The vice president has always insisted he did not consider the temple visit a fundraiser. No admission was charged for the luncheon, there were no solicitations and no campaign money changed hands at the temple. However, the day after the event and unbeknownst to Gore, Democratic fundraisers Johnny Huang and Maria Hsia collected 42 temple-related checks totaling more than $100,000, $62,000 of which was later deemed illegal.

Most of the ensuing confusion about Gore's role centered around the simple fact that Huang had scheduled two events on April 29, a formal Gore fundraiser at Harbor Village Restaurant in Monterey Park, Calif., and then a civic visit at the temple in nearby Hacienda Heights. Crunched for time, the fundraiser at the restaurant was canceled and Huang invited the attendees to the temple to meet Gore.

The press has largely ignored that crucial scheduling detail, even though it was spelled out at both Sen. Fred Thompson's hearings on campaign finance irregularities and at Hsia's subsequent trial, where she was found guilty of concealing the source of campaign donations.

In a typically overheated, Page 1 account in the Philadelphia Inquirer on March 4, Chris Mondics wrote, "One e-mail written by the vice president shows that at some point weeks before the [Hsi Lai] event, he knew he would be attending a fundraiser in Southern California on April 29, 1996." See how the details are danced around? It's no surprise the vice president sent an e-mail regarding a "Southern California" fundraiser on April 29, 1996, since one was scheduled; not at the temple, but at Harbor Village Restaurant. It was later canceled. Either Mondics, who dug through "a body of documents" for the story, didn't know the specifics of the case, or chose to fudge them. For everyday Inquirer readers, the implication was clear: Gore lied. (Perhaps the most laughable evidence that "Gore had many reasons to believe the Buddhist temple lunch was a fundraiser" was offered up by Fortune's Jeffrey Birnbaum: "[Gore] was attending fundraisers often back then.")

But hadn't Gore flip-flopped, and wasn't the press right to call him out? As New York Times columnist William Safire pointed out ominously, "At first Gore said the fund-raiser was merely 'community outreach'; months later, he amended that to knowing only it was 'finance-related.'" Ruth Marcus at the Washington Post was even more blunt: "Gore's shifting and technical responses on this question -- he first said it was 'community outreach,' then acknowledged that it was 'finance-related' or a 'donor maintenance' event -- appear only to have added to his difficulties."

Actually, the only difficulty was that reporters and columnists did not understand that the two phrases "community outreach" and "finance-related" were synonymous, and neither meant fundraiser. In televised hearings before the Thompson Committee in 1997, Democratic National Committee chairman Donald Fowler and DNC finance director Richard Sullivan both testified under oath that "community outreach" and "finance-related" events were efforts to warm up potential or past donors, a chance to greet and get to know supporters, but not to solicit money. Seems like pretty basic stuff in the world of political campaigns, which the D.C. press supposedly covers for a living.

Yet three years later, pundits were still clueless.

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