Hey, Big Spender; Why Gore is Losing, and How He Sells Out Gays
The guy can't debate his way out of a Japanese lampshade. He's absolutely terrible. Take last Tuesday. Campaign finance demiurge John McCain agreed to come to St. Louis to sit with the Bush family. (He got barred because of debate rules for the town-hall format.) But McCain did say, "The Vice President does not have a lot of credibility on [campaign finance] because he and the President debased the institutions of government in 1996. They rented out the Lincoln bedroom. They sold seats on official trade missions. And they have a huge credibility problem."
And yet, when Gore said the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill would be the first one he sent before Congress, did Bush say a word about McCain's having endorsed Bush and condemned Gore? No. When Gore presented his own version of estate-tax reform to compete with Bush's, did Bush shoot back that Gore's was a phony plan that would actually cover only 902 families in the entire country? No, he did not.
It's not just that Bush can't debate. He can't even talk. At an event the day after the St. Louis debate, he stood in a mock pro-wrestling ring in LaCrosse, WI, with the state's governor, Tommy Thompson, and said of Gore, "He's the biggest spender in the history of modern times." Before the assembled wrestling fans could assimilate this solecism, Bush uncorked another: "It's your money?you paid for it!"
There is a real Al Gore, the pundits' simulated anguish over the matter notwithstanding. In fact, his type?that strange mix of condescension and obsequiousness, of heartfelt superiority and donned humility (the better to get laid with, my dear)?will be familiar to anyone who has spent a week or two at an Ivy League university. Those who spent four years with Gore in the Dunster House dining hall will have met his like dozens of times. Those who didn't, however, would like some reassurance about who Gore is, and his unwillingness to provide it?seeing as he wants to rule them, and all?scares the living bejaysus out of them.
As it should. Gore's closing statement at last week's debate ("I have kept the faith") was actually kind of nice. It was nice because Gore probably thought he meant it. Like most untrustworthy people, Gore doesn't wake up in the morning saying, "I'm going to be untrustworthy today." Rather, it's that he can't particularly make the effort to be trustworthy.
Take the issue of prescription drugs. Gore met a 79-year-old retired auto-worker named Winifred Skinner at an Iowa town meeting in late September, and enjoyed telling her story so much that he flew her out to Boston to be in the audience for the first debate. Poor Winifred, the tale went, has to wander through teenage drinking lairs and roadside dump sites "seven days a week," scavenging for returnable tin cans to pay for her drugs. Then the national press?my colleagues at The Weekly Standard, among others?looked into the story. It turns out Winifred has a son named Earl King, an air-conditioning consultant so fabulously successful that he now owns an 80-acre ranch, who has pled with her to let him pay for her drugs. She herself owns a Winnebago.
Winifred Skinner's story was big after the first debate, in which Gore gave Bush the drubbing of his life, losing only in the spin contest, which (rightly) focused on Gore's veracity, or lack thereof. Gore dropped Winifred like a hot potato. But only for a bit. After the third debate, there she was again, campaigning right alongside him. He, what's more, was now in a vindictive, even bellicose, mood, snickering at those who had called him to account on his truth-stretching. "The national media," he crowed, "tried to make a big deal out of the fact that her son is well-to-do. And she doesn't have to go out and pick up cans to pay for her prescription drugs. She could go and ask her son for that money."
Listen to the tone: "...tried to make a big deal..."! It was as if Gore were responding to a request to please tell us all why we disliked him so much in the first place. Because most Americans think that is a big deal. Just as there is a difference between being homeless and enjoying camping, there's a difference between being so destitute that you can't buy necessary drugs, and being a potty, old, Evelyn-Waugh-novel-style eccentric rich lady who likes to look for Miller cans in her spare time. If Gore doesn't understand this distinction, he's probably too patrician for American tastes. If he does understand it, then he was ready and willing to lie about it.
The important point is this: What Gore did wrong in the eyes of Middle America has nothing to do with how rich or poor one is, whether one backed Reagan or Bush or Dukakis or Clinton, whether one thinks there should be a prescription drug benefit in Medicare, or whether one thinks price-gouging by pharmaceutical companies is a problem. It really doesn't even have to do with whether Winifred Skinner's story is true or not.
It has to do with Al Gore's utter indifference to whether it's true or not.
(Here Gore paused and, as he did, gays across the country were probably asking: "or? ?" Given that the largest cry for hate-crimes laws has come from gays, not blacks, it's fair to call this a gay issue.)
"...or ethnicity. And that's why I think that we can embody our values by passing a hate-crimes law. I think these crimes are different... There is pending now in the Congress a national hate-crimes law because of James Byrd, because of Matthew Shepard, who was crucified on a split-rail fence by bigots, because of others."
That Gore mentioned race three times and sexual orientation zero was not inadvertent. Read Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair's new Gore biography, Al Gore: A User's Manual, and you'll find ample detail on Gore's willingness to chuck gays overboard throughout his congressional and senatorial tenure in Tennessee. (See pp. 58-59 if you're in a rush.) The conclusion you'll reach is that, even as he argued for hate-crimes law, Gore did not want the national television audience to know that he was arguing on behalf of gays.
And so we're in the presence of a slightly more subtle Winifred Skinner story. Whether one likes hate-crimes law or not (I don't) is not at issue. It's that Gore got the clever idea that, if he just mentioned Matthew Shepard's name, gay activists would associate it with the (wildly unpopular) idea of special protections for gays, while the general public would associate it with the (fairly popular) idea of special protections for blacks.
Bush just looked at the audience and said of Gore: "On the one hand, he says he agrees with me and then he says he doesn't. I'm not sure where he's coming from." Gore was so used to stomping all over Bush on the subtlest of issues, and so used to the argument-evading blah-blah Bush was spouting throughout the debates, that he didn't feel he needed to answer that response. But he did.