The Gore Disconnect

The world, as Al Gore sees it, is a fairly strange place: a logic-free zone, where irreconcilables are described as identical, the past is subject to revision, and reality barely exists.

Admittedly, this place — which San Francisco newspaper columnist Debra Saunders, in The World According to Gore, calls “Goredom” — is different from Clintonville, which is a place of evasions, illusions, half-truths, and subtleties. In Goredom, nothing is subtle; all has the finesse and indirection of a hammer blow. Pieties are ponderous, humor is leaden, machine guns are used to dispatch insects, and lies are more than bald-faced. It is ruled throughout by the famous “Gore Disconnect” — the gap between fact and image, between Gore’s own views on various issues, between what Gore claims and what others remember, and between the prescriptions Gore lays out for others and the things he does for himself. For years, it has been conventional wisdom that Gore is the “good” Clinton, a “moderate” clone, only honest and stable. On the basis of Saunders’s book — and prior ones by Bill Turque and Bob Zelnick — that needs revision. Gore’s flaws are no fewer than Clinton’s; they merely are different. And in some ways, they are worse.

Saunders begins The World According to Gore with Gore’s appearance at the 1996 Democratic convention, where he made his tear-jerking speech about his sister’s death from lung cancer, and invoked the vow he claimed to have made at her bedside, to fight the tobacco industry from that day on. His sister died in 1984. That year, he helped the tobacco industry remove the words “death” and “addiction” from a proposed warning label. In 1988, he ran for president bragging about his experiences growing and selling tobacco. He was still taking money from tobacco six years after his sister had died.

Saunders ends with the story in the New York Times on March 12, 2000, when Gore announced his intention to run as a campaign-finance reformer, despite his flouting of existing laws. Between these, Saunders relates numerous stories that expose the Gore Disconnect and explode the “sensible centrist” of myth. There are the well-known Walter Mitty-like fictions about his life, for instance: that as a newspaperman he sent corrupt politicians to prison, that he was the model for the novel Love Story, that he made pollution at Love Canal a political issue, that he faced fire while in Vietnam, that he invented the Internet, and more besides.

Even on environmental issues, his signature concern, Gore’s words and deeds are at odds. On paper, at least, he appears a fanatic: scourging his fellows for rapacious consumption, urging a simple — even primitive — life. “Gore seems to be afflicted with what Freud might have called deprivation envy,” observes Saunders, when he writes “yearningly . . . of the simpler days before supermarkets and plumbing,” leaving “the strong implication that the era when man was ignorant, often half-starving, . . . unprotected from the elements and at the mercy of blind fortune was in reality a golden age.” Jerry Brown used to talk like this when he was governor of California, but at least he had the grace to refuse to live in the governor’s mansion and to have himself and other state officers driven about in small cars. Gore has made no discernible efforts to cut back on his motorcades, to move his family from the vice president’s mansion into simpler lodgings, or to use buses instead of Air Force Two. And he did not protest when a river was flooded in drought-stricken New Hampshire to provide him with a fetching photo-op.

For all his hysterics, Gore’s environmental record in Congress was wan. The League of Conservation Voters gave him a 64 percent rating (as opposed to 84 percent for Bill Bradley), for Gore had a way of making exceptions for those who could help his campaigns. In his book Earth in the Balance, he inveighed against the sugar industry for destroying the Everglades. But in Congress and as vice president, he received large contributions from the industry, while helping reward it with “federal corporate welfare . . . in the form of price supports, import quotas, and federally guaranteed loans.” Running for president in the primaries in the southern states in 1988, he suddenly reversed his efforts to get the EPA to clamp down on pollutants drained into Tennessee’s Pigeon River by mills in North Carolina — for needed interests in North Carolina to help his campaign.

Gore also claims to be a centrist and moderate, but somehow always ends up favoring a bloated, diffuse, and ever-expanding state that is constantly adding new federal mandates on top of old ones that don’t work. He has an inflated “livability” program, geared to help the comfortable cope with life’s minor crises, through major infusions of federal power. He wants the state to build sidewalks in the suburbs, to give commuters a national traffic-jam number, and to require airlines to “double the compensation for passengers bumped from oversold flights.”

With regard to some real issues, Gore seems to be the kind of old-fashioned liberal who believes that to name a problem, and pass a bill against it, is to consider that problem solved. Thus he believes that passage of a federal hate crimes law would have prevented the grisly murders of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming and James Byrd in Texas. If hate crimes acts work, why didn’t existing ones prevent these atrocities? And what makes Gore think that a scolding about the evils of prejudice will impress people already willing to torture another human soul to death?

Gore has a weakness for utopian projects that fail to live up to their titles or promise, constantly urging new education initiatives whether or not they might work. But whether or not things work is unimportant in Goredom. As Saunders says, “There already are federal programs for reading, including federal programs to teach would-be teachers how to teach reading, and programs to teach college students how to teach reading. And if those programs don’t work, then Gore’s government will come up with other programs — like a program to push corporations to teach their workers how to volunteer.” In the aftermath of the Columbine massacre, Gore was on the spot with a new list of programs to fix the unfixable — a sort of Evil Containment Agenda to use psychobabble against the dark forces and to fill up the void in our souls.

There have been disconnects between Gore’s words and his actions; between what his programs promise, and what they deliver; and, above all, between Gore in the past and Gore in the present. The one constant in Gore’s political life has been his extreme willingness to see to the needs of the moment, no matter how this contradicts what is on the record, or what he has said or has done in the past. Thus, as needs change — from pleasing the rural voters of a border state in the 1970s and 1980s as a congressman and a senator, to pleasing the New Democrats in 1988 as a would-be centrist national candidate, to pleasing, today, the base of a party that takes its cues from the rights groups and Hillary Clinton — Gore has not just shifted on some matters, but leapt from one extreme to another.

Tobacco is the main and most glaring example of the Gore Disconnect in full flower. But Gore has done the same thing on three other issues, on which the views and interests of Tennessee voters diverge from the national base. He began his career as an ardent pro-lifer, rated by activists on both sides of the issues as having voted either to restrict or to outlaw abortion between 80 and 84 percent of the time. In 1977, he backed a bill to deny federal funding for abortion procedures, even in cases of rape and incest. In 1980, he voted to prohibit coverage for abortion in health insurance plans for federal workers. “I don’t believe a woman’s freedom to live her own life, in all cases, outweighs the fetus’s right to life,” he said to the Nashville Banner. In 1984, he backed the Siljander amendment, which defined “unborn children from the moment of conception” as legal persons, with all of the attendant civil rights. In 1988, as a moderate, he opposed abortion funding in all cases except when a woman’s life was in danger. It was when his political life was in danger — as Clinton’s running mate, on a sturdy abortion-rights platform — that his position changed. He is now the administration’s ambassador to all NARAL dinners, an ardent defender of late-term abortions, thundering against even minor restrictions on a woman’s sacred right to “choose.”

On guns, another hot button issue, Gore has accomplished another neat pivot, beginning his political life (in a state filled with hunters) as an ardent backer of the NRA. In 1985, he opposed the imposition of a fourteenday waiting period to purchase guns. He voted to remove a ban on interstate gun sales and to exempt gun collectors from the Gun Control Act of 1988. Now, of course, he is neatly tucked into the liberals’ corner, a conspicuous hero to the Million Mom March, ready to sound the alarm at all shootings, and call at these times for still new restrictions, on top of all the older restrictions, which the administration doesn’t bother to enforce.

As with guns and abortion, so too with race. Gore was once the model of a Democratic moderate who rejected the idea of identity politics. Opposed to quotas, he urged Clinton to drop his nomination of Lani Guinier. Running as a centrist in the primaries in 1988, he criticized Michael Dukakis for pandering to Jesse Jackson. Now, far from daring to criticize Jackson, Gore has taken to sounding just like him, in both substance and style: speaking in overdone revivalist rhythms and accusing his critics of fostering “hate.”

Politicians, of course, change their views sometimes, and seldom in ways that diminish their prospects. But few do it so often, so blatantly, so operatically, and to such great extremes. Gore doesn’t merely change sides. He bounds from extreme to extreme — and then denounces, as villains and demons, those with the views he once held. People he once agreed with are now callous and cold-blooded killers. Most politicians who “evolve” do so with more nuance, can explain themselves better, and seem less eager to flail their old allies. But the Gore Disconnect is a complete dislocation, as odd as Ivana Trump’s face lift. Gore now seems to be a whole other person. And this person consistently lies.

Many politicians shade their remarks to the tastes of their audience. But they usually recognize that this is an age of taping and video, that people keep records, that what you said before can be thrown back in your face. Gore, however, seems above these considerations, or beneath them, or simply beyond them. He lies, lies, and lies over again, in the face and the teeth of the evidence. He often insists that things never happened, though the proof is on tape, or in writing, or embedded firmly in other people’s minds.

From 1992 until early this summer, for example, he vigorously denied that he had ever voted pro-life. Then he said he had changed his mind only about federal funding. Then he admitted he had changed his mind, period, on the basis of what women had told him about circumstances that might arise.

“That did not happen,” he said definitively, when told during the New Hampshire primary that some of his backers had mocked and splashed mud on Bob Kerrey, and that his spokesman had defended them. But of course it did. In a televised public debate with Bill Bradley, Gore said he would impose a litmus test of gay rights on his military appointments. Then he denied it. Then he said he was sorry for the way his comments had been heard. He did the same thing when a chief aide, Donna Brazile, defamed Colin Powell. The fault lay with the listeners, and their impaired understanding. He regretted what the general had “heard.”

Oddest of all, Gore’s reaction the day after his speech to the Democratic convention in 1996 when reporters confronted him with the script to the ode to tobacco he had delivered four years after his sister had died. He had actually felt everything he described in his speech, he explained, but he had been so stunned by the death of his sister that he had been unable to act on his feelings for nearly six years. “I felt the numbness that prevented me from integrating into all aspects of my life the implications of what that tragedy really meant.” Thus, it was second nature for Gore to proclaim four years later that he would run on the issue of campaign finance reform, though he had been the poster boy for bad behavior in that regard. “All he had to do was keep repeating that he had strong convictions on this issue,” writes Saunders. “He would keep repeating this mantra and soon his guilty past would fall away.”

But would it? Gore has endured a great deal of ridicule, as each nutty claim is exposed. So why does he do it? Why does he lie, over and over, when the evidence is so close to hand? Does he think if he lies often and loudly enough, he can alter reality? That people will start to distrust their own senses? That we will all start to go mad, like the young wife in Gaslight? Young Al, said his mother, was a compliant child, eager to be what was wanted. Perhaps he thinks people would think he was better if he had been a war hero, a romantic novel hero, a discover of Love Canal, a Bob Woodward-like journalist. Perhaps he thinks NARAL would like him better if he had never voted against it. Perhaps he thinks voters would like him better if he never had out-of-line aides. And so he attempts to remake the past.

Is this something we want in a president? Let us hope that George W. Bush shows up at the presidential debates with detailed lists of Gore’s varying views, and that Bush’s staff is preparing new versions of the whirligig ads about various flip-flops Gore used against Dick Gephardt in the 1988 campaign. Gore was shocked — shocked! — that Gephardt had “evolved” on some issues. But that was before Gore started “evolving” himself. Since then, Saunders relates, he has redesigned himself wholly, while denying he ever changed anything. If he is merely being cynical, it is disturbing enough. If he isn’t, then it is much worse.

A frequent contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Noemie Emery is a writer in Alexandria, Virginia.