Gore’s Nose Grows

In the 12 years since he brashly jumped into America’s presidential politics, Al Gore has shown many different sides of himself: loyal understudy, passionate environmentalist, fierce partisan, image-conscious mid-life male. He’s also shown he can be a world-class fibber — though not as skilled a one as his current boss.

During the 1988 presidential campaign, Gore boasted that while he was working for a Nashville newspaper in the 1970s, his reporting “got a bunch of people indicated and sent to jail.” He’s also said that during his five months of military service in Vietnam he was “shot at” and “fired upon.” And just last December, he told the Washington Post that as a 21-year-old he’d provided themes for Hubert Humphrey’s speech at the 1968 Democratic convention. All of these claims, it turns out, are figments of Gore’s imagination and deserve to be memorialized alongside his better-known whoppers about “creating” the Internet and serving as the model for Oliver Barrett in Erich Segal’s Love Story.

But, to be fair, these were fibs that Gore seems to have uttered in moments of spontaneity. Leaving aside whether or not he ever believed them to be true, once he was called on them he didn’t repeat them.

But Gore does repeat his more consequential untruths; he goes to great lengths to rewrite history when confronted with uncomfortable facts. Indeed, Gore makes statements he knows to be false, and then adopts a King Canute attitude: If I repeat these lies over and over and over, they will become true.

Gore’s habitual behavior raises a fundamental question, which Bill Bradley (finally) put to the vice president in their January 26 debate: “Why should we believe that you will tell the truth as president if you don’t tell the truth as a candidate?” (His integrity challenged, the artful dodger instinctively hid behind campaign tactics: “That’s not a negative attack?”)

There was a seemingly minor incident last week that provides a nice snapshot of how Gore’s mind works. On January 30, Democratic senator Bob Kerrey, a Bradley supporter, appeared at a New Hampshire campaign event for Gore to provide the media horde with some counterspin. All innocent enough, and standard practice these days. But some Gore goons didn’t appreciate Kerrey’s appearing on their turf, and so they ran over and began splashing mud on him and ridiculing him as a “cripple” (Kerrey lost part of a leg in Vietnam). A number of reporters witnessed the incident and promptly wrote it up, for the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Herald, and the New York Post.

The simple, and natural, response for any politician in this situation would be to publicly apologize to Kerrey and repudiate the actions of his supporters. But not Gore. Instead, he trotted out his spokesman, Chris Lehane, who said even protesters have a right to free expression(!). Then Gore himself called in to an MSNBC talk show to say reports of the incident were “not true. It did not happen.” Yes, it did happen. Why not just apologize and put the matter to rest?

Because by Gore’s twisted logic, that would concede something to Bill Bradley, and that can’t be done. This mindset also seems to be what’s driving Gore to misrepresent recklessly Bradley’s ambitious health care proposal. Regardless of one’s opinion of the proposal, it is contemptible race-baiting for Gore to tar it as insensitive to the needs of blacks and Hispanics. What’s more, Gore huffs that Bradley’s proposal “wipes out” and “dismantles” Medicaid, while only occasionally mentioning that Bradley wants to provide the poor with refundable tax credits to pay for their health care.

Gore’s most egregious distortions have come in his characterizations of his own voting record on abortion. He consistently voted against federal funding of abortions while a House member from 1977 to 1985. As late as 1987, while he was in the Senate, he wrote, “It is my deep personal conviction that abortion is wrong,” and characterized abortion as “arguably the taking of a human life.” Of course, he never used such language after he began running for president later that year. Indeed, after he’d been selected as Bill Clinton’s running mate, he said, “I’ve had the same position from the very first days in Congress.”

Gore has repeated this fiction over and over during the past seven years. Only in the past few weeks, as reporters, and Bill Bradley, began to question him did he modify his lies. Thus, in the January 26 debate, after the obligatory declaration that he had “always supported a woman’s right to choose,” he conceded that early in his career he’d “wrestled” with the funding question. Note, however, that he never actually admitted he’d changed his position.

Consider, too, what Gore has said about campaign finance reform. He consistently holds himself out as a Common Cause type who, in his words, has “fought for [campaign reform] for 20 years.” The evidence? While a senator, he claims, he cosponsored the McCain/Feingold bill. Just one problem: McCain/Feingold didn’t exist when Gore was in the Senate (Russ Feingold hadn’t been elected yet). There’s also the small matter that Gore didn’t find space in his speeches at the 1992 and 1996 Democratic conventions, or his campaign-kickoff speech last June, to so much as mention campaign finance reform.

And then there are all the statements Gore makes that rest in that gray area between true and false. Gore touts his father’s civil rights record when speaking before black audiences, but ignores that Senator Gore voted against the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. He says he’s “always” supported the death penalty, even though he voted against it 10 times as a senator. And let’s not even bother rehashing his deceit in answering questions on how much he knew about the Buddhist temple fund-raiser in 1996 and how much marijuana he smoked in his twenties.

The conventional view of Gore’s lies is that they’re a function of his having spent the past seven years alongside the master of mendacity. But that’s not quite fair to Saturday Night Bill. Indeed, as the Boston Globe revealed recently, Gore lore was so prevalent in his first presidential campaign that it elicited warnings from his aides. In September 1987, the campaign’s press secretary, Mike Kopp, addressed a memo to Gore warning him that his image “may continue to suffer if you continue to go out on a limb with remarks that may be impossible to back up.” Gore didn’t seem to get the message, so his communications director, Arlie Schardt, delivered the same warning six months later: “Your main pitfall is exaggeration.”

There is, in fact, a fundamental difference between the prevarications of Clinton and Gore. Clinton has lied his way through life to impress people, often women, and to boost his own fragile self-esteem (oh yes, and to protect himself). Gore, by contrast, doesn’t need people to tell him what a noble, wonderful guy he is — he already knows that. No, his lies have a single purpose: political power. One can argue over which kind of lie is worse, but one thing is clear: As long as Al Gore has an election to win — and even beyond — the duplicity will continue unabated.

Matthew Rees, for the Editors