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HenchPAC NewsGore's frequent falsehoods impeach his own credibility
By Robert J. Caldwell
Caldwell is editor of the Insight section and can be reached via e-mail at George W. Bush' s kinder gentler campaign shrinks from any serious assault on Al Gore' s most glaring character weakness -- the vice president' s long history of abusing the truth.
October 1, 2000
accomplishments and stretching the truth, sometimes far enough to constitute sheer invention.
Bush' s reluctance is a shame on two counts. First, after eight years of Clinton, character certainly should be front and center as a presidential campaign issue. Second, Gore' s abundantly documented record of embellishing, dissembling and outright lying is a principal reason he shouldn' t be president. If Bush won' t make that case himself, how are voters to know that this issue matters?
That Gore' s liberty with the truth is a legitimate issue is beyond dispute, and not just because Republicans say so during a hotly contested presidential campaign.
James Fallows, once a White House speechwriter for Democrat Jimmy Carter, reached this blunt conclusion in his searching Atlantic Monthly review last July of Gore' s take-no-prisoners debate style:
"Gore is manifestly willing to lie for political convenience," Fallows wrote.
Reporters Walter V. Robinson and Michael Crowley, writing in the impeccably liberal Boston Globe last April, examined Gore' s record for veracity dating back to his first election to Congress in 1976. Their conclusions reflected the example-replete history they recounted:
"Starting as a junior congressman and continuing through this year' s primaries, Gore has regularly promoted himself, and skewered his opponents, with embroidered, misleading, and occasionally false statements to a degree that even some of his allies concede is rare for a politician of his stature."
Gore biographers Bob Zelnick, a former ABC televison news correspondent, and Bill Turque of Newsweek both note the vice president' s penchant for padding his resume and accomplishments and stretching the truth, sometimes far enough to constitute sheer invention. In a generally admiring biography, Turque nonetheless refers to Gore' s political "demagoguery." The Washington Post' s David Maraniss and Ellen Nakashima write in their new Gore biography that, "recounting his own history, Gore is an unreliable narrator."
Gore' s own staff, during his failed 1988 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination and in the current campaign, has cautioned him that his looseness with the facts risks damaging his credibility.
Clearly, then, Gore can' t blame his credibility problems on partisan adversaries. Over and over and over again throughout a political career dating back a quarter century, Al Gore has inflicted this damage on himself.
Gore' s Internet whopper -- "I took the lead in inventing the Internet" -- was so preposterous that it seems merely humorous. What isn' t at all funny, however, is why an accomplished political figure now in middle age and occupying the second highest office in the United States would continually make such outlandish and patently false statements.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the University of Pennsylvania' s Annenberg School of Communications and a shrewd gauge of political rhetoric, wonders, too. She told the Globe last April:
"You wonder if it' s a failure to listen or an impulse to deceive. The question is, is there a basic personality flaw there that will make it more difficult for him to be president? Is there a tendency to exaggerate? Is there a tendency to reconstruct the past? When you start counting on the fingers of both hands you start to say maybe there' s a pattern here."
Jamieson raises the appropriate questions: Impulse to deceive, personality flaw, tendency to exaggerate, reconstruct the past. No examination of Gore' s many misleading and false statements can conclude otherwise than that all of these motivate the vice president.
Thus, we have, for example, Gore' s various claims during the current campaign, which include these among many others:
That he co-sponsored the McCain-Feingold campaign finance legislation, that he wrote the Superfund law and then led it to congressional passage, that he "always, always" supported the Supreme Court' s abortion ruling in Roe V. Wade, that he discovered the Love Canal pollution scandal, that he authored the Earned Income Tax Credit, that he only attended one of the dozens of White House fund raising coffees in 1996 and that his appearance at the celebrated Buddhist temple in Los Angeles that year was not a fund-raising event.
Each and every one of these statements is false, and provably so.
After a ruinous run like this, one might imagine that an embarrassed and chastened Gore would grow more careful and truthful in his statements. Not so. The following instances of dissembling by the vice president occurred in just the last few weeks.
On Sept. 22, Gore said, "I' ve been part of the discussions on the strategic (petroleum) reserve since the days when it was first established." Actually, the fund was established by legislation signed by President Ford two years before Gore became a member of Congress.
On Aug. 28, Gore told Florida senior citizens that his mother-in-law had to pay $108 a month for the same anti-arthritis drug purchased for his dog Shiloh at a cost of $37.80 a month. In fact, Gore invented this story. The prices quoted were lifted from a study by congressional Democrats and didn' t reflect the prices paid by consumers or anyone in Gore' s family.
Far worse followed last week.
Gore, watching his post-convention lead in the polls disappear, resurrected the Democrats' 1996 lie that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich wanted Medicare to "wither on the vine." Gore then added that George W. Bush agreed with Gingrich. All demonstrably false. The audio tape of Gingrich' s 1995 remark, played repeatedly then and since, shows unmistakably that the Speaker' s "wither on the vine" remark referred not to Medicare but to the Health Care Financing Administration, a bureaucratic albatross that Medicare reformers in both parties wanted to eliminate.
Oh, and let' s note, too, that the reduction that year in Medicare' s rate of spending increase was a bipartisan compromise and was signed into law by President Clinton. But, then, why let the facts get in the way of some politically useful demagoguery?
Al Gore and George W. Bush are to meet Tuesday evening for the first of three presidential debates. At a Democratic primary debate earlier this year in Iowa, Gore ambushed his opponent Bill Bradley with what James Fallows found was a "premeditated lie," an accusation that the former New Jersey senator had opposed and voted against disaster aid for flood-stricken Iowa farmers.
That and more finally moved the patient Bradley to ask rhetorically of Gore, "Why should we believe that you will tell the truth as president if you don' t tell the truth as a candidate?"
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