In his October 11 column in The New York Times, titled "How Bush Won Round 2," William Safire claimed that President George W. Bush won the second presidential debate partly because Senator John Kerry “blundered with a weird attack on an $84 item in the Bushes' federal income tax return, supposedly from a timber business.” Safire pointed to a minor error -- that the $84 came from a company that at the time dealt in oil and gas, not timber -- and ignored the substance of Kerry's accurate charge.

During the October 8 presidential debate, Kerry suggested that under the standard Bush used to denounce Kerry's tax plan for allegedly hurting “900,000 small businesses,” Bush himself would qualify as a small business because, in Kerry's words, “he got $84 from a timber company that he owns.” Safire attempted to discredit Kerry's charge by suggesting that “Kerry relied on an Annenberg Web site that later admitted it had been confused.” However, as Media Matters for America has noted, the Annenberg Political Fact Check article to which Safire referred came to the opposite conclusion; while clarifying that “the $84 in Schedule C income was from Bush's Lone Star Trust, which is actually described on the 2001 income-tax returns as an 'oil and gas production' business,” the article made clear that the substance of Kerry's charge was on point: “Kerry was correct in saying that Bush's definition of 'small business' is so broad that Bush himself would have qualified as a 'small business' in 2001 by virtue of the $84 in business income.”

Safire's assertion that Bush won the debate is further undermined by two major polls that came out after the debate: An ABC News poll showed Kerry winning with 44 percent to Bush's 41 percent, and a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll -- which sampled 6 percent more Republicans than it did Democrats -- showed Kerry winning with 47 percent to Bush's 45 percent. Perhaps most significantly, in the Gallup poll, 53 percent of Independents thought Kerry won, as opposed to 37 percent for Bush.