Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon News

Chaos in Kosovo
Kosovar gangs pick up where the Serbs left off.
By Laura Rozen
[08/03/99]

East is not always east
The effort to urge Japan to pay reparations to China for World War II atrocities has divided the nation's Asian-American communities.
By William Wong
[08/03/99]

Atlanta's burning
The city too busy to hate has found plenty of time for violence lately, and nobody knows why.
By Mike Alvear
[08/03/99]

From red-line to renaissance
Things are looking up in Harlem, but some poor black families are being driven out by the neighborhood renewal.
By Keith Moore
[08/02/99]

Mercy for a terrorist?
Being a radical means never having to say you're sorry for violent crimes against innocent people yesteryear.
By David Horowitz
[08/02/99]

Complete archives for News

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

"I find the coverage stiff and boring," he told Salon News. Not that the veep is complaining. "I feel fine about it," he insists, though his calm seems more calculating political strategy than thick skin. "I would honestly not swap my position in this race for anyone else's; I'm not peaking too early," he adds, only half-kidding. "You know, in stock car races, it's usually the second car in the gun lap that wins."

Gore is referring to his current weak position in the polls compared with his likely opponent in the 2000 election, high-flying Texas Gov. George W. Bush. Gore hopes Bush has only one direction to go in the polls and that direction is down.

Thus, the vice president can insist that he's quite content, for now, being the Rodney Dangerfield of American politics.

Not surprisingly, Gore's allies blame the substance-averse, scandal-happy national media. They say that the conventional wisdom -- that his campaign is lackluster and hobbled by infighting, that he has been stumbling everywhere he goes, and that as a public speaker Gore is only slightly more animated than a corpse -- is just plain wrong.

Gore's allies might just have a point. It's hard to look at the last two years of Gore's press clips and not see a fairly intentional effort on the part of journalists to turn the veep into a stiff, self-important caricature.

Take his most infamous utterance to date: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet," from an interview he gave to CNN a few months back.

While this was obviously an overstatement, Gore actually does deserve a substantial amount of credit for the technology through which you're reading this story. "Gore took a critical part [in launching the Internet]," says Dave Farber, a professor of telecommunication systems at the University of Pennsylvania. "He did misspeak, and everybody jumped on him, but he made a very significant contribution."

Vinton Cerf, the Stanford researcher who sketched out a design for the Internet in 1973, seconds that emotion: "It is entirely fitting that the vice president take some credit for helping to create an environment in which Internet could thrive."

Then there was the flap that ensued when Gore, during an off-the-record chat, boasted that the character of Oliver Barrett in Erich Segal's "Love Story" was based on him. Pounce went the media. "Does he think, going into 2000, that this will give him a romantic glow, or a romantic afterglow?" snarked the New York Times' Maureen Dowd.

But Time Magazine's Karen Tumulty, with whom Gore had the actual conversation, told a columnist that Dowd and others got the story wrong, that "Gore was telling us something that was basically true."

Segal himself, in fact, has confirmed that Barrett is an amalgam of both Gore and his Harvard roommate, actor Tommy Lee Jones.

Then there was the "farm boy" fracas in March, when reporters ripped Gore for an Iowa speech in which he exaggerated his own farming credentials. "In Iowa, Gore claimed that he was a farm boy who plowed steep hillsides with mules," wrote the Cincinnati Enquirer in an editorial titled "King of Gaffes: Al Gore out-Quayles Dan."

But as even conservative Gore biographer Bob Zelnick acknowledged in his fairly critical book, "Gore: A Political Life," the veep did, indeed, spend "long weekends, summers, holidays, and his entire seventh year" in Carthage, Tenn., working on the family farm. Young Gore woke before dawn, fed the livestock, cleaned out the hog parlors and cleared a field one summer "with only a small hand-axe as his tool."

The media's newest anti-Gore flap, "Floodgate," simply continues the anti-Gore trend.

On July 22, not far from Cornish, N.H., Gore, New Hampshire Gov. Jeanne Shaheen and a cadre of Democrats and reporters piled into canoes and started floating down the Connecticut River.

It was a fairly typical campaign photo op; Gore sat erect in his canoe, the perfect perpendicular man, as always. After finishing his 45-minute ride, Gore participated in a carefully staged press conference announcing an immense grant for the Connecticut River Joint Commission and others to implement various components of the American Heritage River Action Plan.

But then a Washington Times reporter in attendance stumbled onto a man who complained to him that environmentalists had been after the river commission to raise the water level of the river for some time to benefit the fish. The man was discouraged that it wasn't until the vice president came to the river for a photo op that the commission finally acted, releasing millions of gallons into the river simply to ensure that Gore's canoe didn't scrape the rocks.

It sounded like another mini-scandal, but there was just one key problem: No one affiliated with the Gore campaign had anything to do with the decision to raise the river's water level. The head of the river commission had come up with the idea in order to help along a photo op that was going to bring national attention to her cause. And, it should be emphasized, raising the river level was actually good for the environment.

But the curious fact that the river was flooded for the sake of a photo op -- on behalf of a politician already stereotyped as being artificial, in a campaign already labeled as faltering -- was too good to pass up.

The following day, a headline blared from the front page of the Washington Times: "New Hampshire able to float Gore's boat."

"Nearly 4 billion gallons of water were unleashed from a massive dam Thursday to raise the level of the Connecticut River in Cornish, N.H., so that Vice President Al Gore's canoe would not get stuck during an environmental photo opportunity," wrote the Times' correspondent.

"Gore in Environmental Quandary," ventured the Associated Press.

That afternoon, CNN's "Inside Politics" reported that "Vice President Al Gore is facing political heat over the fact that millions of gallons of water had to be released from an up-river dam in order to provide enough for him to take a campaign photo-op canoe trip downstream during a regional drought."

By the time the Gore motorcade reached a house party in Rochester, N.H., all the vice president's men were in a tizzy, huddling and pacing and otherwise chagrined. Other reporters -- by now under pressure from their editors -- called Gore's press secretary to get a comment on the matter.

"Critics Paddle Gore in 'Dam' Rowing Row," screamed the New York Post.

"Campaign blasted for water release," yelled the Charleston Daily Mail.

"A Canoe Trip Becomes a Political Misadventure for Gore," said the New York Times, discreet as ever.

By the time I parted company with the Gore campaign that Friday afternoon, it was clear that any hope for positive stories from his two-day visit to New Hampshire -- that his campaign skills have markedly improved, say, or that despite bad press, the Gore 2000 organization seems to be generating lots of excitement -- were drowned out by "Floodgate."

Next page | A cigar-store Indian with a pole up his ass?