Days after George W. Bush and John F. Kerry accused each other of the same thing -- softness on terrorism -- Brooks Jackson and Kathleen Hall Jamieson cast opposing shadows across the rhetorical chasm that often separates voters from the truth.

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Jackson and Jamieson are the twin leaders of FactCheck.org, a Web-based group that calls candidates out when their words don't match reality.

But Jackson, who centers on details, and Jamieson, who draws larger inferences, had trouble judging a pair of disputed campaign ads that drew on fragments of sentences from long interviews in which each presidential candidate was asked about the war on terror.

Kerry told the New York Times Magazine he thought terrorism could be returned to the level at which it was not an imminent threat to the lives of Americans but, like crimes ranging from prostitution to gambling, it was unlikely to vanish forever.

"We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance," Kerry said.

"Terrorism a nuisance?" asked the Bush ad. "How can Kerry protect us when he doesn't understand the threat?" The president, in speeches all last week, mentioned Kerry's use of the n-word. In a speech in New Mexico, Bush took the argument a step further, saying Kerry called terrorists a "nuisance ... and compared it to prostitution and illegal gambling."

Democrats replied quickly with an ad attacking Bush, who said, in an interview Aug. 1, that he did not think the war on terror could be "won" but, while stressing that the U.S. should continue to hunt down terrorists, that terrorism could be made a non-viable means of warfare.

The Kerry ad features a loop of Bush saying "I don't think you can win it" -- although now, with the Bush campaign jumping all over Kerry for saying the same thing, the president says total victory is the goal.

"We looked at the ad Bush did," Jackson said. "For the moment, we're passing that one."

And Kerry's spot -- the one that pulls Bush's remark about "not sure we can win it" from a lengthy interview?

"Bush did say that. That's what he said," Jackson decided.

Where Jackson sees no untruth worthy of a penalty flag, Jamieson sees disparate truths pretzeled into larger fictions.

"Right now, you've got some serious distortions that are a result of taking things out of context," said Jamieson, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

What each candidate was saying, observes Jamieson, is that terrorism is a tactic "and you can't eliminate a tactic," but that a way must be found to reduce its use to the point that it does not seriously threaten the United States.

The irony of two candidates attacking each other for saying essentially the same thing marks a new turn in the rhetorical gymnastics of presidential politics, say some experts.

"It's going to take some time to sort it out, but this campaign has the feel of more distortions and lies than in the past," said Andrew Cline, a professor of communications at Southwest Missouri State University.

Sixteen years after Jamieson watched in astonishment as the first George Bush ran, in part, by tying Democratic rival Michael Dukakis to an escaped rapist named Willie Horton, an array of watchdog groups has encircled campaigns, fact-checking virtually every utterance. FactCheck.org went so far as to correct Vice President Dick Cheney for getting the group's name wrong during his debate with Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards. Cheney called it FactCheck.com.

"There's probably more diligent fact checking than ever, but voters need to follow up on that or it's meaningless. If there are misrepresented facts, or designer statistics, both sides accuse the other of that and so it's a draw," said Alfred Snider, an expert on campaign rhetoric at the University of Vermont.

That "draw" is sometimes hard to call, though, because the agencies that do fact-checking usually avoid tallying the number of misrepresentations or flat-out whoppers.

"Not only do we not try," said Jackson, "I don't see any way we could objectively do that. For instance, if a candidate told one big lie and another told two little lies, what's the equivalency there?"

Another unexpected stumbling block in the truth measuring business, observed Lee Sigelman, a political scientist at George Washington University and the co-author of a forthcoming book on negativity in presidential campaigns, is pure stubbornness.

"It seems that corrections don't seem to matter much," Sigelman said. "In fact, corrections sometimes seem to result in a hardening of opinions." He cited Cheney's assertion that the Iraq Survey Group report, commonly known as the Duelfer Report, justified the Bush administration's rationale for attacking Iraq.

The report's overall thrust was that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and that its programs to develop them had been in decline since the first Persian Gulf War in 1991. President Bush cited Iraq's presumed WMDs as the reason for a preemptive strike by the United States.

In the debate, Cheney embraced the report, saying it proved Saddam Hussein's hopes of manipulating world opinion to end sanctions and restart weapons research that could be provided to terrorist groups like al-Qaida, thereby justifying the Iraq War.

"Certainly that wasn't the primary thrust of that report," Sigelman said.

After Cheney made that assertion, however, Bush picked it up and it has since played a recurring role in his stump speeches.

The trick, observes Darrell West, a political scientist from Brown University, is to place old facts in a fresh context.

"Context is subjective," West said, "which is what allows politicians to play this game. If it were misleading in a clear-cut way, they'd suffer a bigger backlash."

Thus Kerry has repeatedly discussed the U.S. financial commitment in Iraq as $200 billion, although the amount spent so far is more like $120 billion. Kerry acknowledged the lower figure at the last presidential debate, after being scored by the Bush campaign for exaggerating, even though the amount is clearly mounting.

"They're contested figures," said Seligman, the GWU professor. "We have a kind of a simplistic idea that there is 'A Truth' out there."

The 2004 presidential campaign seems to have tested that hypothesis and shown that even true facts can be transformed into grand illusions.