Carthage, Tenn.
THE POPULATION of Al Gore’s hometown seems to fluctuate, depending on who you ask. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution says it’s 2,400, the local congressman told me it’s “about 4,000,” and the one native I asked said only, “Not too many.” And sure enough, not too many showed up at Carthage Elementary School for a tribute to Al Gore last Wednesday, but this was by design. The event kicked off the vice president’s new “Going the Distance Tour” (not to be confused with last month’s “Progress and Prosperity Tour,” which has passed indelibly into the pages of history).
The day before, at a rally in Nashville, Gore had introduced Joseph Lieberman as his running mate; the rally had generated yards of favorable coverage, not least because Lieberman had opened his remarks with a prayer. And now Gore was bringing him to Carthage for a “Hometown Reunion.” “This event,” said Gore’s campaign in a press release, “will let people see the real Al Gore through the eyes of people who know him well.”
Carthage is about 50 miles east of Nashville, tucked in a hollow along the Caney Fork River. Though Gore once represented it in Congress, his relationship with the town is famously tenuous
His mother Pauline lives there, he owns a farm there, and he spent a portion of many summers there as a boy, performing feats of grueling manual labor — plowing hillsides, slopping hogs, pulling stumps — as a “character building” exercise inflicted on him by a sadistic father. No one could blame Al Gore for refusing to go back there, ever, but the exigencies of presidential campaigns call for continuous sacrifice, and so here he was, in a school gym steaming under the blaze of television lights, surrounded by about 150 carefully selected “family, neighbors, and constituents,” as the press release put it, some of whom he seemed to recognize.
Later in the day, at a campaign rally in Connecticut, Gore said: “I actually grew up in two places, Washington, D.C., and Carthage, Tennessee. My political life began in Carthage.” But seated on a stool next to Lieberman in the center of the gym, Gore spoke more sweepingly: “Everything important in my life started right here in Carthage.” Taken together the two statements make an interesting syllogism, with a revealing conclusion: Everything important in Al Gore’s life began with his political career. His aides had billed the Hometown Reunion as a kind of biographical event, but if reporters came to Carthage Elementary expecting to hear heartwarming tales of Al’s youth from old folks whose children he had babysat, or neighbors whose lawns he had mowed, or pals who had learned to whittle or play the banjo on the banks of the old swimming hole in emulation of their friend Al, they were sorely let down.
“I want you to tell me about this man,” Lieberman told the audience, after Gore had introduced him. “I want you to stand up and talk to me about who he is.”
And so they did. Gore would point and they would rise. Roving assistants handed them wireless microphones. A pediatrician from Murfreesboro went first. He said that 20 years ago he had traveled to Congressman Gore’s town hall meetings to lobby for a federal law requiring child-restraint seats in cars. Gore picked up the story from there. “He force-fed me with charts and facts,” the candidate recalled. “So I sponsored the bill, and I, along with another congressman, took the lead.”
A woman rose with a story about her son, who was fed a particular kind of infant formula and now suffers from a rare form of cancer. “So now we have federal standards for infant formula,” Gore told the audience when she was done. “I want you to know that your experience led this young congressman” — he pressed his finger into his chest — “to write that law.”
He pointed again and a man who had received a kidney transplant four months ago began to speak of a national computerized network of organ donors. Chin high, Gore nodded and said, “I held hearings on the need and wrote this law” — here he moved his hand back and forth, as though writing on a chalkboard — “along with some others.”
“People in the kidney community want to thank you for that,” said the man. Gore nodded again.
Gore pointed and another man rose. He told of how his grandmother’s Social Security check had been incorrectly cut off in 1989. “My mom typed up a letter to you,” the man said. “I got on my motor scooter and went to your town meeting and handed the letter to you.” And mirabile dictu (my words, not his) the man received a letter back from Senator Gore, and the following week his grandmother got her check, along with back payments she had missed.
Here in the gym, the man held up the letter he had received from Gore in 1989. Gore briskly moved through the audience to retrieve it. He turned and walked it back to Lieberman, and together they gazed at it admiringly, as though it were a recently discovered addition to the Jefferson-Adams correspondence. “In 1989, you went the distance for our family, Mr. Vice President.” Gore nodded and handed the letter back to the man.
And so it went. A woman whose farm loans were foreclosed (Congressman Gore helped her get more), another whose neighborhood was chosen to be the site of a hazardous waste dump (Gore made sure it was put in someone else’s neighborhood), a man who got a small-business loan, another who got an increase in his student financial aid — one unspectacular instance after another of what Capitol Hill staffers call “constituent service.” Al Gore: This is your life.
This is how, anyway, Al Gore himself sees his life: a uniquely effective career, trailing a parade of businesses reborn, farms rescued, lives saved, all thanks to his own strange power. Nothing less should be expected, of course, from the man who “took the initiative in creating” the Internet, “discovered” Love Canal, served as the model for Ryan O’Neal in Love Story and — well, the vice president closed the meeting with a reminiscence.
Being in Carthage reminded him, he said, of Hillary Clinton’s “wonderful” book, It Takes A Village. He recalled how he had brought Bill and Hillary Clinton to Carthage in 1992, after being selected as the vice presidential nominee. “And I remember how I first used that African phrase here, ‘It takes a village.'” So now you know where Hillary got her title.
“And I remember, by the way, Joe, that I opened that meeting in Carthage with a prayer, too.” He bowed slightly toward Lieberman. “So there’s nothing new about that, either.”
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
