 11th. Senator Dayton of Minnesota was listed as the most liberal senator, and Mr. Kennedy was in the top 10.

“The Bush campaign has been misleading in the way it has used our vote ratings. John Kerry was the most liberal senator in 2003, a year when he missed many votes because he was on the campaign trail. But over his lifetime, he is among the most liberal,” said the magazine’s deputy managing editor, Patrick Pexton.

The Kerry campaign argues the president is being disingenuous with the liberal label because it fails to recognize the Democrat’s readiness to break with his party colleagues on some substantial issues, including voting to reduce the deficit and supporting landmark welfare-reform legislation. He was one of only four other Democrats to join with 36 Republicans to cosponsor a bill to impose federal spending caps, and he has joined regularly with Senator McCain, a Republican of Arizona, to tackle government spending.

Messrs. Kerry and Kennedy have had similar voting records when it comes to social issues and “they’re two peas in a pod when it comes to spending,” said David Keating, executive director of the conservative Club for Growth. Both voted against Mr. Bush’s tax cuts, but only Mr. Kennedy has talked about repealing all of them.

Mr. Kerry last night also misrepresented the facts when he clashed with Mr. Bush over taxes, health care, and education and traded in a blizzard of facts and figures, with references to “budget caps” and other insider Washington terms. Tax policy was a particular flash point between the two. The Massachusetts Senator maintained he would follow through on his plan to roll back tax cuts for Americans who earn more than $200,000 a year while preserving the reductions that have gone to lower and middle income wage earners.

Mr. Bush insists that if you add up all of Mr. Kerry’s spending promises, it wouldn’t be possible to avoid raising taxes on the middle classes, too, or alternatively adding to the deficit. Mr. Kerry promises to reduce the deficit by half.

According to the American Enterprise Institute’s Kevin Hassett, Mr. Bush is spot on. The Kerry spending promises “add up to an extraordinary amount of money,” said Mr. Hassett. He added: “Our best estimate is that Kerry’s proposals will add up to between $2 trillion and $2.1 trillion over the next ten years. Since the revenue from his tax proposals relative to the current baseline is actually negative, this implies that the Kerry proposal would increase the deficit by perhaps as much as $2.5 trillion over the next 10 years.”

In fact, even according to Mr. Kerry’s own one-page budget plan he would have to raise taxes on individuals earning less than $200,000. In the plan he says he would “restore the top two rates” for individual income taxes to their levels prior to the 2001 tax relief bill. The second highest tax rate begins at $146,750 in taxable income for singles and $178,650 for couples.

On employment, too, the facts are a little less clear than Mr. Kerry made out. He said last night: “This is the first president in 72 years to preside over an economy in America that has lost jobs. Eleven other presidents – six Democrats and five Republicans – had wars, had recessions, had great difficulties. None of them lost jobs the way this president has.” Mr. Kerry claimed during the debate that the economy has lost 1.6 million jobs under Mr. Bush.

In fact, by the end of Mr. Bush’s term, it is possible that there won’t have been a net loss. In the past 13 months, 1.9 million new jobs have been created. The jobless rate stands at a historically low 5.4%. One hundred forty million Americans are working, an American record. Since Mr. Bush was elected, 585,000 payrolls have been lost. However, 1.69 million more people are working today, according to the Labor Department’s household survey. It is likely that the economy would add about 100,000 a month during the rest of the year.

In the running-mates’ debate between the vice president and Senator Edwards, Mr. Cheney claimed it was the first time he had met the North Carolina senator. This time it was Mr. Kerry who got his facts wrong about meetings. Last night, the Democrat nominee claimed, “This is a president who hasn’t met with the Black Congressional Caucus. In fact, Mr. Bush did meet with the caucus on January 31, 2001.

The president, too, had moments of playing with facts and figures. “We are meeting our obligations to our veterans. The veterans know that we are expanding veterans’ health care throughout the country,” he said last night. But the White House has rebuffed the Department of Veterans Affairs’ requests for more money than it got in Mr. Bush’s fiscal 2005 budget. Veterans Secretary Anthony Principi told lawmakers at the beginning of the year: “I asked for $1.2 billion more than I received.”

Earlier in the week, Mr. Bush attacked Mr. Kerry for talking about terrorism in terms of it being a “nuisance.” But he, too, has misspoken when talking about terrorism. Last night, Mr. Kerry upbraided the president for once saying that he wasn’t worried about Osama bin Laden. Mr. Bush responded: “I don’t think I ever said I’m not worried about Osama bin Laden. I think that’s one of those exaggerations.”

But in a press conference on February 13,2002,the president remarked: “Well, as I say, we haven’t heard much from him. And I wouldn’t necessarily say he’s at the center of any command structure. And, again, I don’t know where he is. I – I’ll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him. I know he is on the run. I was concerned about him, when he had taken over a country. I was concerned about the fact that he was basically running Afghanistan and calling the shots for the Taliban.”