Al Gore, Tom Vallely, and more.

Did you know, for example, that “Gore has made an effort not to brood on the sidelines” since the 2000 presidential election was resolved in his opponent’s favor? We didn’t, either. But it’s true, apparently: With a “distinct blend of uncomplaining poise and media-age irony,” Remnick reports, Al Gore nowadays declines to say much of anything about . . . that Florida business and whatnot. For that matter, even about America’s unpleasant political present, Gore seems able to maintain an impressive, nigh unto superhuman circumspection. Is he willing to call George W. Bush an idiot, for instance? He is not: “I’m not of the school that questions his intelligence,” Gore tells Remnick. “There are different kinds of intelligence, and it’s arrogant for a person with one kind of intelligence to question someone with another kind.”

Instead–animated more by “public-minded sentiment” than personal bitterness over thwarted ambition, you understand–Gore will say of Bush only that “I think he’s a bully” and “a coward” and a “very weak man.” And, as Remnick is quick to point out, “only rarely” when Gore says such things does the former vice president actually become “feverish” with “hysteria.” Like the time when, after one Democratic rally appearance not long ago, Gore’s “collar was saturated” and “his face was reddened,” although “it had not been particularly hot on stage.”

Offstage, in particular, Gore and his wife Tipper remain the personification of cool, rest assured. They recently treated Remnick to an evening out at Nashville’s Opryland. And “after the concert,” Remnick remembers, “the Gores were in a good mood” and offered to show him the city’s nighttime sights before dropping him back at his hotel.

So off they went:

How on earth did these people not make it to the White House?

In Gore’s Defense, However . . .

It’s hard to imagine even so charmless a man as Al Gore ever making quite so appalling a “joke” as John Kerry ad libbed to a crowd of 4,000 at a United Mine Workers Labor Day picnic in Racine, West Virginia, early last week. When it came time for Kerry to speak, event host Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers, called him up on stage and presented him with a Winchester shotgun made by UMW members in New York. For Senator Kerry’s facial expression upon receiving this gift, see the photograph on our magazine’s cover this week. And for the words which then came out of his mouth . . . well, read ’em and weep:

“It’s a beautiful piece. It’s a beautiful gift, Cecil. But I can’t take it to the debate with me.”

Exercising much the same news and editorial judgment it no doubt would have embraced had President Bush made a “facetious” remark about assassinating his opponent, the New York Times did not report this incident.

And In Other West Virginia News

Elsewhere in the Mountain State–and also on Labor Day–longtime Republican mayor Richie Robb of South Charleston last week pointedly underscored just how ill-advised it would be for Karl Rove & Co. to take anything for granted between now and November 2. Mayor Robb’s name will appear on West Virginia’s Election Day ballot as one of the five Bush presidential electors designated by Republican state party chair Kris Warner in June. It turns out that Warner may live to regret that decision. Because it turns out–or so Robb says–that he may refuse to vote for Bush when the Electoral College meets in December, even if the president has again won a popular vote plurality in West Virginia.

“It’s not likely that I would vote for Kerry,” Robb told reporters after attending a rally organized by Jesse Jackson in Charleston. “But I’m looking at what my options are when it comes time to cast my vote.” And since nothing in the West Virginia statute books obliges its Electoral College delegates to cast their ballots in accordance with officially recorded statewide sentiment, one of Robb’s most obvious available options is a simple abstention.

To win back Mayor Robb’s allegiance, the Bush White House need only abandon and repudiate its foreign and domestic policies. “I think President Bush needs to get the message from people across this country, including Republicans, that his strategy in national security and his economic policies need to be revisited,” Robb says.

Should they fail to satisfy him, however, Robb could conceivably end up deciding the election all by himself–and handing a victory to John Kerry. President Bush won but 271 electoral votes last time around, remember: one more than the barest minimum necessary for a majority. And this time around, even a one-vote margin may prove more difficult to piece together.

This, on account of the fact that a shadowy group of out-of-state Democrats has meantime succeeded in winning November ballot status for a Colorado initiative altering that state’s Electoral College allocation formula. The “Make Your Vote for President Count” initiative, described in these pages during its signature-drive back in June, would, if successful, require that Colorado’s electoral votes be awarded–beginning this year–on a proportional basis, according to the popular-vote results.

To make a long story short, John Kerry would thereby be all but guaranteed at least four of Colorado’s nine electoral votes, even if President Bush “carried” the state. Four years ago, having carried the state in the traditional sense of that phrase, Bush won all of its then-eight electoral votes.

And he needed each one.

Oh, You Mean That Tom Vallely

“Finally, Kerry had had enough,” Newsweek‘s Richard Wolffe and Susannah Meadows last week reported online, in their suitably dramatic reconstruction of the Democratic nominee’s newfound resolve against the dastardly Bush/Rove smear machine. “Furious that the mostly baseless attacks on his valor were driving his numbers down . . . Kerry’s solution was to reach for an old ally. ‘Get Vallely,’ he screamed.”

And who is “Vallely”? That, the Newsweek team explains, would be one Thomas Vallely, “the leader of the pack of vets that Kerry calls his dog-hunters, a group that has beaten back the attacks on his Vietnam record since his first Senate race 20 years ago.”

And that–THE SCRAPBOOK feels it ought further to explain, because the Newsweek folks have not–would also be the same Tom Vallely who, a couple years earlier, served as Kerry’s campaign field director in an unsuccessful House bid. In which capacity, at 2 A.M. on the eve of the Democratic primary, and in the company of Kerry’s brother Cameron, Tom Vallely was arrested on a breaking-and-entering charge in the basement of a building housing the headquarters offices of Kerry and one of his opponents.

Senator Kerry today maintains that the arrest was a setup. In a story about the incident for the Boston Globe on June 18, correspondent Brian C. Mooney concluded that “some of Kerry’s claims in the Lowell break-in are wildly at odds with the facts.”