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One nation, fairly divisible, under God
Jan 18th 2001 | WASHINGTON, DC
From The Economist print edition

Americans are divided about whether their country is itself divided. Some see a yawning culture gap between conservatives and liberals. Others see a soggy moderate centre. Both are right

IN DECEMBER 1999, as George Bush entered the Republican primaries, Gertrude Himmelfarb, a distinguished social historian, published a book entitled "One Nation, Two Cultures". In it, she argued that America was becoming two countries. One, rooted in the 1960s, is hedonistic, individualistic and secular. The other, grounded in the 1950s, is puritanical, religious and family-centred. Such distinctions go back a long way. In 18th-century Britain, Adam Smith called them the "loose" and the "austere". Michael Barone, a commentator for US News & World Report, calls their current embodiment "the Beautiful and the Dutiful".

A year before Miss Himmelfarb's book, as George Bush was wondering whether to run at all, Alan Wolfe published an alternative view. In "One Nation, After All", he argued that, far from collapsing into warring cultures, America is dominated by a fairly homogenous middle class whose cardinal virtue is tolerance. This class, argued Mr Wolfe, lives in a land of "quiet faith", "ordinary duties" and "morality writ small". If there is a culture war, it is within individuals, as they try to strike a balance between the cultures of the 1950s and 1960s. They are neither beautiful nor dutiful. Mutable, perhaps.

As Mr Bush prepares to take the oath as America's 43rd president, the question of who is right, Miss Himmelfarb or Mr Wolfe, seems more than usually acute. This is only partly because Mr Bush's prospects for success hinge on the answer. More vitally, there is a great deal of exit-poll evidence that America is indeed becoming, in some ways, "one system, two nations". Ex uno, plures.

The argument begins with the narrowness of the result. The votes for the presidency, the Senate and the House were more or less tied. At state level, Democrats now control both houses of the local legislature in 17 states; Republicans control both houses in 18 states. Yet this was not a freak election. The past three congressional-election votes have all been squeaky-close, with both parties getting around 48-49% in each of them. Bill Clinton was also re-elected president with 49% of the vote. As Mr Barone says, this is the same number, over and over again.

In the 1990s, both parties had hoped to create decisive governing majorities: the Democrats on the back of Mr Clinton's move towards the centre, the Republicans by trying to become the party of the "new economy". Both failed. Instead, for the first time since the 1880s, America has gone without a dominant party for a whole decade.

Political stasis, of course, is not the same as political division. It could be produced, for example, by an even split in each main constituent group in the country. But that seems unlikely. American political parties have become ideologically more coherent since the 1960s, when conservative Democrats in the South defected to the Republicans, mirroring the decline of liberal "Rockefeller Republicans" in the north-east. And it does not seem to have happened in the 2000 election.

Look at the first electoral map above. Mr Bush's states form a broad band running down the Rockies and across the South. This is America's interior heartland, home of the "dutiful" people. Mr Gore, on the other hand, won the godless coasts and the industrial mid-west. Democrats have won the biggest cities for generations. This time, they won the smaller metropolitan regions too. Mr Gore won metro areas with more than 500,000 people by 71% to 26% (see chart "Urban v rural", below), easily the largest margin since this figure has been tracked. He also won the congested suburbs of the north-east and southern California. This is where the "beautiful" Americans live.

David Brooks of the Weekly Standard calls this the "Ice Age" division. Democrats won those areas which, when the glaciers receded, were either carved by rivers into ports which became big cities (the coasts), or were scraped clean to leave them too poor to support anything but car factories (the mid-west). Republicans won the areas that received all the topsoil the glaciers deposited, turning them into rich farms or ranches.

More important than geology or geography is that different types of people voted for the two sides. Blacks voted overwhelmingly for Mr Gore, white men for Mr Bush (see chart "East v West", above). Unfashionable though it is to say so, the 2000 election revealed the racial divide in American politics more sharply than in the recent past.

This was largely a southern phenomenon. White southerners voted for Mr Bush by a 35-point margin. Ronald Reagan received an even larger margin in 1984; but he had margins almost as big among whites elsewhere. Mr Bush did not. Outside the South, he beat Mr Gore by only 3 points or so. In other words, Mr Bush overwhelmingly needed white southern men for victory. That chimes with other evidence. Nearly half of all voters said they had a gun at home, the highest such figure ever recorded; 61% of gun-owners voted for Mr Bush.

But of all the determinants of voting behaviour, religion was the most precise. The more often voters went to church, the more likely they were to vote Republican. Of those who never go, 61% chose Mr Gore, 32% Mr Bush. For those who go more than once a week, the votes were reversed (see chart "Godly v ungodly", above). It is almost a perfect fit. Mr Barone points out that Mr Gore won the two counties with the lowest church-going rates, Manhattan and Los Angeles County, by margins comparable to the biggest Democratic landslide in recent history (Lyndon Johnson's defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964). Yet Mr Bush won Montana, Wyoming and Idaho by rates approaching the biggest Republican landslide in recent history, Richard Nixon's defeat of George McGovern in 1972.

Put these patterns together. As Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster, told the Washington Post: "We have two massive colliding forces. One is rural, Christian, religiously conservative. [The other] is socially tolerant, pro-choice, secular, living in New England and the Pacific coast." Miss Himmelfarb could hardly have put it better herself.

Multiple melting pots

A single election is a slender base on which to argue how a country has changed. Nevertheless, there are other reasons for thinking that the patterns of the 2000 election may be valid for the longer term.

They come from the new census. For decades, two broad trends have been reinforcing one another to redraw the demographic map of America. These are, first, the internal migration of Americans from the north and mid-west to the South and south-west ("the Sunbelt" at the broadest definition of that over-used term); and, second, immigration from outside, mostly from Latin America, to those same states. The two have worked together to produce a booming Sunbelt and a brisk new stirring of the ethnic melting pot.

Both trends are continuing. But research by Bill Frey of the University of Michigan suggests that they are now going in different directions. This finding gives more credence to the argument that America is becoming more deeply divided.

Between 1990 and 2000, the combined voting-age population of Hispanics and Asians rose by almost 10m to 30m: 10% of the population, almost twice what it was in 1980. That is an acceleration of an old trend. What is unusual now is the concentration of the growth. More than 60% of the increase occurred in just four states: California, Texas, Florida and New York. Mr Frey calls these the new melting pots (he adds Hawaii, New Jersey and New Mexico, which have similarly high levels of immigration).

Meanwhile, other states are getting whiter. The white voting-age population rose by more than 22% in the western states of Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Arizona and Colorado during the 1990s. Most of the white migrants came out of California. In the South, Georgia, North and South Carolina and Tennessee also saw their white voting-age populations increase by more than twice the national average. These too are Sunbelt states. They are still growing economically. The difference is that the new Sunbelt is attracting whites (and blacks) from elsewhere in America. The melting pot is attracting foreigners. The Sunbelt is splitting in half.

This has profound political implications. The states gaining white populations form the spine of Mr Bush's band of victory, running down the Rockies and through the South. With three exceptions (Oregon, Washington and tiny Delaware), Mr Bush won every fast-growing state outside the melting pots. With two exceptions, Mr Gore won every melting-pot state. His exceptions-Florida and Texas-are revealing. Both had governors called Bush. And they are the two states with the largest absolute number of white migrants (as well as large numbers of Latinos). They thus complicate but do not contradict the basic link: there is a close overlap between the short-term trends of the 2000 election and the longer-term figures from the 2000 census.

Cut another way

So is America one nation, two cultures? Before saying yes, consider a different interpretation of some of the same figures, starting in the same place: with America's current political make-up.

This is the first time since the 1920s that one party has held the presidency, the House of Representatives, the Senate, a functional majority on the Supreme Court, and a majority of both state houses and governors. If you look merely at voting margins, there is a dead heat. If you consider the direction of politics over time, there has clearly been a small shift to the right. Ben Wattenburg of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) doubts that this points to any fundamental realignment but argues that, if Republicans establish a renewed political dominance in 20 years' time, historians will point to the 2000 election as the first clear evidence of it.

Now consider the electoral map broken down by county (second map). This shows a far more complex pattern. Instead of one big Republican band separating two Democratic blocks, the new map is like a scatter diagram. Most of the map is grey because Mr Bush took the rural acres. But he won clusters in almost every Democratic state, and took New Hampshire, the state with the highest proportion of "new economy" workers. Conversely, Mr Gore won clusters of votes in every Republican state bar Wyoming, Utah and Nebraska. The Gore enclaves are usually towns or universities, or strung out along the Mississippi. But Democrats won even in Republican heartlands.

It is true that the county-by-county map confirms, rather than denies, the existence of an urban/rural split in America. But too much can be made of this division. Over half of Americans live in neither of these areas, but in suburbs. And suburbia itself is more varied than it looks. Inner suburbs look like the cities they adjoin (and trend Democratic). Outer "exurbs" are usually Republican. In between, the traditional suburbs split more or less down the middle, but in ways that fit no clear pattern.

More important, the census gives an entirely different account of what is happening in this suburban middle ground. At least as striking as the rise in immigration or the change in internal migration is a demographic development that in any other country would be called the collapse of the lower-middle class.

Bill Galston of the University of Maryland argues that, since 1970, the poor and working poor (those with household incomes below $25,000 at constant 1999 prices) have slipped only a little as a share of the total population, dropping from just over a third to just under a third. What he describes as the poorer middle class has declined as a share of the total by over ten points (38% to 28%). The richer middle class and the rich, on the other hand, (those with household incomes over $50,000, of which the very rich are a small part) have risen by almost 15 points from just over a quarter to over two-fifths. In other words, the largest single group of Americans now is the fast-growing rich middle class.

These are the people living in the suburbs: the mythical "soccer moms", socially liberal, economically conservative folk concerned about their children's schooling, their commute to work, their new Palm Pilot. Their attitudes contradict the notion that America is an apartheid democracy. Largely because of the economy's growth in the past decade, traditional economic-interest-group arguments play little part in their politics (though that may well change if recession comes). Instead, they are mostly concerned about "values"; and Mr Wolfe found endless evidence that the value they most admire is tolerance.

For the past 30 years, around 40% of Americans have described themselves as moderates. That share reached 50% in the 2000 election. That, suggests Karlyn Bowman of the AEI, may be a spike; but it still means a plurality of the population sees itself this way, and has done for years.

Suburban moderation cuts across the religious and ethnic lines so evident in the census and election returns. Public Agenda, a polling organisation, has found that large majorities of Americans see religion as primarily a guide to morals and good behaviour (rather than, say, a matter of faith or ritual), and do not want to foist their religious opinions on workmates or friends.

Similarly, the racial divide may be changing in the suburbs. One of Mr Frey's most intriguing findings is that, in the 1990s, blacks reversed their long trend of leaving the South for the cities of the north and began returning-this time to the sprawling suburbs around Atlanta and other southern cities. In the 1990s, the South had a net gain of 326,000 adult blacks from the rest of the country. Most are suburbanites or retirees. In Clayton County, Georgia, for the first time, black incomers have a higher educational level than existing residents.

So far, this has not altered black voting patterns. But other ethnic groups are following the trail, first blazed by Italians, Poles and others, away from identity politics and towards assimilation. One-third of Latinos voted Republican. In Texas, the figure was 43%; in Florida, 50%. And there you can see the political affiliations reversing. Cubans in the city of Miami have traditionally voted Republican. The younger generations who have left for the suburbs of Broward County, to the north, are more Democratic. Cutting across the divide between the two cultures is a different pattern: the growth of a large, tolerant, middle-class suburbia.

That is sometimes used to suggest that America is split only shallowly, rather than deeply. But that does not do justice to the evidence of cultural division. It would be better to think of America as a bell shape. At the edges are the two sharp tails of the cultural and social divide. In the middle is a bulge of moderate opinion. The test of Mr Bush's presidency will be whether he marginalises the centre and encourages the tails, or whether he ignores the tails and appeals to the centre, as his campaign promised to do.

from TPDL 2001-Nov-5, from Scripps Howard News Service, by Rob Hotakainen (McClatchy Newspapers):

Bush's popularity rises among Democrats

WASHINGTON (November 4, 2001 5:48 p.m. EST) - As a union member who usually supports Democrats, Michael Sandersfeld voted for Al Gore, but he's happy now that George W. Bush is in the White House.

"I feel more comfortable with Bush in there right now than I probably would've with Gore," said Sandersfeld, 48, a state recreational therapist from North Mankato, Minn.. "He's more of a hard-liner, no holds barred."

One year after Americans cast their votes in one of the nation's most divisive elections, President Bush is winning strong backing from some improbable supporters: Democrats who worked hard to elect Gore.

After Bush lost the popular vote and many questioned his legitimacy, the president's job approval rating is now hovering at 90 percent. And with Bush leading during an extraordinary time in U.S. history, scholars say the president has a shot at achieving something that might have once seemed implausible: greatness.

"Those presidents in our history who have been able to successfully deal with crisis end up being counted as among the greatest of our presidents," said James Meindl, a professor at the University at Buffalo School of Management who studies presidential leadership, charisma and management styles. "The potential is there, but it's a make-or-break kind of thing: Can he rise to the occasion?"

And will his popularity last?

Bush's high ratings are the result of a "rally-around-the-flag effect" that probably won't last, said Bruce Altschuler, professor and chairman of the political science department at State University of New York at Oswego.

"His popularity ratings aren't that different from his father's during the height of the Gulf War," said Altschuler, an expert on the American presidency and political polling. "Even in a crisis of great magnitude, that tends to start wearing off after -- at most -- about six months."

Experts say that Bush's honeymoon period could end quickly if the U.S. bombing campaign in Afghanistan produces limited results or if the public is not satisfied with how the administration is handling the anthrax scare.

"When the events are prolonged, they can find that their popularity erodes dramatically," said Robert Gilbert, professor of political science at Northeastern University in Boston.

Experts say that much of Bush's early success is the result of his strong response to the terrorist attacks, including his speech to Congress and a particularly well-received news conference in which the president appeared in complete control.

It surprised many people.

"I didn't think he had it in him," said Meindl. "When there's a crisis, people look for something like charisma, and often that shows up rhetorically. And he delivered on that."

Bush "doesn't have the eloquence of an Abe Lincoln, but he's perfectly confident in himself," said Peter Schramm, director of the University of Ashland's John Ashbrook Center for Public Affairs in Ashland, Ohio.

"Extreme situations and necessity test one's mettle, whether you're Harry Truman or George W. Bush," he said. "His real essence has revealed itself, and he's a tough guy who's been wronged, and on behalf of the nation he's standing up in a manly way. And so far, it looks pretty good."

In a correct system, the Chief Executive is not elected by the people directly, and does not have a legislative veto - indeed, his office carries with it no direct control over the legislative process. Instead, he is appointed by the legislature, and his job is to broadly manage the executive aspects of implementing law. Moreover, in a correct system a legislator can represent people who are scattered across the entire country. Contract workers, prospectors, and long haul truckers, constitute a constituency that is inherently scattered, and a correct system permits them to elect representatives who vigilantly guard their interests - and those of other voters with no fixed abode or community support net. People with careers in the arts, or in high technology, or assembly line workers, or construction workers, would also often choose to be represented by legislators whose abodes are far from their own - in fact, by legislators who themselves have a history in the fields of their constituencies (i.e., not just as lawyers).

In a correct system, when a legislator casts a vote, it has a weight equal to the number of people who cast a vote for him. There is no bicameral silliness, no senate. In a final and crucial detail, there is no election day, but rather each voter can retract his vote for one legislator and recast it for another one (or indeed, for himself, personally assuming the responsibility of electronically voting on individual bills and resolutions) any time he wants, and can override his representative's vote on a bill-by-bill basis to boot. Official ballots do not identify parties - or even candidates - avoiding a form of political subsidy central to the status quo system. Any citizen in good standing can declare a candidacy any time, and a candidate can publish a binding contract with his present and any future constituency, in which he guarantees his voting positions on various issues.

That is real representative democracy. No games - no gerrymandering, no dishonest pre-election advertising blitz, no illusion of consensus, no collectivizing into quasi-official parties, no political subsidies by ballot appearance favoritism.

Under the current system, the premise is that a good citizen dutifully casts his vote every four years, on a dark and gloomy Tuesday in November, for one of the presidential candidates. It is a civic sin if he withholds his vote - withholds his consent to be governed by one of the candidates. In the words of USA Today, "If you don't vote, don't complain about what you get in the White House next year." Even if the ballot lists people he finds uniformly distasteful or evil, he is expected to give his consent to be governed by one of them. Making this expectation clearer, the accusation of "throwing away one's vote" awaits him if he casts his vote for a candidate not portrayed as a viable candidate by the mass media. "Throwing away one's vote" is a name for the civic sin of withholding one's consent to be governed by a candidate the establishment either actively or tacitly endorses.

The system is one round, winner-take-all, and there is no requirement for a quorum. It is absolutely silly. Not only does it promote choice as a substitute for freedom, but the choice it offers is not even genuine. It is an inherently rigged system.

Most people accept the premises of the above system. Though only 49% of eligible voters turned out in the 1996 election, the 51% that didn't feels it has committed a civic sin, and indeed is condemned for having shirked its ostensible responsibility. Its dissatisfaction with the regime empowered by the election is considered moot. The only way to vote against the system is to not vote within the system at all, but by design the system does not consider these protest votes at all.

Those who voted for an endorsed candidate that lost the race are traditionally assuaged when the party of the failed presidential candidate wins or maintains a legislative majority, either in that election or in the following one.

Those who voted for an unendorsed but principled candidate are treated with the fearful contempt a con artist has for those who have seen him for what he is - or an emperor has for those who observe that he wears no clothes. Believers in the system dismiss these voters as foolish, and try to hurry the conversation past the now-uncomfortable topic. Being one who makes believers uncomfortable, I can only guess how believers talk among themselves about their votes, but I picture the subtle, even subconscious, recognition of arrogant, comfortable, comradely co-conspirators.

Where does this leave the hapless voter? The thoughtful voter will withhold his consent to be governed by those he considers distasteful or evil. He will either vote for obscure candidates who substantially share his principles, or he will not vote at all. If he does not vote, it is because he has found that the very nature of the system is distasteful or evil. If he does vote, one might maintain that he has given his consent to be governed by whoever is chosen by the system, though I believe this is going too far. Nonetheless, I myself will likely not vote this fall.

If the system permitted real change, if it permitted the overthrow of the hegemons in government and industry, the hegemons - who occupy the positions of greatest influence over the system - would change the system to safeguard their hegemony. As it is, they perceive that only a nip and tuck here and there are necessary to make the system perfect.

from TPDL 2000-Aug-29, from the Washington Times, by Tod Lindberg:

Political gatekeepers

Political scientists have been writing for decades now about the decline of the major parties in American political life. It's true that voters are less willing to identify themselves as either Republican or Democrat. And it's likewise true that such massive developments over the decades as the professionalization of the civil service, thus diminishing patronage rewards at the disposal of party leaders, has reduced clout in the old style. Likewise, the democratization of the parties in the form of caucuses and primaries - including primaries in which nonparty members can participate - has substantially decreased the amount of business that gets done in smoke-filled rooms.

But the dominance of the two major parties over the political system can hardly be said to be in jeopardy. In the real political world, the Democratic and Republican parties are the game. Consider some cases in point from this political season:

Patrick Buchanan. Mr. Buchanan used to be a serious figure in the Republican party - a hero to his Buchanan Brigades, a serious headache for many other Republicans. In 1992, he came to embody conservative disaffection from President George Bush, and the strength of his primary challenge won him a prime-time speaking slot at the GOP convention in Houston. In 1996, he actually won the GOP primary in New Hampshire.

Since 1994, a small but growing faction of the Republican congressional majority has been Buchananite in outlook, a potential building block for a serious politician. Now that Mr. Buchanan has bolted the GOP to seek his political fortune with the Reform Party, he finds himself locked in a faintly comic struggle for the nomination of a party so fractured that it seems, in total, no more than its $12.6 million in federal funding. Mr. Buchanan scores at about 1 percent in opinion polls. Without a major party on which and through which to act, he is now a fringe figure in American politics.

Ralph Nader. As a Green Party candidate, Ralph Nader can perhaps be a spoiler in November. The stronger the Greens are, the more he drains from Democratic support for Al Gore, and the more likely George W. Bush is to win. But Mr. Nader and most of his supporters seem to be under no illusions about who they are: Democrats disaffected with the centrist line the party has been pursuing now for three straight presidential campaigns. The Green Party is not a vehicle for itself but a means to coax the Democratic Party back to the left. Whether Mr. Nader succeeds or fails in this, the result by 2004 is likely to be not a viable third party, but a party that has served its purpose or a party whose novelty has worn off.

John McCain. Mr. McCain's blunt talk about reform and his compelling biography brought huge numbers of independents and Democrats to the polls in GOP primaries. There were so many, Mr. McCain nearly knocked out Mr. Bush. Some analysts speculated about the possibility of a third-party run by Mr. McCain. Yet Mr. McCain is now locked in an embrace with Mr. Bush, and the reason seems clear: Mr. McCain has no political future as an independent but possibly a bright one with in the GOP. If Mr. Bush loses, Mr. McCain will be a leading contender for 2004 - provided he does his bit for the party this year.

George W. Bush and Al Gore. Let's not forget how these two got where they are. Estimable politicians in their own regard, they also left the starting gate of the 2000 election with the near-unanimous support of their respective party establishments. The importance of this fact cannot be overstated. In the case of Mr. Gore, a sitting two-term vice president is an obvious party consensus choice when times are good. Even so, Mr. Gore drew a primary opponent, Bill Bradley, who looked like he might mount a serious insurgent challenge. Yet Mr. Gore had, in effect, the full resources of the party establishment to put down the challenge, and down Mr. Bradley went.

Mr. Bush was hardly as obvious a choice as Mr. Gore, but he was no less the consensus favorite, first among the GOP governors, national party figures and major donors, then quickly among the activist base. What looked in 1996 like it might have been a wide-open primary field quickly became Bush territory; Mr. McCain posed a serious threat; but Mr. Bush met it by using the party establishment to consolidate the support of the GOP base. While it is true that growing numbers of voters are calling themselves independent, there are still no corresponding independent institutions capable of speaking for them.

In general in Washington, it's impossible to find anyone who takes politics seriously and wants political influence who is neither a Democrat nor a Republican. To be independent is to be powerless. No independent has ever been appointed to the Supreme Court or crafted an administration's domestic policy agenda or whipped the passage of a piece of legislation. When the time comes for political action, the two parties are the gatekeepers now as much as ever.

Tod Lindberg is editor of Policy Review magazine.

Let's examine the field for the 2000 presidential election cycle.

Gore is just horrid - almost everyone perceives him as wooden, insincere, and irretrievably associated with Clinton (whom most people would honestly like to forget, the way one yearns to escape the hangover from so much riotous party drinking that one can't actually remember the riot, party, or drinking proper). Bradley is a hack and a bonafide full-blown Marxist - i.e. an unadmitted revolutionary. Bradley has a snowball's chance in hell of being elected, and Gore's chances aren't much better - though they may team up (Bradley as VP), in a US version of the green-red coalition. [Obviously, this did not happen.] Ralph Nader is an undiluted globalist (United Nations with its own independent and peerless military) socialist (particularly, the economic democracy / social justice edition) whose idea of good government regulation is sheer quantity. Whatever his motives, he's just atrocious.

Bush is better than any of them, but he is a Bush, a publicly - even militantly - believing Christian (one might even say a fundamentalist), and capable of very little but realpolitik - having no substantive or broad principles with which to drive his policies. He is faintly likeable, but when he is likeable it is because he is boyish. Boyishness is not presidential.

Below, I include a collection of incisive items on the two major surviving candidates.

Both major party candidates are weak, and though a successful insurgency by a third party doesn't currently (2000-Aug-14) appear to be in the offing, the psychosocial impact of this carefully staged battle of Hegelian midgets is still hard to predict. The battle is shaping up to center around bidding wars on certain territory - currently, devotional theism - and on Morrisonian triangulation (a term I hereby coin after Dick Morris). Triangulation is the disciplined, encyclopedic identification, adoption, and promulgation of politically expedient Hegelian syntheses. The bidding wars are straightforward engines of marginalization, used where the establishment expects to benefit from cascading extremism, and where neither party in the dialectical system expects to gain advantage from opposition to that extremist position.

Here is George Will's report on Bradley's proposal, in an article in Newsweek, 1999-Oct-11, titled "A 100 Percent Tax on Speech?". This is the first half of the article:

At a stroke, Bill Bradley recently refuted the bromide that he is boring, and in doing so he usefully illuminated the upcoming Senate debate on campaign finance reform. He did all this with a remarkable proposal - a proposal flagrantly unconstitutional and amazingly inimical to democratic values, but definitely not boring.

On a call-in program on New Hampshire public radio, Bradley was at first boring: he advocated public financing, saying we spend $900 million a year promoting democracy abroad and for about the same sum we could supplant all private money with public money in campaigns. This would "totally take special interests out of our election process." His unremarkable, because familiar, thought raises questions:

By what criteria would he sort the "special," and impliedly disreputable, interests from the nonspecial, reputable ones that deserve to be in our election process? When the sorting is done, what will that process be about? Is Bradley a modern Mugwump, trying to scrub the stain of politics from politics? Bradley is a practicing liberal who (therefore) is comfortable with the regulatory state, which, with all its regulating and subsidizing, is waist-deep in the business of allocating wealth and opportunity. Does he understand that the way to reduce the role of money in politics is to reduce the role of politics in the acquisition of money?

But let us move on to Bradley's remarkable idea.

The host of the radio program, noting that Bradley is ardent for campaign reforms, asked about "issue ads," noting that "nonprofit advocacy groups" of many persuasions are alarmed about the regulation of such ads envisioned by the Shays-Meehan bill, the House-passed version of campaign finance reform. Bradley replied that the way to deal with issue ads is to "simply say if somebody is going to buy an issue ad, that there's got to be an equal time on the other side." That, he said, is "the regulatory way. The market way to do it is simply say, when an issue ad is put on, there's a 100 percent tax, and the 100 percent tax is then given to the other side so that you get both points of view presented and you simply don't have the point of view that has the most money behind it dominating the airwaves."

A caller declared it "appalling" and "scary" to say "if I'm going to express my opinion I have to support somebody else who wants to express his opinion." And the caller added that Bradley, by talking about giving money to "the" other side so that people would hear "both" points of view on an issue, assumes, unrealistically, a tidy bipolarity of public debate, rather than a variety of opinions on particular issues. Bradley called that "a very good point" and "food for thought."

Here is more such food: the campaign finance reformers' assault, in the name of political hygiene, on the First Amendment is now so sweeping, and so untroubled by even twinges of conscience, that a mainstream politician like Bradley can casually propose such a tax on political communication. Note well: the tax is intended not to raise revenue but to change behavior - to extinguish an entire category of political advocacy.

[...]

Bush is at the other extreme from Bradley. Bush is opposed to any campaign finance reform, except perhaps further deregulation. In particular, Bush defends the system of unlimited corporate soft money contributions, of which he is currently the principal beneficiary. The gulf between Bradley and Bush would seem to be too great to bridge.

McCain is no longer in the running, but an examination of his meteoric dash at the nomination is instructive.

McCain has been a powerful Senator for years. He has an aura that is at once personal and majestic. The media love him, not least because of his full time media access policy. His rhetoric on campaign finance is duly reformist, his rhetoric on Social Security is duly conservative, and his rhetoric on the military is duly patriotic. He appears silver-haired and firmly wise, not grey-haired and flaccidly aged. He looks a bit like an astronaut or some other ex-military hero-type, and indeed he is presented as exactly that. He just seems like a good guy. He seems to combine plain speaking and "high" speaking in just the right measures. He seems earnest. He does not feel your pain, nor does he not feel your pain, rather he considers your pain as an important concern, to be weighed justly against many other important concerns. McCain is the heroic moderate.

The trouble with this, of course, is that moderacy is inherently incompatible with heroism. This is a better point than most on which to begin a critical re-evaluation of McCain's ostensible merits. Political moderacy means, put simply, promulgation of policy midway between two competing political extremes. Moderate policy is dictated by extremist politics - but seldom does anything of lasting merit arise from extremist politics. These are the politics of Hegel, of the dialectic. Moderacy is simply Hegel's synthesis.

Consider McCain's position on campaign finance, and how it relates to those of the other candidates. Bradley stands at one extreme, and Bush at the other, as shown above (Bush, it turns out, is closest to correct).

Enter John McCain, who claims implicitly that from two wrongs, one can work a right.

McCain proposes the surgical elimination of so-called "soft money". This done, all donations are akin to what is currently called "hard money". The difference between soft and hard donations is that soft donations cannot be used to explicitly promote a particular candidate, and are not subject to donation ceilings, whereas hard money can be used to fund ads that explicitly endorse a candidate by name, and there are stringent donation ceilings on a per-donor basis. Corporations can be hard donors, and most soft money is donated by corporations.

There are two gross defects in McCain's proposal (which he advertises as a "solution"). The first is that incorporated entities are still able to contribute to campaign funds. This is a loophole of immense magnitude. The organized establishment, with its interlocked boards of directors and its corporate hierarchies of control, is able to distort campaign finance with or without soft money. The second is that the exercise of free speech by ordinary citizens will come to be viewed as a soft money contribution, and hence illegal, regardless of the candidates favored or disfavored by the speech. Casual political speech will be criminalized. If you support a genuinely reformist third party candidate and you put material on your web site favorable to him but not explicitly naming him or his opponents, you will have committed a federal crime. The Federal Election Commission is already warming up for such enforcement activity, harrassing the owners of web sites containing political speech that does explicitly name candidates, when the owners fail to file the requisite paperwork with the federal government. Of course, the owners in most cases had no idea there was any paperwork to file, much less how to go about actually doing so.

McCain is known to be a hypocrite on the issue of campaign finance reform, even if he does not view himself as such. Some of the below material reveals this pattern of hypocrisy.

So, let's briefly survey McCain's positions on other issues.

According to Broadcasting and Cable magazine (early January 1999), McCain repeatedly wrote "scathing" letters to the FCC's leadership (William Kennard) on the prospect of a new Low Power FM licensing regime, "questioning the competence of the commission's public affairs staff. McCain also has written Kennard letters criticizing his plans to change the broadcast ownership rules." McCain's stand on these issues is a result of his constituency in the broadcast industry. As a result of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, FM radio in the United States has evolved from a somewhat homogenized but diversely owned patchwork, to a tyrannically homogenized handful of corporate empires. A frenzy of corporate mergers has led to the following reality: Clear Channel Communications Inc. owns 955 radio stations (the number one and number two radio empires merged in October of last year to create this behemoth, and a year before that the number 3 and number 4 empires merged to create that number 2 empire), Cumulus Media owns 231 stations, and Infinity Broadcasting (Westinghouse/CBS) owns 155. Major markets are absolutely dominated by these heavyweights.

McCain is firmly aligned with these vast corporate empires, and is firmly opposed to anything that might threaten their hegemony - in particular, any opening of the airwaves to small independent programmers, and any reform of the rules erected by the Telecommunication Act of 1996 - the rules that led to the current, highly monopolistic radio broadcasting morass. His opposition can't be reasoned, unless McCain is secretly opposed to the very idea of freedom. Indeed, this is quite conceivable.

In 1997, a multipartisan reform movement toward substantive and practical relaxation of an archaic and unconstitutional cryptographic software export embargo was underway. The movement was spearheaded by the Pro-CODE bill of Senators Conrad Burns (R-Montana) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), and the House SAFE bill by Representative Bob Goodlatte (R-Virginia). It was Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John McCain who introduced the bill (the "Secure Networking Act", referred to as the McCain-Kerry bill) that dead-ended the reforms. McCain delivered an address to the committee that hinged on his claim that the crimes of child pornographers would be facilitated by cryptography. The bill McCain was promoting is bluntly Orwellian.

From the Center for Democracy and Technology, here is a summary of the bill McCain pushed:

1. Force businesses and individuals to use "key recovery" systems if they wish to participate in the secure information infrastructure. The bill would:
   • Require the use of key recovery systems in order to obtain the "public key certificates" needed to participate in electronic commerce. Retaining this linkage between certificates and third-party access effectively holds electronic commerce hostage to key recovery. (Sec. 405)
   • Use powerful safe harbor liability protections and other market-distorting regulations to force use of "federally-licensed" key recovery agents. (Title V)
   • Require key recovery for all secure networks built with any federal funds -- including the Internet II project and most university networks. (Title II)
   • Direct the President to negotiate with foreign countries to create a worldwide system for national government access to keys. (Title VI)
2. Codify a low 56-bit key length limit on exports of any non-key-recovery encryption products. Products with much greater strength are already in demand in the market and widely available outside of the U.S.
3. Endanger personal privacy by allowing government access to sensitive encryption keys without meeting normal Fourth and Fifth Amendment requirements. The bill would grant any government agency access to keys without court order, using as little as a subpoena issued without notice and without any judicial approval, thereby leaving valuable private keys highly vulnerable to mistaken disclosure as a result of mistake, fraud, or abuse.
4. Criminalize an array of encryption activities -- In addition to a broad new crime that would penalize routine use of encryption and federalize vast numbers of state crimes, the bill would create fifteen new federal crimes (see list below) dealing with the use of encryption and key recovery and grant the Commerce Dept. sweeping new enforcement powers.

Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape, told Congress that "The McCain-Kerrey bill is completely flawed. Unlimited strength crypto has been available for years worldwide over the Internet and from some companies. Terrorists and other criminals already have it. The genie is out of the bottle. The only thing the McCain-Kerrey bill does is cripple American companies' abilities to compete worldwide."

I proved this years earlier, in 1994, with a worldwide cryptosystem survey I conducted on the Internet. Even then, state of the art US-invented cryptosystems still in use today were available for download in source and binary forms, from countries scattered all over the world, countries that impose no restrictions on cryptographic software export.

McCain's position on this issue is inscrutable unless one allows that he is either dangerously foolish, or as contemplated above, secretly opposed to the very idea of freedom. McCain's favored policy bestows the full benefits of cryptographic authentication and privacy on governments and privileged elites, and leaves the plebes naked to fraud and invasion of privacy (or government persecution - you get to choose your nightmare).

The United States waged a controversial war in Kosovo in 1999. This war was advertised as a compulsory crusade for justice. In reality, it was more simply crusade, far from compulsory, and imposing and seeding injustice by the bomb load and bucketful. There was no Serbian campaign of genocide, and there are no mass graves. The US aggression supplied the Serbian socialist tyrant Milosevic with the political capital he needed to accelerate his ethnic cleansing campaign - which has always been a criminal campaign of displacement, never a Naziesque one of internment or extermination.

Now, months on, Kosovar Albanians routinely persecute, assault, and murder Serbians. The situation is like that in Rwanda: neither side is even remotely in the right, and outside influence (from the West) has been a major precipitating factor for violence.

John McCain was a vocal defender and proponent of the US action in Kosovo, a belligerent action which clearly violated international law. His refrain was "Now that we're in, we have to win.", which actually makes no sense, since no bonafide strategic victory in ex-Yugoslavia was or is theoretically achievable by military force. The conflicts there are manyfold, but most intractably, center on race and faith. Victory there is only possible if racism and faith there are crushed. This is a noble strategic objective, but not one which the US military is equipped to pursue.

McCain's position on the Kosovo campaign is somewhat hard to fathom, but is consistent with his moderate internationalist stance. Ever the moderate, McCain believes the US has a responsibility to intervene militarily under certain circumstances - not as broadly circumscribed as Strobe Talbott would like, but nonetheless including some circumstances under which intervention is a clear violation of international law. This is bad for America and Americans, and in the final analysis, bad for the inhabitants of the lands invaded by the US military in pursuit of these half-baked policies, and bad for the world.

McCain's morality is driven almost entirely by his perceptions of the necessary. Desire and virtuosity do not enter into the equation. Whatever its dark origins, this fundamentally bankrupt morality makes McCain manipulable and predictable. In the case that serious economic depression leads to serious social unrest, Commander in Chief McCain will perceive as necessary the imposition of martial law, relaying claims that the Constitution and legacy law are ineffective and no longer being meaningfully enforced. Moreover, McCain will command the respect and obedience of a revived military. The point is not that this is a certain eventuality, it is that a McCain presidency puts a man in the Oval Office who will take such steps. Consider these quotes:

``Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.''
-William Pitt, speech to the House of Commons, [Nov. 18, 1783]

``The United States is not a nation to which peace is a necessity.''
-Grover Cleveland (President of the US 1885-1889 and 1893-1897)

``Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.''
-Daniel Webster

press articles on John McCain:

from TPDL 2001-Mar-23, from the Wall Street Journal, Paul A. Gigot:

McCain Against Bush: The Guns of March

Everyone wonders if Al Gore will run for president again. But the question that really worries George W. Bush is whether John McCain will run again.

The Arizona senator and war hero denies any such ambition, and no one in the White House will say it on the record. But the prospect -- the implicit threat -- is the elephant in the room of the Senate's current campaign-finance debate. It's the reason many Republicans doubt President Bush will veto even a bad "reform" bill.

A GOP senator close to the White House says, "That's their nightmare scenario, that McCain heads for New Hampshire in 2004 to go out in a blaze of glory." Or, just as damaging, that he does a Teddy Roosevelt-Ross Perot and runs as an independent. (Apologies to TR's descendents for mentioning those two across the same hyphen.)

It's true Mr. McCain campaigned hard for Mr. Bush last year. But that was a matter of duty, honoring the promise he made to GOP voters in the primaries. For John McCain, politics is all about personal honor and integrity. His ideology is autobiography.

And in recent weeks Mr. McCain has been redefining his personal and party duty. The senator was once a genuine policy maverick, tacking left and right. But this year his heresy has all been to Mr. Bush's left, where a 2004 challenge might be possible.

He criticizes the Bush tax cut whenever he's asked, echoing liberal lines about the rich. He's negotiating with Democrats to revive gun control, an issue even Al Gore gave up on last year.

Mr. McCain also has signed up with Ted Kennedy and the trial lawyers on HMO regulation, even as other Republicans defer to Mr. Bush. The president was able to persuade House Republican Charles Norwood to back off his own trial-lawyer bill to allow a chance for a better compromise now that a Republican holds the White House.

But when Mr. Bush announced his HMO "principles" yesterday, Mr. McCain stole time from his campaign-finance crusade to join Teddy in a press-conference protest. "His support is very important and powerful," Mr. Kennedy enthused.

But the best evidence that he's trying to roll over Mr. Bush is Mr. McCain's behavior on campaign finance. His best friend in the Senate, Nebraska Republican Chuck Hagel, has put a sincere, bipartisan alternative on the table. Mr. Bush has applauded the concept, if not every detail. Yet Mr. McCain has dismissed his pal's effort as "not in the middle of anything."

The Hagel bill is in fact a classic compromise. It would trade new limits ($60,000) on unregulated soft money to parties in return for increases in hard-money limits (to $3,000). Political-speech purists -- including this columnist -- don't agree with much of it. (I like the Virginia system, which requires disclosure but allows unlimited donations.)

But members of both parties support Mr. Hagel's effort, and at least he'd improve the current system. The single biggest obstacle to political challengers today is the $1,000 hard-money limit. There's also no doubt Mr. Hagel would restrict the large corporate and labor donations that Mr. McCain insists are so "corrupting."

If the Arizonan really wanted a bipartisan deal, he'd at least negotiate with his friend. Mr. McCain's public objection -- that the Hagel bill would "legalize" the soft-money loophole -- is bizarre. Bill Clinton long ago "legalized" it in practice if not in law.

This week Mr. McCain has also agreed time and again with Big Labor. That includes the simple disclosure of forced union dues he'd endorsed only last year. Republican Orrin Hatch threw in corporate disclosure to sweeten the deal, but Mr. McCain still balked.

And this week he met privately with John Sweeney, the AFL-CIO boss who opposes parts of the McCain bill. The senator knows many Democrats will abandon the bill if unions give the word. So it'll be fascinating to watch if he now bends to Mr. Sweeney, even as he refuses to budge on Mr. Hagel.

Mr. McCain may also have become a hostage of his own favorable press coverage. The media have made him a rare Senate star because he agrees with them on campaign finance. If he breaks with them now, even in the cause of getting something done, he'll lose his public halo.

Asked about all this, Mr. McCain's aides admit he's trying to muscle his bill through the Senate. But they dismiss talk of 2004 as "Bush paranoia." Their man is 64 years old and a loyal Republican. The most any of them will concede is that the threat of his running may work for him the way it did for the Joe Pesci figure in "Goodfellas"; he's scarier because he's so unpredictable. ("Funny? What do you mean I'm funny?")

The McCainiacs do have a point that Mr. Bush hasn't tried his legendary charm on his old campaign foe. The pair's only postinaugural chat was by all accounts stiff, even "weird," says one Bush aide. McCain aides also say he wants to help Mr. Bush on military reform and Social Security, not that he's yet told the White House.

Mr. McCain no doubt thinks he's made his last presidential run. But politics has a momentum of its own. The Bush-McCain relationship now resembles that of the great powers in Europe in 1914, with armies and mistrust equally abundant. One spark, and who knows?

from National Review, 2000-Aug-28, by Ramesh Ponnuru, NR senior editor:

Hauntings, Visions
The civil religion of John McCain.

A minor controversy broke out at the 1992 Republican convention in Houston over a sentence in the party platform calling America "the last best hope for man on earth." The sentence had clearly been inserted as innocuous boilerplate. But some evangelical Christians objected: The world's last, best hope, they said, was Jesus Christ. President Bush's political aides rolled their eyes - there they go again, those fundamentalist hayseeds - and kept the sentence.

By contrast, nobody even objected to John McCain's hymn to America at this year's Republican convention in Philadelphia. No doubt this difference reflects the party's current intolerance for controversy at conventions, an intolerance rooted in a perception that Houston had a surplus of it. In addition, McCain's speech to the convention was eloquent, gracious, and conservative. But McCain's message ought to be controverted anyway, and not just by religious conservatives. He misunderstands the country he has served so well, and his misunderstanding is dangerous in its implications.

McCain's speech to the convention came at a delicate political moment for him. His presidential campaign went as far as it did because its large themes - patriotism, self-government, honor - were powerful and conservative ones, and ones he was well equipped to address. But the campaign failed because those themes came attached to liberal policies. Republican voters overwhelmingly rejected him.

McCain wants to keep open the option of running for president in 2004 if Bush loses in November. His task at the convention, then, was to increase his appeal to Republicans without alienating his current supporters, and especially his friends in the media. The first thing he had to do was to dispel doubts about the fervency of his support for George W. Bush. So he said, "I support him. I am grateful to him. And I am proud of him."

Beyond that, McCain's strategy was neither to promote nor to repudiate the policies on which he differs from most Republicans, such as campaign-finance regulation. Instead, he omitted all mention of those policies. McCain could have replaced them with other policies that fit his campaign themes but are more congenial to conservatives. He didn't do that either. Instead, those themes stood alone. When McCain declared that we have to "restore the people's sovereignty over government," he could have been speaking about abolishing soft money - or taking on the imperial judiciary. The effect was that the delegates were able to applaud the statement, while McCain's journalistic cheering section was not offended.

McCain's silence about policy had another effect: It forced him to flesh out his underlying philosophy. That philosophy begins with the familiar argument for America as an ideological nation, which is to say, a nation constituted by the liberal-democratic principles for which it stands. The typical formulation is that America is more than a nation, it's an idea. Other nations might be held together by race or culture, but Americans are united by their shared devotion to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Liberals and neoconservatives have long agreed on this point. But McCain, in applying the point to contemporary circumstances, pushed it further than most of them would go.

He explains that because we no longer think of ourselves as participating in the ideological project that is America, we are balkanizing: "When we quit seeing ourselves as part of something greater than our self-interest, then civic love gives way to the temptations of selfishness, bigotry, and hate."

Our project is to fulfill principles that are universal, says McCain: "[D]emocracy is not only the most effective form of government, but the only moral government." So we have to see our principles fulfilled universally. This brings us to the one policy pronouncement McCain makes in the speech - but it's a doozie: "We are obliged to seize this moment to help build a safer, freer, and more prosperous world, completely free of the tyranny that made the last century such a violent age." The words in McCain's prepared speeches are always carefully chosen. We are obliged - it is obligatory for us - to make the world "completely free" of tyranny, with tyranny implicitly understood as the absence of democracy (the "only moral form of government").

We have moved, with a few small steps, from being an ideological nation to being a revolutionary power, pledged to transform the Caucasus, central Africa, Saudi Arabia . . . It's a big world out there. Presumably McCain would allow that the goal of universal democracy must be pursued prudently; his own foreign-policy record suggests as much. But in this case, the goal itself is imprudent. Worldwide liberal democracy can be a guiding ideal. Anything more than that would strike most conservatives, indeed most Americans, as dangerously utopian.

The domestic implications of McCain's national-greatness conservatism are hazier. But here too, a tendency toward grandiosity can be discerned. McCain comes close to arguing for patriotism not merely as an ideology but as a civil religion. Consider how he praises Gov. Bush: "He wants nothing to divide us into separate nations. Not our color. Not our race. Not our wealth. Not our religion. Not our politics. He wants us to live for America, as one nation, and together profess the American Creed of self-evident truths." To live for America. It's not clear what that means, but it sounds uncomfortably close to idolatry.

There are other passages in the speech that have this sound. It is a religious speech, in fact, though it does not mention God. It doesn't even conclude with the conventional prayer for His blessing. Instead, McCain ends with, "I have such faith in you, my fellow Americans. And I am haunted by the vision of what will be." This bit about being haunted by visions alludes to a passage in Tocqueville that McCain had quoted earlier. But it's still an odd way to end a political speech, especially since it was immediately preceded by an elegant meditation on the speaker's own mortality and America's endurance (its greatness "a quest without end, the object beyond the horizon").

What's really haunting McCain? What is all this doing in a political speech anyway? Perhaps it's serving as a substitute for a more traditional politics of patriotism. McCain presents national greatness as an antidote to multiculturalism, but it may be better to see it as a consequence of multiculturalism. McCain (like Bush) is unwilling to reduce immigration levels, or at least to abolish the racial spoils system or to insist on English as our common language. With our cultural cohesion thus weakened, we must be held together by ideology.

McCain suggests that America's continued existence as a nation depends on its sense of its own greatness and destiny. The truth may be the other way around: America will not sustain its greatness if Americans stop feeling that they belong to a common culture. American principles elevate American patriotism above other countries' patriotisms, but all patriotism begins in the same sentiment of belonging. We love our country for the same reason we love our mother: not because she is great, but because she is ours.

America is a great nation. But it can be great only because it is a nation. And a nation, as McCain inadvertently reminds us, is more than an idea.

from TPDL 2000-Mar-4, from WorldNetDaily, by P. Andrew Sandlin, executive vice president of the Chalcedon Foundation:

John McCain, Mr. Moralist

I'm not enthusiastic about either of the Republican presidential frontrunners, but I am quite less enthusiastic about John McCain than George W. Bush. With Dubya, we basically know what we are getting: The Republican Same. Bush, like his father, is a country-club Republican who will neither champion an activist liberal agenda nor overturn the decisive liberal successes of the last 70 years. What Dubya will give us is a nice president who will nicely preside over a nice liberal democratic society. Bush is passionately committed -- as are all establishment Republicans -- to the dispassionate "don't rock the boat" agenda.

John McCain, the allegedly maverick senator from Arizona, is a horse of a different color. He has a reputation in the Senate for saying surprising things and taking surprising positions. And treating everyone else condescendingly while cussing a lot. There is a good explanation for this. John McCain is a consummate moralist. As George Will pointed out in a recent Newsweek column, it's not enough for McCain to distinguish his position from Dubya's on such issues as abortion, tax cuts and campaign finance "reform." He must always occupy the high moral ground, depicting those who oppose his position as "corrupt." To McCain, almost everybody in Washington is corrupt -- the politicians, the lobbyists, the congressional staffers, and probably even the interns and waitresses and hairdressers. Same goes for Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Corrupt. Tobacco companies? Corrupt. No honest disagreement permitted. The other guys are just plain charlatans, thieves and liars.

And I, John McCain, Mr. Clean with gray hair but sans earring, will dutifully clean it all up.

The only thing worse than an immoralist is a moralist. Immoralists wear their sin on their sleeve. You know pretty much where Hugh Hefner and Charley Manson stand. Moralists, on the other hand, transform their sin into a virtue on the basis of which they launch moral crusades. McCain's support for murderous militaristic interventionism is a prime example. The militaristic interventionists never have the guts to come out and say, for instance, "We want to bomb and incinerate the Serbs -- including innocent civilians -- in Kosovo, and all of you conservative non-interventionists had better get out of our way." We would, at least, appreciate their candor if they put it this plainly. No, they must at all costs assume the moral high ground: "Our refined Western sensibilities cannot abide this thousand-year squabbling in the Balkans. Refusal to support NATO's air strikes evidences a cold-heartedness that does not befit true American patriots and a democratic humanity." This, basically, was McCain's position during the 1999 war in Kosovo. Let it be remembered that he got on the airwaves consistently chiding the Clinton administration for not being more active in bombing people. He wrapped this militaristic interventionism in the most fulsome expression of moral superiority.

The same is true of his much-vaunted program of campaign finance "reform." What is its stated rationale? People shouldn't be permitted to give lots of money to political candidates because it will "corrupt" them. What the little moralistic dictator really means is, "I want to revoke Americans' freedom to say and support what they want, and I will do this under the guise of opposing 'corruption' in Washington." Well, can lots of money corrupt politicians? Of course it can. So can senatorial privilege, the Lincoln bedroom, CNN pollsters, campaign staffers, too many Sunday morning TV appearances, and any book by John Kenneth Galbraith. The great thing about big campaign contributions is that we can keep a close eye on the extent to which they may corrupt the recipients. The problem with other kinds of potential corruption -- like McCain's -- is that it is obscured by high- sounding moral phrases.

Moralists who pose as reformers always frighten me. What they usually want is the power of coercion to wage moral crusades. Power tends to corrupt, Lord Acton wisely uttered, and absolute power corrupts absolutely -- even, one might add, the power to reform. Politicians who lust for "bully pulpits" to "clean up corruption" usually are interested in replacing one form of corruption with another.

The last thing we need is "strong, presidential leadership." Let's chain the president to his explicitly enumerated Constitutional responsibilities and suggest that, like Calvin Coolidge, he take a long nap every afternoon so the country will be a little safer from tyranny emanating from the White House.

Better yet, let's pray that little moralistic dictators like McCain don't get the chance to nap there at all.

from TPDL 2000-Mar-4, from Scripps Howard News Service, by Betsy Hart:

McCain not as ethical as he seemed

(March 3, 2000 5:03 a.m. EST http://www.nandotimes.com) - I've long been with the folks who believe that character counts, especially in our national leaders. That's why I was dismayed when our president behaved disgracefully and many Americans looked the other way, apparently because their stock portfolios were going up nicely.

Conversely, that's why I was pleased when Arizona Sen. John McCain's campaign began to take off in his battle against Gov. George W. Bush for the Republican presidential nomination. His early success said to me that many Americans rightly value a war hero who served and sacrificed for his country, who showed courage under fire. It showed they do care about honor and want someone in the Oval Office we can hold up as a role model and example of America's best.

I myself wanted to be able to support John McCain. I was concerned that too many Republicans were signing up too early with George Bush, a man whose mettle was seemingly untested, simply because they wanted so desperately to win the White House back. I thought perhaps it was McCain who had the record and the stature to be president. In any event, the early and surprising success of the McCain candidacy suggested to me that many Americans are looking for an "anti-Clinton" after all.

But I've sadly concluded people are wrong if they think they will find this ideal in John McCain. Perhaps, given McCain's string of losses in last Tuesday's primaries, his character flaws are already becoming more evident. They should. For it's becoming more and more apparent that John McCain will do anything to win.

First, it was employing the class-warfare rhetoric of the Left on the issue of tax cuts. But this was nothing next to his negative campaigning, the very campaigning McCain claims to eschew. It began with the demonstrably low-blow of comparing George W.'s integrity to Bill Clinton's. Then there was McCain's gratuitously vitriolic and nasty comments in what should have been a gracious concession speech after his loss in South Carolina, a harbinger of worse to come.

That worse turned up in Michigan with McCain's Catholic-baiting in recorded phone calls to Catholic voters there. Come on. Regardless of the theology of the folks at Bob Jones University, and Bush's campaign stop there in the tradition of almost every Republican pursuing votes in South Carolina, does John McCain truly believe that George Bush is really an anti-Catholic bigot as the phone calls clearly implied?

Most audaciously, the McCain campaign, the "Straight Talk Express," denied making the calls. Until, of course, the polls closed in Michigan, at which point the campaign finally admitted the calls had come from them after all.

Hmm. Haven't we just been there/done that with the current occupant of the Oval Office? (Nor was this about-face from "Straight Talk" an isolated incident. Maybe it should be the "Doubletalk Express"?)

But Virginia is where he pulled out all the stops. McCain decided the day before the primary there to attack conservative Christian leaders Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, both of whom enjoy a substantial following among evangelicals, as being at the "outer reaches of American politics."

He was responding to Robertson's own attacks on McCain (not associated with the Bush campaign) in which some of Robertson's rhetoric was over the top. But McCain didn't have the guts to address what might be considered legitimate policy or tactical differences with Robertson and Falwell. No. McCain himself called these successful Christian Right activists "agents of intolerance," comparing them to Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton - men who quite effectively really do preach and incite widespread racial hatred.

But even this wasn't enough for McCain. He had to ratchet it up a day later, going on to call Robertson and Falwell an "evil influence" in the Republican party. "Evil?" The murderers at Columbine were evil. Whatever McCain's differences with Robertson and Falwell, whatever political miscalculation made him think he could win with such gratuitous attacks, it is a sign that he has gone nuclear for him to apply such an appalling epithet to these men. And this from a guy who if elected to the presidency really could go nuclear.

None of this means that suddenly George W. Bush is the perfect presidential candidate. But it does mean that if Republicans really do believe that character matters, they will dump John McCain as a presidential contestant.

Fast.

from TPDL 2000-Feb-25, from NewsMax, by John LeBoutillier:

"Fringe Veteran" Vindicated

"Senator McCain has abandoned the veterans. He came home from Vietnam and forgot us."

No other statement or quotation has caused such controversy in the 2000 presidential campaign. And no other single event was more mis-reported and mis-analyzed than Army Veteran Thomas Burch's analysis of McCain's record at a George W. Bush rally in South Carolina on Feb. 3. And in the aftermath of the South Carolina GOP Primary, no other incident better illustrates the mainstream media's pack mentality that has boosted McCain's candidacy.

Reeling from his 19-point defeat in New Hampshire two days earlier, Bush had surrounded himself with soldiers and veterans at an outdoor rally in Columbia, South Carolina. Among those speaking on his behalf were Congressional Medal of Honor winners and a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Thomas Moorer. But it was retired Army Green Beret Burch's clear and concise attack on McCain's political record that drew instant national attention.

By now it is well known that John McCain rose to fame almost solely because of his five and one-half years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. This part of his life, more than his 17-year congressional record, distinguished him from all the other presidential candidates. Yet he and his defenders in the Senate and in the national news media knee-jerked themselves into convulsions over Burch's remarks, with McCain labeling Burch, in the February 15 debate, "a spokesman for a fringe veteran's group".

The media has marched in lock-step with these "McCain talking points": NBC's Tim Russert two weeks in a row on his "Meet the Press" program has referred to Mr. Burch as a "fringe veteran." Newsweek's Jonathan Alter wrote in last week's issue of Burch as a "fringe veteran." CNN's Steve Roberts decried Burch's attacks on McCain as "the rantings of a fringe veteran." The Wall Street Journal,'s AL Hunt lambasted Burch as a "fringe veteran" on CNN's Capitol Gang adding, "it is just crazy to attack McCain on veterans issues."

How can it be that all these supposedly "independent" news organizations use the exact same language to describe a man none of them had probably ever even heard of before the South Carolina press conference?

In fact, Major Burch's organization, the National Vietnam & Gulf War Veterans Coalition, is hardly a "fringe" outfit. Founded in 1983 as the National Vietnam Veterans Coalition expressly to force the federal government to address the Agent Orange fiasco, the Coalition took the lead in writing the legislation and garnering House and Senate co-sponsors. The Coalition was the only non-chartered veterans organization permitted to testify before the United States House of Representatives.

As Burch says, "Our Coalition was then and is now `cutting edge.' We want results for our veterans `now' - while they're alive. We don't want or need more phony studies and delays."

Tom Burch is a former Green Beret and a member of the Judge Advocate Corps, who served in Vietnam and received the Bronze Star in 1968. He is a past department commander of the Washington D.C. Veterans of Foreign Wars. The VFW, along with the American Legion, is considered the most "mainstream" veteran's group.

Senator McCain and his supporters do not want to address the specific charges made by Burch: that as a representative and a senator, McCain was not cooperative on a range of issues important to veterans:

1) According to Burch, beginning in 1984 when the coalition sought co-sponsors for the Agent Orange bill, John McCain refused to sign on. When Burch and his men asked other members of the House to co-sponsor, these congressmen would invariably ask, "Has John McCain signed on to this bill?" When told that McCain had not it was believed, as often happens on the Hill in matters like this, that McCain was against the bill.

It was only after more than two hundred congress members expressed their support for the bill and final passage was assured that McCain finally agreed to come on board. But McCain's foot-dragging and initial reluctance made the coalition's work much more difficult and delayed the veterans' final victory.

2) In 1988 the coalition led the charge for "Judicial Review," a new system whereby veterans rejected for benefits by the Veterans Administration would have the same right to appeal as Social Security recipients have. Again, the coalition members working the halls of Congress asking for co-sponsors to the bill found McCain in opposition.

The senator from Arizona never signed on.

3) In 1991 when new evidence of living American servicemen missing in Vietnam surfaced, the coalition - in conjunction with those "mainstream" veterans organizations, the VFW and American Legion - led the charge for a Senate Select Committee to investigate whether or not any American POWs were left behind in Southeast Asia and whether some might still be alive. All these veterans groups wanted a senate panel instead of an executive branch panel because no one believed the executive branch could be trusted to investigate itself.

Senator McCain initially opposed the Senate committee. Later, when the Senate ultimately created the panel, McCain was appointed a member.

4) As a member of the Senate POW Committee, McCain "distinguished himself" by repeatedly insulting wives, mothers and children of POWs and MIAs and accusing many veterans groups fighting for the POW cause of "making a living off this issue." He made similar charges in the South Carolina primary when the National Right to Life Committee endorsed Bush: "It is a shame when they take a cause and turn it into a business."

5) Tom Burch's District of Columbia law partner is Adrian Cronauer, made famous by Robin Williams' portrayal in the movie "Good Morning Vietnam." When the presidential campaign was heating up last month, Cronauer asked for a meeting with McCain to discuss veterans' issues. The answer came back from McCain's office: "The Senator says he will not meet with you."

6) And when word leaked out that Tom Burch and the coalition were going to endorse George W. Bush, McCain campaign operative and fellow former POW, Orson Swindle, called Burch and said, "We will destroy you."

The mainstream media rallied to McCain's defense after Tom Burch charged that "John McCain abandoned the veterans." Conventional wisdom was that such an attack was political suicide for the Bush campaign in veteran-rich South Carolina.

But the veterans knew better. In fact, exit polling shows that Bush and McCain were separated by only one percentage point among veterans; McCain won 48% to Bush's 47%. Clearly Major Burch's charges struck home. As one former Republican congressman who served in the House with John McCain and is neutral in this year's campaign said the day after South Carolina, "Maybe the media doesn't know it, but most veterans know that McCain's political record on these issues is a disgrace. Thank God, Tom Burch had the guts to say it."

It is one thing for John McCain to label an opponent a "fringe veteran," it is quite another for the news media to become his erstwhile spokesmen.

from TPDL 2000-Dec-15, from the Conservative News Service:

Presidential Electors Pressured to Abandon Bush

Al Gore may have conceded to President-elect Bush, but a group calling itself "Citizens for a True Democracy" is trying to pressure Republican electors to vote for Gore.

Its Web site, VoteWithAmerica.com, encourages visitors to "make your voice heard by calling, e-mailing, or writing to the electors" to ask that they "vote with America" and elect Gore.

"We have obtained," the Web site's message said, "contact information for 172 electors in 18 states that voted Republican in this election. Most of the targeted states do not legally require their electors to vote for the party's official candidate, meaning that each elector is free to put patriotism above partisanship."

The Web site was set up by David Enrich, a senior at Claremont-McKenna College in Claremont, Calif. In a statement, Enrich said, "Conscientious electors are America's only chance to stop an unfair and anti-democratic institution from overruling the will of the American people. The VoteWithAmerica.com campaign has picked up steam while Gore's legal efforts have gone up in smoke."

Founding Fathers and Constitution Be Damned

Enrich believes there should be campaign finance reform and an abolition of the Electoral College. "Most Americans believe that the popular vote, not the electoral vote, should determine the presidency," he said.

One of the electors being targeted by the group is Frances Sadler, a Bush elector who resides in Ashland, Va. When contacted, Sadler said on a telephone message, "If you are calling about the Electoral College, I am casting my vote for George W. Bush. If you are calling to change my mind, you are wasting your time."

Other electors being targeted to change their votes from Bush to Gore are Wayne MacDonald of Derry, N.H.; Mamon Wright of Memphis, Tenn.; and Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Ariz.

Arpaio said he was not switching his vote either and added, tongue-in-cheek, that being targeted by the group is an "honor and a privilege."

Arpaio says he has received many phone calls and letters encouraging him to vote for Gore, but his mind is already made up.

"I endorsed Bush before it became popular, against my hometown Senator [John] McCain in the primary. Bush came here and asked me for an endorsement and I gave it to him.

"So, why would I break from Bush? So come Monday, I will cast my vote for George W., come Monday at two o'clock, Phoenix time," Arpaio said.

Neither Wright nor MacDonald could be reached for comment.

Anti-Coup Americans Fight Back

The harassment attempt could backfire. Several readers have sent e-mails to NewsMax.com saying they visited VoteWithAmerica.com but changed the message to one of support and sent it to the electors. However, one reader cautioned that people should not send e-mail through that site "as it is very simple for them to affix your e-mail address to their own message and edit out the real message."

Other options are available. At least one Web site - http://shambusters.homepage.com/ElectorHonor.htm - is campaigning to urge the Bush electors to honor their pledge and ignore the harassment.

If two of Bush's 271 electors were to abandon him, there would be a tie. With neither Bush nor Gore having an absolute majority of the 538-member Electoral College, the presidential election would go to the House of Representatives. There, each delegation would cast one vote, and a candidate would need at least 26 votes to win. Republicans control at least 28 House delegations.

Several weeks ago, Gore said in an interview: "I completely disavow any effort to persuade electors to switch their support from the candidate to whom they are pledged. I will not accept the support of any elector pledged to Governor Bush."

On Jan. 6, 2001, Vice President Gore, in his capacity as president of the Senate, will open and count the electoral votes, state by state, before a joint session of Congress. A majority of both chambers can reject any vote found to be improper.

If Republicans wanted to reject a faithless elector, they could do so without any Democrat support in the House because they hold a majority. But in the Senate, where the 100 members are split evenly between Republicans and Democrats, Gore could conceivably cast the tiebreaker in any dispute over an electoral vote.

However, Enrich is adamant. "Though Gore has distanced himself from CTD's efforts, his campaign acknowledges that he will accept victory if electors defect."

Enrich, however, said he did not vote for Gore. "We are not Democrats and we did not vote for Al Gore. VoteWithAmerica.com is based on the simple principle that the candidate that wins the most votes nationally should be the next president. The electors should put patriotism above partisanship."

["he did not vote for Gore": methinks I smell a dyed-red-in-the-wool socialist..]

from TPDL 2000-Sep-26, from the New York Post:

SHAME ON YOU, AL GORE

Al Gore went to Florida to scare the hell out of senior citizens yesterday. Presently the polls will reveal whether the mission was a success - but, in the meantime, the vice president should be ashamed of himself.

Gore's message of the day - of the week, actually - is that he'll save Medicare, a fiscally unsound program meant to provide health care to the nation's elderly. Actually, it will become even less sound as a result of "reforms" now being proposed by the veep.

More about the merits of the scheme - or lack thereof - below. First, a little about the scare tactics.

Gore traveled to St. Petersburg - arguably the nation's retirement capital - and alleged that his Republican opponent, George W. Bush, is pushing a Medicare package that could "run seniors through welfare offices" in order to secure a prescription-drug benefit.

Here's how Associated Press political writer Ron Fournier summed it up:

"Gore's charge, based on self-serving assumptions his staff has made about Bush's plan, caused independent analysts to question whether the vice president was playing racial and class warfare politics to court elderly voters - as well as suburban whites." (Emphasis added.)

Shades of Willie Horton? You betcha - but you shouldn't hold your breath waiting for an eruption of outrage from the mainstream media.

It is heartening, though, to see that somebody is catching on to Gore's class-warfare strategy. That's been the linchpin of his campaign from Day One. At no time has it been more evident than during the past week or so - as the veep did a 180-degree turnaround on energy conservation, championing cheaper petroleum and blaming recent price hikes solely on "Big Oil."

Regarding seniors and health care, Gore has been blaming "Big Pharmaceuticals" (and "Big Managed Care") for all manner of unhappy situations - and promising a "Big Bucks" solution that surely would bankrupt Medicare, if actually enacted.

And, as always, he's talking out of both sides of his face.

He told the gathered seniors yesterday that he would "veto the use of any money from Medicare, other than [on] Medicare" - even though he already has proposed using some $400 billion in short-term program surpluses to help pay down the national debt.

Medicare, as currently constituted, can't survive the projected demands of the Baby Boomers - let alone additional benefits that the politically powerful generation is sure to demand and, doubtless, secure.

Indeed, Gore already is promising an additional $340 billion in prescription-drug benefits - with no spending reductions or program modifications to help mitigate the initiative's impact.

Who, apart from the promise-makers who are crafting his campaign, knows what Gore will propose next?

But promises are easy. Paying for them is the hard part - which Al Gore doesn't seem to care about at all.

from TPDL 2000-Sep-26, from the Los Angeles Times Syndicate via the Houston Chronicle, by Cal Thomas:

Reserve decision is high-octane politics

The definition of strategic, for people interested in such things in the age of Clintonisms, is "necessary to or important in the initiation, conduct or completion of a strategic plan; required for the conduct of war ... of great importance within an integrated whole or to a planned effect."

Tapping into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in an effort to lower fuel oil prices a few pennies in the Northeast five weeks before an election does not have the importance or urgency suggested by the above definition. The decision looks instead like high-octane politics. Naturally, both President Clinton and Al Gore deny such a motivation, but when did they ever acknowledge a political motivation for any action (or inaction)?

Gore continues to accumulate proof that he is more than a standard politician. He is a dishonest man whose thoughts are not his own and whose positions and promises cannot be believed. To paraphrase his former opponent, Bill Bradley, he will lie about anything if it suits his purposes.

Last week, after claiming that "Look for the Union Label" was a childhood lullaby he frequently heard, though it wasn't composed until he was 27 years old, Gore told another fib: "I've been part of the discussions on the strategic reserve since the days when it was first established." But the reserve wasn't established until 1975, and Gore didn't arrive as a congressman until 1977.

Gore has flipped on the use of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to drive down oil prices. Last winter, Gore opposed tapping the reserve because he believed it would lead to retaliation by other oil-producing countries. Of those countries he said, "All they would have to do is to cut back a little bit on the supply, and they'd wipe out any impact from releasing oil from that reserve." If Gore wanted to reduce oil and gas prices, he could propose that fuel taxes added by this administration to balance the budget be rolled back, given the forecast of huge surpluses that Republicans and Democrats are busy spending before they materialize.

Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers opposes raiding the oil reserves. It "would be a major and substantial policy mistake," he says. Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan agrees.

Wall Street Journal columnist Al Hunt quoted a top Gore advisor: "Larry is substantively brilliant, but politically stupid." What was that again about politics having nothing to do with this decision? A Detroit Free Press editorial called the decision a "Bad idea. Bad precedent. Poor policy that seems politically motivated by the man who would be president."

In his environmental manifesto, "Earth in the Balance," Gore writes of his hope to eliminate "the internal combustion engine over, say, a 25-year period." He says he favors higher gas and oil prices (he would drive them up by raising taxes, but the objective is the same) because it is "one of the logical first steps in changing our policies in a manner consistent with a more responsible approach to the environment."

One might expect Gore to be enthusiastic about higher fuel prices this winter because they take him closer to his goal of eliminating the automobile as we have known it. Higher prices would serve as an offering to Gore's environmental gods. But the politics of it won't let him do it. Not yet.

Clinton and Gore may not have the final say on winter fuel prices. That may be up to Iraq's Saddam Hussein. Farouk Kaddoumi, foreign minister for the Palestine Liberation Organization, said last week that Arab nations should again use the "oil weapon," which they have not done since 1973. Saddam has revived his claim that Kuwait is stealing Iraqi oil, the pretense he used to justify his 1990 invasion. But as Holger Jensen of the Rocky Mountain News writes on Scripps Howard News Service: "Saddam doesn't need to invade Kuwait again. He only needs to halt exports of Iraqi oil to send crude oil prices soaring above their current $38 a barrel, causing massive disruptions in the world economy." This would be the ultimate October surprise.

Gore's lies, flips and bad ideas are catching up with him. He is offering George W. Bush the integrity and policy weapons he needs to win the debates.

from TPDL 2000-Sep-26, from the Washington Times, by Donald Lambro:

Gore's reserve boast draws renewed fire

Al Gore's tendency to exaggerate his role in government came under renewed fire yesterday from the Bush campaign and energy experts who said his claim that he helped establish the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is a fairy tale.

"To say that he was involved in the creation of the nation's petroleum reserve is just factually not true. He's becoming the Hans Christian Andersen of American politics," said Dan Sullivan, a spokesman for George W. Bush, the Republican presidential nominee.

"There's definitely a pattern to embellish or exaggerate or make up facts," Mr. Sullivan said.

In the aftermath of the Clinton administration's decision to sell 30 million barrels of oil from the SPR, Mr. Gore defended the action last Friday, saying that he was in on the ground floor when the nation's defense-related Strategic Petroleum Reserve was established by Congress in 1975.

"I've been part of the discussion on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve since the days it was first established," Mr. Gore told reporters.

The Gore campaign said over the weekend, when the controversy over Mr. Gore's statement first erupted, that Mr. Gore was in Congress when the oil reserves were being filled and he was a member of a key committee with oversight of the project.

Gore campaign spokesman Kym Spell said the Strategic Petroleum Reserve was authorized in 1975 but was not funded until two years later, when Gore worked on the project as a member of a House Commerce subcommittee on energy.

In fact, after the oil storage reserve was authorized and signed into law in 1975 two years before Mr. Gore was in Congress it was being filled with oil by the middle of 1977, about five months after he became a member of the House of Representatives.

Energy experts said yesterday that Mr. Gore could not have played any role in the establishment or development of the oil reserve at that point because $760 million had already been appropriated and spent to build the storage facilities and they were in the process of being filled a few months after he was sworn into office.

"It was in the original 1975 legislation to fill it up by 1 billion barrels of oil, and they started filling it on July 21, 1977," said Ed Porter an energy analyst at the American Petroleum Institute.

Other independent analysts also maintained yesterday that Mr. Gore's claim was not true.

"It's just another one of his wonderful fantasy exaggerations," said Angela Antonelli, director of economic policy at the Heritage Foundation.

"The need and the purpose of the petroleum reserve was established before Gore was in Congress," she said. "And regardless what he claims now about the purposes of the petroleum reserve, he stands alone in his attempt to justify this new use of the reserve, which he now claims to make up by asserting, apparently falsely, that he was there at its creation."

Mr. Gore made his claim when he was defending President Clinton's decision to begin selling oil from the reserve in an effort to reduce oil prices rejecting arguments by critics that the reserve was set up for strategic purposes only, not to regulate prices.

The Web site for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve program makes no claims that the program was created to regulate prices and instead calls it "the nation's first line of defense against an interruption in petroleum supplies" and "a significant deterrent to oil import cutoffs and a key tool of foreign policy."

Mr. Bush called the administration's decison to sell off part of the reserve "a political decision" to gain some reduction in oil prices to help Mr. Gore in the final weeks of the presidential campaign.

The Bush campaign stepped up their criticism of the decision yesterday when Colin Powell, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a key Bush adviser, also accused the administration of abusing the strategic reserve for political purposes.

At a news conference yesterday in Richmond, Gen. Powell said Mr. Clinton's decision was politically motivated. "I don't think any decision one could take would not have a political coloration," he said.

With the latest opinion polls showing Mr. Bush's numbers rising and Mr. Gore's falling, Republicans aggressively attacked Mr. Gore's latest statement on the reserve, calling it "another in a long line of exaggerations" and false assertions by the Democratic nominee.

The Republican National Committee dug out and circulated several statements over the weekend by people who have questioned Mr. Gore's honesty in the past.

One statement circulated by the RNC quoted Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the dean of the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School of Communications, who earlier this year questioned Mr. Gore's honesty.

"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," she said in an interview with the Boston Globe last April.

Mr. Gore's claim about his role in the petroleum reserve comes after two weeks of statements that raised similar questions about his credibility.

In one episode he claimed that his mother-in-law paid three times as much for her arthritis prescription drug than Mr. Gore paid for the same drug that his dog takes. It turned out that his numbers were lifted whole from a House Democratic study and that he could not substantiate his story.

Last week he maintained that the union song "Look For The Union Label" was sung to him as a child as a lullaby when, in fact, the TV jingle came out in 1975 when he was 27.

"His lying looks at this point not like a foible but a compulsion," Republican speech writer Peggy Noonan wrote yesterday in an op-ed article in the Wall Street Journal.

from the New York Times, 2000-Aug-18, by David E. Rosenbaum:

Will Issues Be Answer?

WASHINGTON, Aug. 18 -- When he accepted the Republican presidential nomination in Philadelphia two weeks ago, Gov. George W. Bush of Texas skipped lightly over a few issues -- taxes, Social Security, education, nuclear weapons -- and then got to his topic sentence: "We must usher in an era of responsibility."

In Los Angeles on Thursday night, Vice President Al Gore took the opposite approach. Declaring that "the presidency is more than a popularity contest," he said, "I am here to talk seriously about the issues."

And that he did, one issue after another, as if he were delivering a State of the Union address and not speaking to a political convention, so that by the time he finished, there could be no doubt where he stood on virtually every important matter before the federal government.

He favors abortion and homosexual rights, affirmative action, gun control, a higher minimum wage and restrictions on marketing tobacco products. He opposes tuition vouchers for private school students and diverting Social Security taxes into private retirement accounts.

On each of these issues, Mr. Gore and Mr. Bush are on opposite sides.

And, as Mr. Gore pointed out, there is also a stark contrast in what may be the most important issue decided by this year's presidential election: how the government will use the budget surplus, projected by the Congressional Budget Office to be about $4.5 trillion over the next decade.

Both candidates have agreed to earmark the $2.4 trillion in the surplus that will come from Social Security taxes to bolster the Social Security system.

But they would do this in different ways.

Mr. Gore would use all this money to pay down the national debt, the theory being that this would improve the economy and make it easier to pay Social Security benefits after the baby boomers retire. Mr. Bush would use a big chunk of the Social Security surplus to cover the cost of creating private retirement accounts that would be invested in the financial markets.

As for the rest of the surplus, Mr. Gore would spend most of it, and he described how in his acceptance speech: for universal health insurance for children, for prescription drug coverage under Medicare, for medical research, for hiring and training teachers and for environmental protection.

He would also use a relatively small bit for specific tax cuts, mostly to make college tuition tax deductible, to modify the estate tax and to eliminate the tax penalty paid by some married couples.

Mr. Bush, by contrast, would use most of the money not set aside for Social Security for across-the-board tax cuts: lower tax rates for taxpayers at every income level, tax breaks for all married couples regardless of whether they now owe a penalty and a complete elimination of the estate tax, which is owed only on estates worth more than $675,000.

Mr. Bush says he also favors prescription drug coverage for those on Medicare. But he has set no money aside for this initiative, which could cost $250 billion or more between now and 2010, depending on how generous the benefit is.

In his speech, Mr. Gore derided the Bush tax plan. "For every $10 that goes to the wealthiest 1 percent," the vice president asserted, "middle-class families would get one dime. And lower-income families would get one penny."

"In fact," Mr. Gore went on, "if you add it up, the average family would get about enough money to buy one extra Diet Coke a week, about 62 cents and change." (The text Mr. Gore was reading from said "a Diet Coke a day.")

Those figures were developed by Citizens for Tax Justice, a labor-backed research organization. In 1999, the richest 1 percent of Americans were taxpayers with incomes over $319,000. The average income in this segment was $915,000, and the average tax cut under the Bush plan would be $46,072.

Taxpayers with incomes in the middle 20 percent of all taxpayers (40 percent had higher incomes and 40 percent lower) had an average income of $31,100, and their average tax cut would be $453 (less than 10 cents for every $10 saved by the wealthy). By this reckoning, the daily tax cut would be $1.24 -- twice what Mr. Gore suggested, perhaps enough for a bag of chips with the Diet Coke.

The poorest 20 percent of the population, those with incomes below $13,600 would get an average annual tax cut of $42.

The Bush campaign accused Mr. Gore of missing the point. Under the tax plan, said Dan Bartlett, a campaign spokesman, a family of four making $35,000 would have its entire $1,500 tax bill wiped out.

A family of four making $50,000 would have a tax bill of about $4,000 cut to about $2,000. And a family of four with an income of $75,000 would have a 25 percent cut, to about $7,500 from about $10,000.

The Gore and Bush calculations are both accurate. The reason for the different emphases is that the Gore figures counted all taxpayers at particular income levels, single people as well as families. At middle-income levels, families would fare better under the Bush plan than individuals.

Still, there is no dispute that the giant share of the tax cuts under the Republican proposal would go to the wealthy. The question is whether that is fair. Republicans say it is, since the wealthy are the ones who pay most of the taxes to start with. Democrats say it is not, since people that rich can afford what they are paying.

For people who plan to vote for president in November on the basis of where the candidates stand on the issues, the choice will be a clear one. That is true not just on issues like abortion and gun control but also on the economy.

Those who believe that the government should spend most of the surplus to provide better health and education programs will vote for Mr. Gore. And those who want to give the money back in tax cuts will vote for Mr. Bush.

Over the last eight years, Democrats have succeeded when they have been able to reduce the political debate to this binary choice between tax cuts and spending for popular programs. That is exactly what Mr. Gore was trying to do in his acceptance speech, and what Mr. Bush was trying to avoid in his.

from TPDL 2000-Jul-24, from the Orlando Sentinel, by Charley Reese:

Presidential race boils down to respect for the Bill of Rights

I've given up on the Constitution. After all, the Constitution and the republic of sovereign states it created were destroyed in 1865. But I still have some hope for the Bill of Rights, those first 10 amendments.

For that reason, I intend to vote for George W. Bush. He's the only candidate with a chance to win who hasn't indicated that he views the Bill of Rights with utter contempt.

Yes, my conservative friends, I know that Pat Buchanan would make a better president. But Pat isn't going to win. He isn't going to win not because I say he isn't but because an overwhelming majority of Americans don't agree with him. If you think otherwise, then I believe that you are out of touch with your fellow Americans. I suggest you look at the kinds of movies and television programs they patronize by the millions.

At any rate, reality will decide that issue on Nov. 7.

But so far as I can foresee the future, smell the political winds and spot tracks in the jungle, our choice for president is either George W. Bush or Albert Gore. There is a huge difference in these two guys -- true, not on many issues such as trade or big government but on the key issues of respecting the Bill of Rights.

Gore already has said publicly on more than one occasion that he will appoint people to the Supreme Court who won't be bound by the document's original meaning. In other words, Gore's Supreme Court, which would curse the country for decades, would be an anything-goes legislative type of court with a left-liberal agenda.

If Gore is elected, you can kiss your right to own firearms goodbye. What has the Gore-Clinton mob been hollering on this subject?

"If they can do it in Australia and England, we can do it here." And just what did they do in Australia and England?

They confiscated and destroyed practically all the private firearms held by the population.

Don't kid yourself. That's the intention of the Gore crowd: first registration and licensing, then confiscation. Otherwise, there is no point, as no sane criminal is going either to register or apply for a license. What they want is your name, your address and a complete inventory of all your firearms. Then, when they later pass legislation, similar to that already on the books in California, you will be given so many days to surrender your arms or be declared a criminal felon.

And don't think they will be satisfied with effectively repealing the Second Amendment. They will go after speech, the press, religion and protection from search and seizure. Already the Federal Bureau of Investigation has placed, with court authorization, a software sniffer program on an Internet service provider that scans all the e-mail that flows through it. The results of the scan are not available to the provider nor is the provider allowed to notify its customers that the FBI is monitoring all e-mail.

The Gore-Clinton crowd has been insistent that the federal government should have a key to all private encryption. It has authorized searches of public housing for firearms -- without a warrant -- as if the residents of public housing were not entitled to a Bill of Rights.

It will go after hate-speech laws, which will make private thoughts criminal. Nothing is more of an abomination to the First Amendment than for the government to criminalize people's thoughts and opinions. Several European countries have already done this. If you, for example, disagree with the orthodox version of the Holocaust, in Germany or France, you can be sent to prison.

As Thomas Jefferson and James Madison both said, however, the only way to maintain freedom is to be tolerant of error. People have a right to be wrong or mistaken.

A vote for Gore is a vote against liberty.

from TPDL 2000-Aug-18, from the Associated Press via the New York Post:

TRUTH BE TOLD, AL TWISTED THE FACTS

LOS ANGELES - Some of Al Gore's factual claims last night fell short of giving voters a complete picture of his campaign proposals and those of his opponent.

Gore alluded in his acceptance speech to efforts to eliminate the estate tax and the "marriage penalty."

Gore said he favors these cuts. But the Democrats support much more narrow changes than the high-profile Republican proposals.

Gore said he wants to "reform the estate tax, so people can pass on a small business or a family farm."

But the estate tax already exempts almost all small businesses and family farms. At issue is whether to eliminate it for the top 2 percent of heirs.

Similarly, Gore said he wanted to end the marriage penalty "the right way, the fair way."

By that, he means it should be eliminated only for poor- and middle-class families. Republicans would give tax breaks to all married couples, including those - typically with one principal wage-earner - who already pay less than they would if they were single.

Gore pledged to take on such monied interests as insurers and pharmaceutical companies, which he said control the Republican party.

He didn't mention that his running mate, Joseph Lieberman, is among Congress' biggest recipients of money from both insurers ($197,419 this election) and drug makers ($84,550).

In attacking proposals of Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush, Gore again left out some details:

* He said: "Their plan tells seniors to beg the HMOs and insurance companies for prescription drug coverage." In fact, Bush proposes that the government give low-income elderly people prescription drug coverage under Medicare. Bush promises to give the rest the right to sign up for a plan that offers coverage.

* He characterized Bush's Social Security plan as one that would "strip one out of every $6 from the Social Security Trust Fund." That would happen only if every worker took Bush up on his offer to put about one in $6 of their Social Security taxes into a private retirement account.

from TPDL 2000-Aug-8, from the Florida Times-Union 2000-Aug-5, by John R. Port, training consultant, Jacksonville Beach (a reader):

DEMOCRATS: Reassess credibility of Al Gore

It is disgusting to watch the Democrats feverishly fight to retain power with focus-group-driven lies and demagoguery.

In an attempt to perpetuate their unpopular philosophy of an ever-expanding central government, it is imperative to portray opponents of this socialistic perspective as buddies of business while claiming to "speak for the people."

Even a cursory examination of these absurd attacks reveals a party willing to say anything to remain entrenched in power.

Al Gore claims that allowing taxpayers to control 2 percent of their Social Security contribution is "catastrophic." We get less than a 2 percent return on these contributions with a 40-year time horizon. The only thing catastrophic is the federal mismanagement of these funds and the inclusion of this money into annual spending, as voted by a Democrat-controlled Congress.

Democrats love to claim that their opponents vote to "cut education," as if any parent, Republican or Democrat, opposes quality education. The truth is that Republicans believe that our kids benefit the most from funding and intervention at the local level.

The inability of the Department of Education to account for much of its spending, beyond the excessive administrative costs, clearly reinforces the advantage of local control over education.

Gore now claims that the belief that Americans should have the right to own a gun for protection "threatens the welfare of our children." The facts are that this administration has prosecuted about two dozen of the tens of thousands of school gun violations during its terms.

Most relevant to the safety of our children, the Clinton administration has facilitated the transfer of nuclear and missile technology to the Communists who will now be able to target America decades sooner. I am sure that it is just coincident to the illegal campaign funds that materialized in Democratic coffers from this same government.

It is incomprehensible that Clinton and Gore would repeatedly lie to the nation, yet they would accurately portray the positions of their political foes. Perhaps it is time for Gore supporters to reassess the credibility of their candidate.

from TPDL 2000-Aug-18, from the Wall Street Journal opinion pages, by Peggy Noonan:

Banal, Boilerplate Boob-Bait Pundits say we saw the "real Gore" last night.
If so, the real Gore is a loser.

Al Gore's acceptance speech was a rhetorical failure and, in my view, a strategic blunder of significant proportions.

It failed as rhetoric not, as his defenders quickly claimed, because it lacked "poetry" and "song," but because it lacked thought. It was relentlessly banal and formulaic, its sound shaped not by the simple speech of the honest man but by a reflexive politico-bureaucratese: "The future should belong to everyone in this land. . . . We're entering a new time. We're electing a new president. . . . In our democracy, the future is not something that just happens to us, it's something that we make for ourselves together."

It was boilerplate boob-bait punctuated by tired vows. It has been called specific but was only declarative--specific only in the way a shopping list is. Would that seasoning, even just a bit of pepper, had been on the list.

It seemed written by a committee of second-tier communications aides, but Mr. Gore says he wrote it, and we must take him at his word. It certainly didn't have much Shrum in it. I had imagined reading it with reporters and producers when the text was released before it was delivered and, finding a word that's just right or a passage in which thought was linked to feeling, shouting with delight, "Shrummy! Page three, graf seven, Shrum strikes!" But Bob Shrum, the fabled Democratic speechwriter, did not strike--or, if he did, it was perhaps in the second way in which the speech failed, its seeming strategic miscalculation.

Mr. Gore's speech seemed to aim purely at his base, at the left of his party and the more leftward part of the electorate. The text hit every liberal pleasure point--from creation of a national health care service to affirmative action to no school vouchers to a woman's right to abortion to a federal pre-school daycare system to class warfare featuring greedy polluting nicotine-head oil-company gangsters vs. decent people like you and me.

It was unleavened by any hint of doubt and unshaded by the assumption that decent people can disagree. It was, in short, amazingly . . . retro. It sounded not at all like what one might have expected--a post-Clinton era rallying cry informed by the insights of the Democratic Leadership Council, and brought to a new level in the new century.

Instead it sounded like Walter Mondale in 1984, or Teddy Kennedy in 1980, or even Hubert Humphrey in 1968. It sounded like something untouched by the history of the past 15 years or so. It sounded like something Rep. Maxine Waters would like. It was playing to the base in a way that seems so narrow, so constricting and unsophisticated that it has left me full of questions I did not expect to be asking at the end of the Democratic National Convention.

Why would Al Gore on his big night play to the left of his party, and ignore most of the assumptions and views of the middle--of independents and Republicans who are still looking around, of McCain people and young professionals?

Because he had to forestall the threat of Ralph Nader on the left and Buchanan on the blue collar-protectionist right?

Because he believes he doesn't really have his base, even now, and must win it?

Because he thinks he can, in the coming weeks and months, pivot to the center, hoping no one will remember his acceptance speech? Was the speech therefore brilliantly boring in that it effectively communicated to the left in such an unmemorable way that no normal person could be expected to remember any of it? Was it deliberately boring as a tactical matter--that is, did he anticipate that America would turn it off 14 minutes in, while the left would like it and remember it?

Or, as some are asking, does he think he's going to lose, and if you're going to lose you might as well lose standing for something? But if he thought he was going to lose, why did he choose Joe Lieberman?

In the entire speech Mr. Gore mentioned Bill Clinton only once, at the very beginning of his speech. He used the word "future" 12 times. By contrast, in his 1988 acceptance speech Vice President George Bush mentioned Ronald Reagan three times by name and devoted several paragraphs to a discussion of the Reagan-Bush administration's accomplishments. Mr. Bush admired and respected Mr. Reagan and sought to be associated with him.

Clearly in this speech Mr. Gore sought to break from Mr. Clinton, and he at least achieved that. All of those wholesome family films and speeches by family members conveyed the message: I am not a weirdo like Clinton. But to break with Mr. Clinton, was it necessary also to break with the DLC insights Mr. Gore once cared so much for, and to return to the old Mondale-era sound and reality of the Democratic Party?

I don't know the answers to these questions, and I suppose time will reveal them--or whether the questions were the right ones.

But I must tell you that right after the speech I did some talking-head commentary and tried to express my disappointment, and was told by pols and pundits alike that "this is the real Gore," and that we should feel some satisfaction that he showed us who he is. Well, if that's who Mr. Gore is, he's a loser.

from TPDL 2000-Aug-15, from the Washington Times:

The Democratic platform

Like its standard-bearer, presidential candidate Al Gore, the Democratic Party's platform, which was made public yesterday, has great difficulty not only telling the difference between fact and fiction - but also telling the truth. So dominated by the lowered moral standards of the Clinton years has the party become that no one seems to think twice about shading, twisting or simply ignoring the facts. As has often been pointed out by his political opponent, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, Mr. Gore will say anything to get elected. Well, here it all is, in black and white.

In its approach to what is arguably the nation's most pressing domestic problem - the lack of basic skills among large segments of the potential work force - the platform first inexplicably, proudly, recalls the Big Lie that John F. Kennedy popularized in 1960 when he was nominated in Los Angeles as the Democratic presidential candidate - and then offers another Big Lie to address the current problem.

"Forty years ago," Mr. Gore's document intones, "the Democratic platform discussed a Missile Gap," an assertion that Mr. Kennedy certainly knew to be false. "Today, too many Americans face an Opportunity Gap, a lack of the skills they need to be competitive in the global economy." True enough this time, but Mr. Gore's ferocious opposition to school vouchers for poor students condemned to the failed public school system in the nation's great cities will no more close the Opportunity Gap than Mr. Kennedy's razor-thin election eliminated a Missile Gap that never existed in the first place. Interestingly, elsewhere on the education front, the platform extols the fact that "Pell grants are at their highest level ever" - intentionally ignoring the fact that Pell Grants are nothing more than college-tuition vouchers for the poor.

Following eight years in which the Clinton-Gore administration has decimated the nation's defense budget, the 2000 platform audaciously asserts, "Al Gore and the Democratic Party will make sure that our armed forces face any future conflict from a posture of dominance." However, the document makes it clear that Mr. Gore is more interested in "ensuring that any [national missile defense] system is compatible with the Antiballistic Missile Treaty," a relic from the Cold War that would severely limit the extent to which an anti-missile system could defend the nation.

Addressing the economy, the Democratic platform repeats the lie that "slow growth had turned into no growth" by the end of the Bush administration. In fact, the economy the Clinton-Gore administration inherited in 1993 had grown by 3.5 percent the previous year with little inflation. Nor would a reader of the Democratic platform realize that one of the world's greatest bull markets in history effectively began after Republicans gained control of Congress on Nov. 8, 1994 - the day, by the way, when long-term interest rates peaked.

The Democratic platform pledges to "fix the marriage penalty so that parents can spend more time at home and less time trying to make ends meet." But didn't President Clinton, with Mr. Gore's enthusiastic support, just veto a bipartisan bill that would have eliminated the marriage penalty?

With U.S. oil production now at its lowest level in decades, a fact that has made the American economy far more dependent on imported oil than it was during the oil crises of the 1970s and early 1980s, the platform proudly declares that "Al Gore is committed to . . . protecting the coasts of California and Florida and the [Alaskan] Arctic Wildlife Refuge from oil and gas drilling." Irresponsible in the extreme, Mr. Gore's short-term energy policy amounts to nothing more than a crusade against Big Oil, a campaign that will do nothing to alleviate America's growing dependence upon foreign oil.

The platform promises to "reform the labor laws to protect workers' rights to exercise their voices." But it says nothing, of course, about eliminating Big Labor's practice of funneling millions of dollars of mandatory union dues from Republican-voting union members into the Democratic Party's coffers.

Regarding its strategy for "fighting the scourge of drugs," the platform implores citizens to "send a strong message to every American child: Drugs are wrong and drugs can kill you." Unmentioned, of course, is the fact that during the eight years of the Clinton-Gore administration the level of drug use by American children has soared. The platform also declares, "Al Gore is committed to dramatically reducing teen smoking in America" - never mind that teen smoking has dramatically increased during the Clinton-Gore administration.

Will the American people believe any of this? After the experience of having Mr. Gore's mentor, President Clinton, look them straight in the eye and lie outright about his affair with a White House intern, Americans should know to treat anything coming from Democrats with the skepticism it deserves.

from TPDL 2000-Aug-15, from the Los Angeles Times Syndicate via the Houston Chronicle, by Cal Thomas:

Al Gore's 1968 problem

LOS ANGELES -- Democrats and the media are waxing nostalgic about the last convention they held here in 1960. But the better comparison would be 1968 in Chicago.

Then, Vice President Hubert Humphrey waited until it was too late before separating himself from the Vietnam War policies of Lyndon Johnson, who declined to seek "another term as your president" because of falling poll numbers and an insurgent campaign run by Sen. Eugene McCarthy.

Gore is now faced with precisely the dilemma, if not the circumstances, that Humphrey confronted. Humphrey needed to demonstrate independence in order to persuade voters that he was not Lyndon Johnson. But by the belated time he criticized Johnson's conduct of the war, his break with LBJ had lost whatever political appeal it might have had, had he separated himself, possibly even resigned, earlier.

Now, it is Al Gore's turn in the Humphrey spot. Gore has been the vice president closest to his boss in modern times. According to President Clinton, Gore has been intimately involved in decision-making, often accepting assignments and developing policy strategies on his own. Everywhere Clinton went, Gore was sure to go (with a few exceptions). One rarely sees a Rose Garden picture of the president without also seeing Gore standing, woodenly, just behind him.

It has been this way all of Gore's life. He relied on the "kindness of strangers" and a lot of powerful and influential friends and family members, who groomed him from the political manor in which he was born. His life has been one of privilege and entitlement. When forced to take stands -- be it on abortion or the Persian Gulf War -- he did at the time what seemed best for his career, later changing positions if that helped him advance toward the White House. His convictions have the depth of floor wax because he will change them at the drop of a poll or focus group.

Gore has also been a close part of "the most ethical administration in history," the standard set by none other than Bill Clinton, and now the standard by which Gore must be measured. Did Gore ever raise objections to the campaign fund-raising strategy that sold the Lincoln Bedroom and the honor and integrity of the White House? How could he? He was part of it. Did Humphrey at any time object to Johnson's prosecution of the Vietnam War and that president's egomaniacal rationale for not quitting it? This is an important question because it gets to the heart of Gore's (and Humphrey's) judgment.

If, when presented with a supreme ethical dilemma, you make decisions based on your personal goals -- and not what is best for the country -- the voters need to know.

Just as Humphrey found it impossible to separate himself from Johnson in 1968, so, too, will Gore find it extremely difficult to split from Clinton, a man he called on impeachment day one of our "greatest" presidents.

A lengthy New York Times editorial Sunday expressed liberals' concern for Gore's problem. It said, "in a personal declaration of independence, (Gore) should promise to provide a standard of White House behavior that would not require either public lying or public confessions by the chief executive." The editorial continued: "(Gore's) early waffling on gun control and abortion financing, his exaggerations about Mr. Clinton's place in history and his evasions about White House fund-raising all cast doubt on the steadiness of his convictions and identity." This is from a paper that favors Gore over Bush and is likely to endorse him for president. In the words of JFK, "We can do better."

If voters consider what this administration has done to mock the law, trample the Constitution and repeatedly lie, most, it is to be hoped, will not wish to compound the problems of Clinton-Gore by rewarding Gore. He will have to continue the cover-up of his administration's deceit, in which he was at best a silent partner and at worst a full participant.

Hubert Humphrey would understand Gore's quandary.

from TPDL 2000-Feb-29, from the Washington Times:

Al Gore's problem with the truth

It may seem that Vice President Gore has taken the clue from his boss when it comes to finessing the truth. However, the fact is that Mr. Gore was lying long before he ever teamed up with Bill Clinton. Indeed, during Mr. Gore's ill-fated 1987-1988 pursuit of the Democratic presidential nomination, his own staffers twice admonished him in writing to tell the truth now that the national media was following his words. His press secretary told Mr. Gore his image "may continue to suffer if you continue to go out on a limb with remarks that may be impossible to back up." Later, his communications director told Mr. Gore in a memo, "Your main pitfall is exaggeration."

Mr. Gore fibbed when he told the Des Moines Register that his stint as an investigative reporter at the Nashville Tennessean "got a bunch of people indicted and sent to jail." In fact, as the newspaper acknowledged, nobody went to jail. For years Mr. Gore greatly exaggerated the danger he faced in Vietnam, where bodyguards were assigned to protect him. He lied when he claimed that Harvard professor Erich Segal used him and Tipper as the models for "Love Story." And Mr. Gore, of course, lied when he asserted that, as a congressman, he "took the initiative in creating the Internet." In fact, the Internet was created years before Mr. Gore entered Congress. Mr. Gore lied when he claimed to be a co-sponsor of the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform bill. As it happens, Mr. Feingold wasn't even in the Senate when Mr. Gore represented Tennessee there. Mr. Gore lied when he said it was he who "found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal" and "had the first hearing on that issue . . . that started it all." In fact, President Carter had declared Love Canal a disaster area months before Mr. Gore's hearing. "I live on a farm today," Mr. Gore tells people, when, in fact, he resides at the Naval Observatory. Mr. Gore has repeatedly lied about his evolving position on abortion.

Mr. Gore doesn't just lie to reporters or during debates. During his 1996 speech before the Democratic National Convention, Mr. Gore brazenly lied to a national audience about the impact the 1984 smoking-related death of his younger sister had upon him. "That is why until I draw my last breath I will pour my heart and soul into the cause of protecting our children from the dangers of smoking," Mr. Gore declared, conveniently forgetting that the Gore family continued to grow tobacco on the family farm for years after his sister's death and for decades after the surgeon general's 1964 warning about smoking. Indeed, Mr. Gore accepted thousands of dollars from tobacco political action committees after his sister died, and in 1988 he bragged to North Carolina tobacco farmers about his wonderful experience farming tobacco.

The man who introduced "no controlling legal authority" into the political lexicon has not shied away from lying about his role in the 1996 campaign-finance scandal. Mr. Gore's office insisted the political shakedown at the California Buddhist temple in 1996 was not a fund-raiser but merely "community outreach." Later, as evidence mounted, the afternoon was described as "political outreach." Still later, it was a "finance-related event." Mr. Gore also apparently lied when he said he did not know that the money he raised from his White House telephone calls was divided into both hard- and soft-money accounts. Memos and notes later surfaced contradicting Mr. Gore.

"Why should we believe that you will tell the truth as president if you don't tell the truth as a candidate?" Bill Bradley asked Mr. Gore at the Jan. 26 debate between the two. The best thing that can be said about Mr. Gore's refusal to answer Mr. Bradley's highly pertinent question is that he has not added still more lies to his mountain of mendacity.

from TPDL 2000-Mar-22, from Accuracy in Media via NewsMax, by Reed Irvine:

The Seventeen Lies of Al Gore

(1) His use of marijuana was "rare and infrequent."

(2) He didn't know the Buddhist temple event was a fund raiser.

(3) He didn't know that fund raising calls from his office were illegal.

(4) He has always been pro-choice.

(5) He has never said anything in the campaign that he knew to be untrue.

(6) He was co-sponsor of the McCain/Feingold campaign finance reform bill in the Senate.

(7) He took the initiative in creating the Internet.

(8) He and Tipper were models for "Love Story."

(9) He uncovered the pollution at Love Canal.

(10) His reporting for the Nashville Tennessean "got a bunch of people indicted and sent to jail."

(11) His views on the Vietnam War were written into Hubert Humphrey's speech to the 1968 Democratic National Convention by a journalist who had interviewed him.

(12) His claim that, as an army reporter in Vietnam, "I pulled my turn on the perimeter at night and walked through the elephant grass and was fired upon."

(13) One reason he enlisted and went to Vietnam was to spare some other family the agony of sending a son.

(14) He had been a small businessman and a homebuilder, helping develop a subdivision on his father's land in 1969.

(15) He is responsible for the "one-click-away" tool that helps parents block, filter or monitor Internet content to protect their children.

(16) He was taught how to clean out hog waste, how to clear land with a double-bladed ax and how to plow steep hillsides with a team of mules.

(17) His claim at the Des Moines Register offices in January that he bought his own farm when he came back from Vietnam and that he has owned and operated it for 26 years. [This is the 80 acres Hammer sold to his father on which he has collected $20,000 a year in mining royalties since 1974.]

from TPDL 2000-Aug-15, from the Wall Street Journal, by Helene Cooper:

Gore Faces Embarrassing Protests About Family's Occidental Shares

LOS ANGELES -- For the past six months, Vice President Al Gore and his representatives have engaged in quiet talks with environmental activists over the activists' demands that Mr. Gore shed his family's shares in Occidental Petroleum Corp.

Occidental is seeking to drill on land claimed by the 5,000-member indigenous U'wa tribe in Colombia. The U'wa have vowed to walk off a 1,400-foot cliff in the Andes if Occidental drills on the land, which they consider sacred.

The issue, which has dogged Mr. Gore throughout the presidential campaign season, will come to a head Monday when thousands of activists plan to take to the streets outside the Democratic Convention here to protest Occidental's plans.

So far, Mr. Gore has refused to sell the Occidental shares, which his May 22 public financial disclosure report valued at between $500,000 and $1 million.

The shares originally belonged to Mr. Gore's father, Albert Gore Sr., who died in 1998, and are part of a trust for Mr. Gore's mother, Pauline, a Gore spokesman said Sunday.

Although Mr. Gore is the executor of his father's estate, which still includes the shares, "Al Gore does not own shares in Occidental," the spokesman, Doug Hattaway, said.

The issue threatens to embarrass Mr. Gore, who has made environmental protection a centerpiece of his campaign. Indeed, on Saturday, Mr. Gore visited the Springdale, Pa., home of Rachel Carson, whose 1962 book, "Silent Spring," brought environmental concerns to the forefront.

The environmental activists, who also want Mr. Gore to issue a statement condemning Occidental's plans to drill, say Mr. Gore's refusal so far to shed the shares means that Monday's planned protest against Occidental will become a protest against the presumed Democratic presidential candidate.

The activists reject Mr. Gore's argument that he can't unload the stock because it belongs to his mother. "This is rubbish in my mind," says Steve Kretzmann, a consultant with Amazon Watch who has been in talks with Mr. Gore and his representatives. "He's the executor of the estate. "

Already, Republicans are seizing on the chance to criticize Gore ties to Occidental. A Republican television ad that began airing last Tuesday in key battleground states criticizes Mr. Gore for receiving royalty payments from a zinc-mining operation on Gore land in Tennessee that has been cited for polluting a nearby river. Albert Gore Sr. purchased the land in 1973 from an Occidental subsidiary and sold it to his son a year later.

For years, the senior Mr. Gore maintained a close business relationship with Occidental founder and Chief Executive Armand Hammer. When he left the Senate in 1970, Mr. Gore Sr. went to work for an Occidental subsidiary and took a seat on Occidental's board of directors.

The talks between the vice president's representatives and the environmentalists began back in February after activists started an intense campaign of heckling and demonstrating at Gore rallies and outside Gore regional campaign headquarters.

A handful of demonstrators crashed a Gore campaign speech in Oakland, Calif., and started chanting about the U'wa. Mr. Gore responded then that he would meet with the activists afterwards if they stopped interrupting his speech. He met with a handful of demonstrators for about 20 minutes, and told them to call the office of his chief foreign-policy adviser, Leon Fuerth.

The two sides spoke five or six times in late February, according to Mr. Kretzmann of Amazon Watch. The environmentalists said they would stop heckling Mr. Gore if he sold the shares and produced a statement criticizing Occidental. The Gore camp balked, the activists say. The talks fell apart in March.

Talks began again three weeks ago when Mr. Kretzmann saw Katie McGinty, Mr. Gore's chief environmental adviser, at an environmental forum in Washington. He approached her and asked to talk about the U'wa issue. The two had three subsequent conversations on the phone, ending last Wednesday, but failed to agree.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reported that Dick Cheney, the Republican vice presidential nominee, got a break on his retirement settlement from Halliburton Co., of which he was chief executive before accepting the nomination. According to Securities and Exchange Commission filings, Mr. Cheney in 1995 received restricted shares now worth about $10.2 million and is due stock options now worth about $12 million.

Those benefits might have been in jeopardy because Mr. Cheney took early retirement to join Gov. George W. Bush's ticket. But Halliburton has said the company's board voted to allow Mr. Cheney tto retire with full benefits.

from TPDL 2000-Apr-29, from Insight Magazine, by John Elvin:

Gore Family Ties

The connections between the late industrialist and Soviet agent Armand Hammer and the Gore family run long and deep - and they continue to haunt Al Gore Jr.

Why should anyone care, at this late date, about Vice President Al Gore's relationship with philanthropist-industrialist Armand Hammer, a wealthy, globe-trotting dabbler in diplomacy who died eight years ago? Well, of course, there is the small matter that Hammer was a top-shelf Soviet agent, but he might not have mentioned that to Gore.

And there's more. ``Al Gore's relationship to the late Armand Hammer and Occidental Petroleum is important for many reasons,'' according to Charles Lewis, director of the Center for Public Integrity and author of The Buying of the President 2000. Lewis tells Insight: ``There is no U.S. company that Gore is closer to, financially or socially, than Occidental, one of the most controversial in America. It was Occidental, via Hooker Chemical, that brought us Love Canal in the 1970s. The configuration of the vice president, Al `Earth in the Balance' Gore, with an oil company is more than a little surprising.''

Does this mean that Gore's highly touted environmentalism is tainted with oil? Actually oil, coal and zinc, but the biggest taint was Hammer himself. It's a matter about which the vice president is more than a little sensitive.

The experience of Bob Zelnick, a veteran ABC News correspondent, might be instructive to anyone delving into the links. Zelnick was warned off from reporting the Hammer-Gore connection when he commenced writing his book, Gore, A Political Life. Zelnick was told in no uncertain terms by Gore staffers that the vice president would ``personally resent'' intrusions by the reporter into his family affairs and that Gore was ``extremely sensitive'' about the Hammer connection. But the reporter pursued his subject despite resistance by the Gore camp. Then, with the book nearing completion, he was told by ABC that unless he dropped the project his newscasting contract would not be renewed.

Such an ultimatum is extraordinarily rare; usually, media employers are pleased when one of their own be-comes an author - as a result they benefit by association. Instead, Zelnick not only was warned off but was fired when he refused to cave.

The reason for ABC's action, Zelnick was told in a memo from his boss, David Westin, was that the network could be ``held up to ridicule that our reporting is influenced by views you/we have formed about the individual covered.'' This was a smoke screen that could be dispersed quicker than you could say ``Sam Donaldson,'' Zelnick decided, knowing that ABC's Donaldson had written and commented extensively about individuals he covered. Believing that the real reason was ideological, Zelnick left ABC for academe.

After all that fuss, Zelnick presented a passable account of the Gore-Hammer relationship but gave credit for the material mainly to Edward Jay Epstein's Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer. The connections revealed by Epstein include Hammer's cultivation of Albert Gore Sr., a fiddle-playing hill-country tobacco farmer of grand ambition who rose to become an influential U.S. senator from Tennessee.

The elder Gore made many a mark upon the American landscape in the course of his career; he was a kingpin in the establishment of the mighty Tennessee Valley Authority, or TVA, effort to socialize electrical power and a sponsor of the $50 billion National Highway Defense Act of 1956, the largest public-works project ever undertaken. He initially acquired substantial wealth as Hammer's partner in the cattle business.

Zelnick notes that, while receiving prize Angus stock from Hammer on the one hand, Gore Sr. at the same time auctioned off portions of his herd - reportedly at outrageously high prices - to lobbyists and others who wanted his attention. Sometimes, according to local accounts, purchasers didn't even bother to pick up the livestock they had bought. The author quotes former Tennessee Gov. Ned McWherter, a staunch Gore ally: ``I've sold some Angus in my time, too, but I never got the kind of prices for my cattle that the Gores got for theirs.''

According to scholars who have reviewed Gore Sr.'s archived letters at the University of Tennessee, the senator did many favors for Hammer over the years, intervening when U.S. policies conflicted with Hammer's international wheeler-dealing. ``Through the 1950s and well into the following decade, Hammer counted on Gore as his principal link to the Democratic congressional leadership, and to defend his economic interests,'' writes Zelnick.

Another source familiar with Hammer, Neil Lyndon, a former personal assistant who helped compile the last in a string of authorized and, critics say, largely fictive biographies or autobiographies of Hammer, says the younger Gore and Hammer engaged in a ``profound and prolonged involvement'' as social and political cronies. Lyndon credits Gore Sr. with arranging the meeting that propelled puny Occidental Petroleum from a tiny holding with two wells into a major player.

``As [a member] of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Gore [Sr.] used his influence on the U.S. ambassador in Libya to arrange a meeting between Hammer and King Idris,'' then ruler of Libya. Lyndon says Hammer bribed the old king and a few ministers with slightly more than $5 million and gained a concession that ultimately would yield $7.5 billion per year in oil revenues. ``Al Gore Sr. was at Hammer's side on the day he paraded King Idris up a red carpet laid on the desert to open the new field.''

It was on advice from Sen. Gore that President Kennedy appointed Hammer as an economic emissary of the Commerce Department and sent him to the United Kingdom, France, West Germany, Italy, Libya, India, Japan and the Soviet Union. This was going on even as Hammer devoted no small amount of energy to his clandestine role as a Soviet agent, shuffling money back and forth between Russia and the United States.

Was the U.S. intelligence community asleep at the wheel? Actually, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had been observing Hammer's operations since the 1920s and was well-aware of his role as a Soviet agent, but Hoover also was aware of the political realities. During the Franklin Roosevelt administration, when Hoover was gathering power and building the FBI into a first-class investigative agency, Hammer was all but invulnerable due to close ties as a White House regular and benefactor of Eleanor Roosevelt. Later, Gore Sr. chaired the Senate committee overseeing FBI activities. Through Gore and other top Washington connections, Hammer continued to checkmate Hoover.

``Hammer was involved in any number of dubious dealings all over the world,'' Lewis tells Insight. ``He was personally close to both Al Jr. and his father, who was paid $500,000 by Occidental upon losing his Senate seat.'' In fact, as president of Occidental's Island Creek coal division and a member of Occidental's board of directors, Gore Sr.'s salary was reported as $750,000 per year back in the days when three-quarters of a million dollars was real money. Island Creek was at the time the third-largest coal producer in the United States.

Once free of Hammer's payroll, Lyndon tore a fairly large chunk out of the hand that had fed him, terming his former boss ``one of the [last] century's most sinister figures,'' as well as ``the godfather of American corruption'' who ``bribed and suborned elected representatives at all levels of American life, from city assemblymen and mayors to presidents.'' Lyndon said in an article in London's Sunday Review that Hammer liked to claim he had Gore Sr. ``in my back pocket,'' patting his wallet with a chuckle.

During the time he worked for Hammer, authorized biographer Lyndon says, Gore Jr. often dined with his father's patron in the company of Occidental's ``lobbyists and fixers who, on Hammer's behest, hosed tens of millions of dollars in bribes and favors into the political world.'' As for Gore's orchestration of VIP treatment for Hammer during the Bush inauguration, Lyndon asks: ``Why did Gore Jr. allow himself to be so closely embroiled in a compromising connection with such an unalloyed crook? He had little choice. He inherited from his father the mantle of being Hammer's principal boy in Washington. Gore's father effectively delivered his son into Armand Hammer's back pocket.''

That would be an example of the more forthright ways that Hammer did business with politicians. He also apparently was quite comfortable with covert dealings. In 1972, one of his operatives provided $54,000 in laundered $100 bills to Nixon fund-raiser Maurice Stans, a maneuver that resulted in Hammer's conviction on three counts of making illegal campaign contributions. President Bush pardoned him in 1989 for that lapse in covering his tracks.

Earlier, Gore Jr. engineered Hammer into a section reserved for senators at Ronald Reagan's 1981 inauguration. Reagan had been warned that Hammer was a Soviet agent and ignored Hammer's attempts to greet him. And Reagan became one of the few presidents who evaded Hammer's inroads, though he couldn't totally ignore the philanthropist's contributions to causes such as Nancy Reagan's White House redecoration fund. He did not grant Hammer's persistent pleas for a pardon for the Watergate Era misdemeanor convictions, and he didn't appoint Hammer to any prestigious boards or committees. But Reagan did provide some cagey recognition in a note allowing that he valued Hammer's ``insights on our policy toward the Soviet Union.''

It would seem that Reagan was well-aware that he was thanking the fox for advice on protecting the henhouse. Sources tell Insight that, in the 1980s, then-president Reagan asked international journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave about Hammer at a dinner in Los Angeles. ``Reagan had just read Arnaud's book, The Spike, containing descriptions of the different types of Soviet agents,'' according to one of the sources familiar with the story. ``Arnaud described Hammer as a Soviet agent of influence. Reagan said, `I've known that, but I wanted to get it from somebody who really knows.'''

Over the years, Hammer's family and corporations gained influence by contributing to the max to Gore Jr.'s campaigns, and the pair appeared together in several national and international events, such as the gathering of Physicians Against Nuclear War in Moscow in 1987. From the time Gore became a vice-presidential candidate, Occidental has given more than $470,000 to various Democratic committees and causes, according to Lewis in The Buying of the President 2000. Ray Irani, current Occidental chief executive officer, dropped $100,000 in soft money into Democratic coffers in 1996 alone. Critics suggest that his generosity may have been prompted by, or at least encouraged during, a White House visit a few days earlier that included an ``overnight'' in the Lincoln Bedroom.

During the 25 years that Gore Jr. has leased the right to mine zinc on his property along the Caney Fork River outside Carthage, Tenn., he has earned more than $450,000. The land and mineral rights were acquired by Gore Sr. from Hammer under terms described as ``highly favorable.'' The lease payment of $227 per acre was quite a bit higher than the established Occidental rate of $30 an acre in that area. Occidental never actually mined the property but paid Gore $190,000 altogether before selling the lease, which since has changed hands several times, shifting around the right to pay Gore.

Gore maintains that there is nothing improper about the family's relationship with Occidental or the negotiated sale of mineral rights. As for current Occidental stock held by the family, Gore says it is an estate holding consisting of his late father's assets over which he exercises no control. ``According to his will, that [Occidental stock] was put into a trust fund to benefit my mother for the remainder of her life, and I was named executor of his will,'' Gore said during a rare press conference in Tennessee.

It doesn't seem unreasonable to suggest that Gore, an heir, has considerable interest in Occidental's success. And there is at least the appearance of conflict. Has there been a quid pro quo? ``Most Americans don't know that Occidental tripled its do-mestic oil reserves overnight because of a historic reinventing-government decision announced by Vice President Gore,'' Lewis tells Insight. ``Oil companies have been lusting after the Elk Hills land in California for 70 years, but it was not until Bill Clinton and Al Gore that it was opened up, with Occidental the high bidder.''

Gore has taken some heat for the Elk Hills sale, which boosted the value of Occidental stock by 10 percent. That 47,000-acre deal, tripling the size of Occidental's petroleum reserves in the United States, is said to be the largest sale of U.S. assets ever. The land had been held as an oil reserve for the U.S. Navy since 1912. The environmental review for the sale was conducted by ICF Kaiser, on whose board sits noted wheeler-dealer Tony Coelho, now Gore's campaign manager.

No evidence of impropriety in the conduct of the sale has emerged, and Occidental is said to have paid $4 billion, about twice what Congress thought would be harvested from the sale.

``I am not suggesting that Al Gore is closer to oil companies than George Bush,'' Lewis insists, ``but I do think the vice president should have to answer questions. `What did he know and when did he know it?,' regarding the intricacies of various concessions made to Occidental since 1993. Why hasn't he released his appointment calendars and phone-log records, as Texas Gov. George W. Bush has done? Why doesn't the Energy Department release the bidding information surrounding the Elk Hills decision? There is no excuse that they haven't.''

Lewis' CPI, a group of investigative reporters, has had a Freedom of Information Act request on the Elk Hills deal pending for months. The core elements of the request recently were denied and are on appeal.

Among more recent interactions with Clinton-Gore, Occidental lobbied vigorously for a $1.6 billion military-aid package to Colombia that had administration backing. Occidental operates Colombia's second-largest oil field in a country plagued by guerrilla warfare and narcoterrorism. The company also has been in conflict with the U'wa Indians, a tribe whose official lands in Colombia border a major drilling site that Occidental believes could yield 1.5 billion barrels of oil.

Gore must shudder at the mention of the U'wa claim that the site is on their ancestral lands and that oil is ``the blood of Mother Earth.'' The U'wa generated a good deal of publicity for their cause in 1995 when they threatened mass suicide if drilling plans went ahead. All 5,000 of them would step off a 1,400-foot cliff, they said. The Colombian government has been fairly assertive in protecting Occidental's multibillion-dollar operation and will receive 25 percent of any profits resulting from the major find that is expected there.

In the days when Hammer was around, reporter James Cook as-serts, Marxist guerrillas simply were bought off. ``Hammer gave them $3 million to protect'' Occidental's pipe-line in Colombia. Today, the firm also pays the Colombian military to maintain a base near the site.

A number of environmentalist groups have been on Gore's case about the U'wa deal. They recently placed an advertisement in the West Coast edition of the New York Times asking: ``Who is Al Gore? Environmental champion or petroleum politician?'' Protesters are beginning to write to Gore ``as the purported environmental candidate'' and ask that he exert pressure on Occidental to stop its work in U'wa territory.

Another Gore-Occidental connection, mentioned by Lewis early in our talks, is found in the Love Canal toxic-waste tragedy. Gore, who claimed to have unearthed the scandal, hasn't been overly forthcoming about ownership of Hooker Chemical Co., the firm that paid millions of dollars in fines for polluting Love Canal. Hooker was a subsidiary of Occidental, purchased by Hammer in 1969. At that time, insider Gore Sr. took advantage of a stock offer, well below market value, and scarfed up thousands of shares of Hooker at $150 per.

Al Gore Jr. is of course heir to all of this, and if he ever again holds a realpress conference, say critics, he just might be asked about it.

Hammer's Sympathies Were Well-Known

Although it was no secret in intelligence circles, the first public mention of Armand Hammer's service as an actual operative of the Soviet Union may have been during the course of a speech given by international journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave in Palm Beach, Fla., in 1980. ``I said that he was a longtime Soviet agent of influence,'' recalls de Borchgrave, currently head of United Press International. ``The Soviets had various special categories of gents. Hammer's role was to dispense disinformation to the useful idiots,'' de Borchgrave tells Insight. ``Useful idiots'' is the term describing those in Western media, academia, politics and other influential realms who were sympathetic to the Soviet cause.

Shortly after the speech, de Borchgrave adds, he received a call from a Hammer associate, ``a former CIA guy who told me that there was talk of a multimillion-dollar libel suit against me for my comment about Hammer. I told him they could go right ahead and sue, and I'd countersue for defamation of character. I never heard from them again.''

Few in politics, business and the press who played the fool for Hammer care to admit that they were duped by a Soviet agent, and perhaps they weren't fooled. They may have responded to him as some sort of Darwinian prototype of the modern leader - a totally self-willed charlatan, certain that everything and everyone can be bought or bulldozed.

A favorite anecdote concerns an incident that took place when Hammer was visiting the Soviet Union with his third wife, a wealthy widow, the former Frances Tolman. As Mikhail Gorbachev entered the room, the 65-year-old Frances slipped and fell on the polished floor. Hammer left her lying where she fell and rushed to embrace Gorby. That is but one of many minor anecdotes documenting Hammer's crassness, coarseness and deviousness, the meat of them ranging from firing a long-term, devoted secretary as she lay in the hospital downed by chronic colitis to having his only son's blood tested surreptitiously to determine his legitimacy.

Edward Jay Epstein's book, Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer, a damning investigative classic based on previously unavailable FBI and KGB files, is the keystone of most reporting and commentary on the real Hammer, consulted by all who delve into Gore-Hammer connections. Other biographies and exposés have provided pieces of the puzzle, but Epstein put many of the pieces in place.

More has emerged since Epstein's book was published. Most recently, Insight discovered the little-noted autobiography of a close Hammer associate, Fair & Square by industrialist John Burton Tigrett. Evidencing a level of respect shared by many who dealt with Hammer up close and at length, Tigrett describes him as ``not just mean, he was evil.'' Tigrett, who negotiated many of the oil and coal concessions that propelled Hammer to billionaire status, termed Hammer ``absolutely ruthless in both business and life.''

Tigrett knew personally such remarkable high rollers as J. Paul Getty, Nelson Bunker Hunt, Howard Hughes, Jimmy Hoffa and Sir James Goldsmith. But he says Hammer took the cake. ``His mind was the most devious I have ever encountered,'' Tigrett wrote, adding that Hammer had ``no conscience.''

As further evidence of Hammer's ties to top Soviets, Tigrett describes a note issued to Hammer by Leonid Brezhnev that advised notoriously balky and greedy Kremlin bureaucrats to ``come and see me'' if they could not grant anything Hammer might request. Those familiar with the workings of the Soviet system will appreciate that the note guaranteed fawning cooperation. This carte blanche treatment was nothing new for Hammer. The note echoed one previously given to him by Communist patriarch Vladimir Lenin, who ordered underlings to ``make note of Armand Hammer and in every way help him on my behalf if he applies.''

Epstein, the biographer most often quoted in the press, provides proof from Soviet files that Hammer was working on orders from Soviet masters, including Lenin and Leon Trotsky, and that he served as a conduit for Soviet funds sent to the United States to establish and promote espionage activities. Several other biographers have taken Hammer through the wringer on his service as errand boy for the Soviets, including Carl Blumay and Henry Edwards in Hammer: The Dark Side of Power, Steve Weinberg in Armand Hammer: The Untold Story and Joseph Finder in his book Red Carpet.

Hammer's Soviet connection traces to his father's efforts to get the Communist Party established in the United States. Julius Hammer was an immigrant New York City abortionist who headed a firm dealing in pharmaceuticals and chemicals. He also was close to Trotsky, who was Lenin's commisar of war.

Blumay, who worked as an image-polisher for Hammer for 25 years, claims Hammer wanted to ``punish'' the United States for jailing his father when an illegal abortion resulted in the death of the mother. Epstein, in his book, asserts that it was young Armand who actually performed the abortion and his father took the rap because consequences for Armand, then a medical student, would have been more severe. What sort of ``punishment'' for the United States did Hammer envision? Blumay, who certainly knew the man as well as anyone, euphemizes that he wanted the Soviets to win the Cold War.

Hammer's role in laundering and channeling money for Soviet espionage and recruitment and placement of spies in the United States long had been known to J. Edgar Hoover, the bulldog boss of the FBI, but Hoover held back from a full-scale assault because of Hammer's influential ``protectors'' in Washington. While Hoover kept his mouth strategically shut, the enigmatic superspook, James Jesus Angleton, had no such inhibitions. Angleton paid quite a price for his paranoia, painted as a witch-hunter in the press and maneuvered out of the CIA by his enemies. It was Angleton who put biographer Epstein on the trail of documentary evidence of Hammer's role as financial errand boy for the Soviet Union. And, writing in the New Republic, author Joseph Finder said ``James Jesus Angleton, the CIA's legendary chief of counterintelligence, told me in 1981 that Armand Hammer was an agent of Soviet intelligence. Angleton's source was said to be Soviet defector Anatoly Golitisyn, who spoke of a highly valued `Capitalist Prince' whose profile matched Hammer with remarkable precision.''

Finder was among the first to attempt a biography of Hammer without authorization. When Hammer was unsuccessful at derailing Finder's efforts, he bought every copy of the published book, Red Carpet, that he could acquire. While this tactic may have limited the impact of the book, it sat well with the publisher, who scored a ``sell-through.''

With the exception of Epstein's work, most biographies of Hammer are out of print, available only through secondhand dealers.

from TPDL 2000-Aug-17, from the Wall Street Journal, by Barbara K. Olson, a Washington lawyer and author of "Hell to Pay: The Unfolding Story of Hillary Rodham Clinton" (Regnery, 1999):

For Sen. Lieberman, Politics Trumps Principle

Every other word from the Democratic faithful in Los Angeles these past few days has been a mantra-like repetition of the talking point that vice presidential candidate Joseph Lieberman is the "conscience of the Senate." Setting aside for a moment how irritating and condescending this must be to the other Democratic senators, it is appropriate to examine Mr. Lieberman's record in saving the soul of the world's greatest deliberative body.

Mr. Lieberman has apparently acquired his reputation for piety on those occasions when he stood up against his party's liberal core and uttered a few words of common sense. Examples include his support for some degree of Social Security privatization, welfare reform, strengthening of the military, and school vouchers, his campaign against cinematic violence and sex, and his opposition to racial discrimination dressed up in the form of affirmative action. He is particularly praised for his forthright -- and correct -- characterization of President Clinton as a disgraceful, lying sexual predator.

But a closer examination of Mr. Lieberman's record reveals more sanctimoniousness than sanctity. This week, the senator has fallen all over himself to sell what was left of his integrity to please Al Gore's campaign managers, Jesse Jackson and the Rep. Maxine Waters (D., Calif.) It has not been a pretty sight.

Still, Mr. Lieberman gave us a preview of his willingness to abandon principle in 1991 during the Senate's confirmation hearings of Justice Clarence Thomas. At first, Mr. Lieberman announced his decision to vote for confirmation based on the "legal competence and balance, the personal character and intellect, and the independence and fairness of judgment" of Mr. Thomas.

This was until the charge by Anita Hill came along. After examining the allegation and Mr. Thomas's record, Mr. Lieberman found no corroboration for Ms. Hill's charge, and no history whatsoever of sexual harassment by Mr. Thomas. He nonetheless voted against confirmation. In other words, a single, unsubstantiated charge of sexually suggestive language by a man whose record was otherwise unblemished was enough, in Mr. Lieberman's mind, to deny Mr. Thomas a position on the Supreme Court.

Compare the words and actions of Mr. Lieberman when it came to the president of the United States and leader of his party. By the time Mr. Lieberman spoke out, it was clear to everyone on the planet that the president had lied under oath about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, that he had disgraced the office of the president by engaging in sex in the Oval Office with an intern the age of his daughter, and that he had obstructed not only a federal civil-rights case but a criminal investigation.

Mr. Lieberman, to his credit, publicly deplored the president's conduct as "disgraceful behavior" that "is not just inappropriate, it is immoral." He admonished Mr. Clinton for his "intentional and premeditated decision" to deceive and said that Mr. Clinton had weakened the presidency. But when it was time for action to replace talk, Mr. Lieberman, the conscience of the Senate, voted to retain in office the man who had violated his oath to preserve and protect the laws and who had brought disrespect to his office.

In short, an unsubstantiated charge against a decent and honorable man like Justice Thomas was disqualifying. A fully substantiated charge of much more serious misconduct against the leader of his party was not disqualifying. The conscience of the Senate became just like one more Senate hypocrite.

The same thing is happening this week in Los Angeles. After Mr. Lieberman privately explained his newly minted position on vouchers to the Black Caucus, Rep. Maxine Waters declared, "he told the truth that he had experimented with vouchers. He made it clear that he's not going to do that in the future."

Mr. Lieberman also jettisoned his previous opposition to affirmative action as "inconsistent with the law and with the basic American value of equal treatment and opportunity" with comparable alacrity. He reinvented himself Tuesday: "There's been a misunderstanding. . . . I have supported affirmative action, I do support affirmative action and I will support affirmative action."

And to all those other irritating little principles on which he might disagree with Al Gore, he assured the American public: "When we get to the White House, when the president decides, the vice president will enthusiastically support." What an accommodating conscience he has.

So Mr. Lieberman will, indeed, be a perfect choice to continue the policies and practices of the Clinton-Gore years. If Mr. Lieberman is elected vice president, his replacement as conscience of the Senate is already warming up in the bullpen. She's the aspiring new senator from New York: Hillary Rodham Clinton.

from TPDL 2000-Aug-8, from the Wall Street Journal opinion pages, by John Fund:

Will the Real Joe Lieberman Please Stand Up?

Al Gore's choice of Joe Lieberman is a good one because it shakes up the race, ends George W. Bush's postconvention bounce, and gives Mr. Gore a good chance at picking up Connecticut's eight electoral votes. Mr. Lieberman is beloved in his home state; recent polls show him taking 51% of Republicans in his re-election race this November. (Like LBJ in 1960 and Lloyd Bentsen in 1988, Mr. Lieberman is seeking both offices simultaneously.)

Mr. Lieberman has always been a different kind of Democrat. When he first ran for Senate in 1988, he won a lot of votes from conservatives who couldn't stomach liberal GOP Sen. Lowell Weicker. Even William F. Buckley endorsed him. Mr. Lieberman, then Connecticut's attorney general, appealed to them by suggesting among other things that he would have voted to confirm Robert Bork to the Supreme Court.

Once he took office, two Joe Liebermans emerged. One was the thoughtful moderate who devoutly practiced his Orthodox Jewish faith, supported school vouchers and teamed up with Bill Bennett to decry Hollywood raunchiness. The other was the party loyalist who after agonizing in public almost always voted with his fellow Democrats. A perfect example came in 1991, when Mr. Lieberman announced his support for Clarence Thomas's confirmation as a Supreme Court justice, then changed his mind after Anita Hill came forward with her allegations of ribald talk--making him one of only three senators to flip-flop on the basis of Ms. Hill's charges.

Similarly, when the time came to deal with President Clinton's impeachment, Mr. Lieberman gave a scathing speech calling the president's behavior "immoral"--but after talking with Democratic leaders agreed not to introduce a resolution of censure. Along with all his fellow Democrats, Mr. Lieberman voted to acquit Mr. Clinton in the impeachment trial.

Over the years Mr. Lieberman has compiled an 80% rating from the liberal Americans for Democratic Action. In 1999 the American Conservative Union gave him a zero, putting him to the left of Ted Kennedy, Barbara Boxer and Paul Wellstone.

So which is the real Joe Lieberman? Both. Like New York's Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, he is a genuinely thoughtful moderate with a highly liberal voting record that reflects both his Northeastern constituency and the recognition that his party base will tolerate only so much collaboration with Republicans.

Mr. Gore seems to have decided that the only way he can escape Bill Clinton's shadow is by putting the un-Clinton on the ticket. But his presence on the ticket may have the opposite effect, calling attention to Mr. Clinton's shortcomings and raising the question: Would Mr. Lieberman be anything more than window dressing for a partisan, liberal Gore administration? If Mr. Gore really wanted to distance himself from Mr. Clinton, he would have announced plans to name Mr. Lieberman to succeed Janet Reno as attorney general.

from TPDL 2000-Aug-14, from the Washington Times:

Let Lieberman debate Gore

As the Democratic Party opens its national convention today, it seems appropriate to ask a simple question: Where have Mr. Gore, the imminent presidential nominee, and his vice presidential running mate, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, stood on the important issues of this presidential campaign?

Well, as it happens, the Democratic standard-bearers have hardly pursued a united front on any of these matters. Yesterday, Mr. Lieberman apeared on all five Sunday morning talk shows to deal with numerous questions regarding areas of disagreement. Ironically, the man who was chosen because of his reputation for personal integrity was seen trying to explain away numerous and serious differences with Mr. Gore. There is little ambiguity, however, in Mr. Lieberman's record: Consider education.

No U.S. senator from either party has been a more forceful proponent of school-choice vouchers than Mr. Lieberman. On the other hand, given Mr. Gore's bludgeoning of his Democratic primary opponent, Bill Bradley, for having at one time merely considered vouchers as a policy option, no politician has opposed vouchers with the determination and gusto that Mr. Gore showed in his unrelenting attacks upon Mr. Bradley. In 1992, Mr. Lieberman was one of three Democrats to support a $30 million program to finance six demonstration projects that would give low-income parents money to enroll their children at the public or private school of their choice.

Then-Sen. Gore opposed the experiment.

Five years later, Mr. Lieberman sponsored legislation that would give $3,200 each to 2,000 poor children in Washington, D.C. - home of arguably the most dysfunctional public school system in America - to attend suburban public schools, private schools or parochial schools. Testifying before a Senate committee, Mr. Lieberman implored his Democratic colleagues to support his bill, arguing, "There are some" - and here he clearly had Mr. Gore in mind - "who dismiss suggestions of school-choice programs . . . out of hand, direly predicting that these approaches will 'ruin' the public schools.

The undeniable reality here is that this system is already in ruins, and to blindly reject new models and refuse to try new ideas is simply foolish. We can and must do better for these children, and to cling stubbornly to the failures of the past will just not get us there." With only four Democrats voting to end Edward Kennedy's filibuster, which was enthusiastically endorsed by the Clinton-Gore administration, the Senate fell two votes shy of the 60 needed to allow Mr. Lieberman's voucher experiment for low-income D.C. families to come up for a vote.

In 1998, Mr. Lieberman was one of eight Democratic senators to vote for education savings accounts, which would permit individuals to invest up to $2,000 per year in after-tax funds in tax-sheltered accounts that could be used to finance education expenses. Mr. Gore opposed the measure, and President Clinton vetoed it. As Donald Lambro of The Washington Times reported last week, Mr. Lieberman was one of the first Democrats to support the partial privatization of Social Security.

He endorsed a proposal that would permit workers to invest a portion of their payroll taxes in private investment accounts. "I think in the end that individual control of part of these retirement Social Security funds," Mr. Lieberman said in an April 1998 interview, "has got to happen."

This is precisely Mr. Bush's position, which Mr. Gore has repeatedly characterized as "a risky scheme." (That might explain why Mr. Lieberman's staff has been recently circulating a mysterious, unpublished op-ed article in which the senator recants his privatization position.) Mr. Lieberman is also one of the few Democrats to support tort reform by advocating changes in product-liability laws, which trial lawyers mine for preposterous punitive-damages awards and fees, a good portion of which are conveniently recycled into the Democratic Party's coffers.

In 1995, Mr. Lieberman was one of only two Democrats to vote to end a Democratic-led filibuster against a bill that would have limited punitive damages in product-liability and medical-malpractice cases at twice the level of compensatory damages. Messrs. Lieberman and Bush support tort reform, which Mr. Gore opposes. According to the New York Times, at a recent Manhattan fund-raiser where Mr. Lieberman introduced Mr. Gore, several of the donors, aware of Mr. Lieberman's position on health-care regulation, snickered loudly in response to Mr. Gore's knee-jerk attack on the insurance industry.

Consider the fight over the so-called "patients' bill of rights" legislation. Mr. Lieberman has sponsored a bipartisan, compromise approach in an effort to break the deadlock between the Clinton-Gore administration and congressional Republicans. But the Clinton-Gore administration has vigorously opposed Mr. Lieberman's bipartisan compromise.

And while Mr. Gore regularly condemns the pharmaceutical industry, it's worth noting that Mr. Lieberman was among the few Democrats to vote on behalf of the drug companies on several 1997 amendments relating to legislation reauthorizing the Food and Drug Administration. Indeed, while Mr. Gore spends many of his waking hours condemning the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, Mr. Lieberman spends much of his time raking in their campaign contributions.

According to a recent analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), a nonpartisan organization that compiles campaign-finance data, no other senator of either party has received more contributions this year ($197,419) from the "Big Insurance Companies" than Mr. Lieberman, who ranks second in the Senate for contributions ($91,150) from the "Big Drug Companies."

Larry Makinson, director of the CRP, told the Los Angeles Times that Mr. Lieberman has "more in common with Bush than he does with Gore." Mr. Gore is among his party's most stalwart supporters of affirmative action. Mr. Lieberman vigorously opposes such a policy.

"Affirmative action is dividing us in ways its creators could never have intended," Mr. Lieberman declared in a 1995 Senate speech. "For after all, if you discriminate in favor of one group on the basis of race," Mr. Lieberman cogently reasoned, "you thereby discriminate against another group on the basis of race."

Mr. Gore refined his class warfare gambit while he and Mr. Lieberman were Senate colleagues during the first year of President George Bush's administration. Mr. Lieberman was one of only six Democrats in 1989 to vote to end then-Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell's filibuster against President Bush's capital-gains tax cut. Arguing "you can't be pro-jobs and anti-business,"

Mr. Lieberman failed to convince his Democratic colleagues, including then-Sen. Al Gore, who voted to continue the filibuster, which eventually killed the legislation. What about national missile defense and the defense budget?

Unlike most of his Democratic colleagues in Congress, Mr. Lieberman has regularly voted to increase defense spending. Meanwhile, under the Clinton-Gore administration, the defense budget measured as a percentage of total economic output has plunged to its lowest level since the year before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Before the Clinton-Gore administration in 1999 had to be dragged kicking and screaming into supporting the deployment of a technologically feasible anti-ballistic-missile (ABM) system, Mr. Lieberman, a member of the Armed Services Committee, had been one of the first Democrats to vote for deploying an ABM system.

Finally, Mr. Lieberman and Mr. Gore have remarkably different perspectives of the 1995-96 fund-raising tactics of both the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton-Gore re-election committee. Mr. Gore insists the notorious White House coffees were not fund-raising events, while Mr. Lieberman described them as "highly improper." Moreover, unlike most of the Democrats on the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee investigating the campaign-finance scandal, Mr. Lieberman did not play an obstructionist role.

After committee chairman Fred Thompson charged in his July 8, 1997, opening statement that there was "a plan hatched during the last election cycle by the Chinese government designed to pour illegal money into American political campaigns," the committee's ranking Democrat, John Glenn, accused Mr. Thompson of McCarthyism, darkly intoning, "During the 1950s, we can all remember what happened."

However, after a three-hour briefing by the FBI and CIA, Mr. Lieberman announced that the evidence did in fact support Mr. Thompson's charge that the Chinese government sought to launder funds into U.S. elections. Before Mr. Gore debates Mr. Bush and before Mr. Lieberman debates GOP vice presidential candidate Dick Cheney, perhaps Messrs. Gore and Lieberman ought to debate each other over the rather significant policy differences that exist between themselves. This week's Democratic National Convention provides them with the perfect opportunity.

from TPDL 2000-Aug-15, from WorldNetDaily, by Joseph Farah:

Lieberman's change of heart

Matt Drudge reported last week that Joseph Lieberman once suggested an independent counsel be appointed to investigate Al Gore's fund-raising practices.

Lieberman reportedly confided to a congressional staffer, "I think the attorney general should heed the advice of Mr. (Charles) LaBella and appoint an independent counsel to look into all of this."

There's plenty of reason to believe Drudge's sources right on the public record. On July 24, 1998, the Associated Press reported, "Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, a Democrat who participated in the Senate's campaign fund-raising investigation, said La Bella's views are 'significant, and it gives me pause to think about my previous position.' Lieberman has been skeptical of naming another independent counsel."

More than a year later, Lieberman was quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying, "As it now stands, the law has no teeth. Why else would two of the most prominent figures from the 1996 scandal -- John Huang and Charlie Trie -- be allowed to plea to charges that resulted in no jail time?"

What happened to Joseph Lieberman on the way to the Democratic vice-presidential nomination on Gore's ticket? Is he going to defend Gore's abusive campaign finance tactics? Is he going to rationalize his running mate's deception and Clintonesque spin?

And, more significantly, is Lieberman going to defend the record of the Democratic president for the last eight years? If he does, he's got some explaining to do with regard to his own powerful critical rhetoric.

For instance, look what Lieberman told the Record-Journal editorial board that same summer of 1998: "(The president) definitely has a serious problem. I do think the ultimate point here is a question of obstruction of justice and the validity of an oath taken. We have his clear denial and, therefore, if (the DNA testing) comes back differently than he said, then he has some explaining to do.''

We all remember Lieberman's famous speech on the Senate floor in September 1998: He condemned Clinton's behavior in the Monica Lewinsky affair as "immoral" and "harmful'' and deserving of public rebuke.

"In this case, the president apparently had extramarital relations with an employee half his age and did so in the workplace in the vicinity of the Oval Office,'' Lieberman said. Such behavior, he said, "is harmful for it sends a message of what is acceptable behavior to the American public.'' He added that Clinton "had by his disgraceful behavior jeopardized his administration's historic record of accomplishment. ... The president's relationship with Ms. Lewinsky not only contradicted the values he has publicly embraced over the last six years, it has, I fear, compromised his moral authority.''

The talk throughout Washington at the time was that Lieberman was on the verge of calling for Clinton's resignation.

And it was hardly just the Lewinsky scandal that got under Lieberman's skin. He was also outspoken in condemning the administration's role in what has become known as China-gate.

It's clear, he said, "this espionage has gone on through the Clinton administration and that, in hindsight, the administration's response -- after notification -- was not as rapid as it might have been. Indeed, in several respects, that response was obstructionist, counterproductive and clearly antagonistic to long-term U.S. national security. ..."

In June 1999, he was quoted in a Reuters story: "From everything that I know the administration ... either knew about it or should have known about it. The 'should have' is because some of the experts at our labs in the Department of Energy reached a conclusion based on what they saw from Chinese nuclear testing that the Chinese must have obtained, probably obtained, information on our W-88 warhead. Looking back at it, this is critical enough. The president should have been told then, there's no question about it.'"

Is Al Gore going to be running on his administration's record of the last eight years? Or is he planning on completely reinventing himself in the next three months? If Gore doesn't sufficiently distance himself from the corruption and stench of the Clinton years -- and, frankly, I don't see how that is possible -- then how does Lieberman explain himself and his rhetoric of the last four years? How will he rationalize his current suck-up to the vice perpetrator? Or will he even be forced to do so?

from TPDL 2000-Aug-9, from the Washington Times, by Donald Lambro:

Senator makes move away from Bush-like positions

Joseph I. Lieberman is abandoning two of his most prominent conservative positions in order to conform to Al Gore's more liberal agenda for their presidential campaign.

Mr. Lieberman has for several years been a strong supporter of school-choice vouchers to help inner-city students escape from failing public schools. He has also been an enthusiastic backer of letting workers divert some of their Social Security payroll taxes into their own private investment accounts to build a more comfortable retirement.

Now, however, he is telling Democrats that he no longer supports either of these ideas.

When a Lieberman adviser was asked yesterday if he still embraces these two conservative proposals, the adviser said, "Not anymore."

The two-term Connecticut senator, picked by Mr. Gore to be his running mate, has spoken favorably about allowing partial privatization of Social Security to let workers get a higher return on their retirement savings. "I think in the end that individual control of part of these retirement Social Security funds has got to happen," he said in an interview on April 19, 1998. But now, in an unpublished article that mysteriously began circulating this week, Mr. Lieberman says he is flatly opposed to the idea that is a central feature in George W. Bush's campaign agenda.

"At the outset, I was attracted by privatization proposals that seemed to promise taxpayers more control over their Social Security, high returns on their contributions, and more income for their retirement," Mr. Lieberman observed in the article that he said he wrote in June.

"But ultimately I turned away from privatization because the promises and the numbers supporting them don't add up, and more importantly, they don't add on to the security of Social Security," he said.

Mr. Gore is unalterably opposed to the retirement accounts idea that is supported by several Democrats, including Sens. Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, Bob Kerrey of Nebraska and Charles S. Robb of Virginia.

Mr. Lieberman's new position was largely unknown until this past week, when he was being prominently mentioned as a possible contender for vice president. Democratic sources said that is when the senator's unpublished article began to be circulated in the news media and to selected Democrats.

The Connecticut Democrat also appears to be changing his tune on his long-held position on experimenting with school-choice vouchers through a government-funded pilot program, according to Democratic policy strategists. "There are too many ways in which the public school system has failed to deliver adequately for our kids. It's failed to keep up with the times; it's failed to innovate," he said on March 14, 1995 - and numerous times since then.

Now, Mr. Lieberman's aides say that the senator, who introduced a bill that would create six school-choice demonstration projects, has quietly dropped the idea. "He offered a bipartisan education bill in May and that bill did not have anything about vouchers in it," said a Lieberman aide.

"What I've heard is that he is now saying we ought to expand charter schools and not pursue voucher programs," said Roger Hickey, the co-director of Campaign for America's Future, a liberal public policy group based here.

"I don't think he'd be my first choice [for a running mate] because until recently he seemed to disagree with Al Gore on a number of issues like Social Security and vouchers," Mr. Hickey said. "But now I'm open to those who see the light."

Mr. Gore is staunchly opposed to school vouchers, an idea that Mr. Bush also wants to encourage by diverting some federal aid to failing school districts to let parents use the money to send their children to better private or public schools.

Meantime, there was little if any evidence that the Democratic Party's base constituencies were bothered by Mr. Lieberman's earlier centrist views on these and other issues - even when the senator held a position they strongly opposed.

The National Education Association, the powerful teachers union, said that while it had not agreed with Mr. Lieberman on school vouchers, "Gore would set education policy if he becomes president," an official said.

"We've looked at his voting record and Mr. Lieberman supports a lot of our issues, including school modernization, education funding and family and medical leave," said NEA spokesman Kathleen Lyons.

"[Mr. Lieberman] has voted for school vouchers, but we're encouraged that Al Gore has an unwavering position against school vouchers," she said. "As head of the ticket, that's certainly where they'll campaign."

Mr. Lieberman has four children, three of whom have finished their secondary education, but a spokesman for the senator said yesterday that the youngest daughter is attending a private Jewish school here.

The NEA recently completed its rating index on votes cast in the current Congress and it gave Mr. Lieberman a strong 90 percent score, Ms. Lyons said. The NAACP has issued no public position on Mr. Gore's decision to pick the chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, but state and local NAACP officials said yesterday that Mr. Lieberman was a strong supporter of their issues.

Even though Mr. Lieberman opposes affirmative action and says he does not like "group preferences," the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in his state still gave him a 90 percent score on his voting record.

"We don't expect everyone to agree with us on all the issues," said Lisa Scails, spokesman for the Connecticut NAACP.

The senator won election to a second term in 1994 with 67 percent of the vote, including the overwhelming support of black voters.

Hilary Shelton, director of the Washington NAACP office, said that despite Mr. Lieberman's remarks on group preferences "he has voted to support affirmative action programs" throughout the '90s.

"In the 106th Congress, we gave him a 100 percent rating for his votes in the Senate," said Mr. Shelton.

from TPDL 2000-Aug-15, from Capitol Hill Blue, by Ann Coulter:

THE HAND-WRINGING HAMLET FROM HARTFORD

At least we know Al Gore is still breathing. Choosing Sen. Joseph Lieberman as his running mate may not be the amazingly bold stroke that the press is hyperventilating about, but it does show the presence of brain waves. At last -- Gore did something!

Gore has received wide acclaim for his "risky" move in putting a Jew on the ticket, amid none too-subtle insinuations that anyone who votes against Gore is an anti-Semite. Echoing other Gore campaign staffers, ABC's Cokie Roberts casually remarked on NPR the other day that any "hard-core anti-Semites" are not "likely to vote for the Democratic ticket" anyway.

She must be referring to all those registered Republicans like Louis Farrakhan and Jesse "Hymietown" Jackson. Indeed, in light of recent allegations about her potty mouth, the only vote Al Gore may have lost by putting a Jew on the ticket is Hillary Clinton's.

The press has been demure in listing Lieberman's many accomplishments. He is not only the first Jew on a national ticket, but also has the distinction of being a member of the World's Smallest Group: Orthodox Jews for Partial-Birth Abortion.

No doubt he's troubled about sucking the brains out of a half-delivered baby. Lieberman spends half his life being troubled. Always troubled, but never troubled enough to do anything.

He was, of course, famously troubled about President Clinton "willfully deceiving the nation about his conduct," -- conduct Lieberman called "not just inappropriate," but "immoral," "harmful," "sad" and "sordid." Lieberman said his "conscience" compelled him to express his "concerns forthrightly and publicly." His conscience did not, however, compel him to vote to remove the source of his troubles from the office of the presidency.

This is the way liberals always avoid taking action against other liberals. They furrow their brows and dutifully register some vague consternation, for which they expect great admiration. With their impeccable consciences duly placed on the record, they believe no further action should be required of them.

Sen. Joe Lieberman is the master of agonizing before inaction. Explaining his acquittal vote to Tom Brokaw on "NBC Nightly News," Lieberman suggested he had seriously considered voting to remove Clinton, noting that "every time I've been forced to go into the facts of this case, I get repulsed, and I get troubled and torn up." Gee, thanks for that display of scruples.

When asked on "Fox News Sunday" about a passage in the Starr report in which Clinton and Monica discuss the possibility that their phone sex was being tapped by a foreign government, Lieberman said: "Yes, that part of the report troubled me deeply."

At a National Press Club lunch on Oct. 1, 1998, Lieberman allowed as to how even his daughter was "troubled" by the president's behavior, and a woman he had met on the beach was also "very troubled." But of course, amid all this sense of "trouble" in the world, he voted to keep Clinton in office.

Lieberman was also troubled by Anita Hill's accusations against Clarence Thomas. (If Hill's unsupported allegations against Thomas had been all Clinton were forced to admit to, he would have been dancing a jig). But somehow Lieberman managed to emerge from his anguish and vote the party line. In a letter to constituents explaining his vote against Thomas, Lieberman assured them that he had spent "many agonizing hours of deliberation," before casting his vote.

In 1995, Sen. Lieberman signed a letter with Bill Bennett urging corporations to establish standards of decency for the airwaves. They wrote they were "deeply troubled" by trash TV. Then a year later, Lieberman joined with Rep. Lamar Smith in a similar campaign against Fox -- this time saying they were "especially troubled."

The one great thing about Gore's choice of Lieberman is that it is now beyond cavil that claims of Clinton's invincible popularity have been greatly exaggerated. Gore can't go to the bathroom without taking a poll, and somehow he ends up with a running mate who is the most vociferously anti-Clinton Democrat in the U.S. Senate. How did that happen?

It happened because the polls were wrong -- maybe wrongly interpreted or wrongly reported, but wrong. Clinton never got 50 percent of Americans to vote for him. But according to the polls, upon discovering that Clinton was molesting interns and hiding evidence, suddenly 80 percent of Americans adored the man. That's not possible.

Because Clinton was never punished, there's a deep sense of unfinished business in the country. This election is the Fred Goldman civil suit of politics. Gore taking Sen. Lieberman as his running mate is as good a strategy as O.J. hiring one of Nicole Simpson's relatives would have been. It's good, it's just not going to be good enough.

from TPDL 2000-Aug-17, from WorldNetDaily, by Tanya K. Metaksa

No absolution

During my grade school years we lived next to an Italian-American family. Of course, then they were called Italians or they even referred to themselves as "wops." It was long before the days of hyphenation and political correctness. Although they had several children, I can only remember Bobby. He was my age and I learned from him the finer points of playing baseball, cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers and swimming in the nearby river during the long lazy days of summer.

I also learned lots of dirty words. For a 9-year-old he had one of the foulest mouths I have ever run across. Whenever I would bring home a new "word," my parents would severely chastise me and tell me not to use it again. The first time I told Bobby what my parents said he replied, "Oh, that's OK. I just go to church on Sunday, tell the priest that I have sinned, and then it's OK with God."

Watching last week as the Democrats embraced the devout Orthodox Jew, Senator Joe Lieberman, I kept thinking of Bobby. Bobby had been going to church every Sunday to get absolution, but did not change his sinful ways. It appears the Democratic Party has embraced Bobby's view of redemption. Only this time they are trying to change their outward appearance, while still hanging on to their hedonistic roots.

First it was the announcement of Joe Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew, as their vice presidential candidate. It seems that it's okay for Joe to invoke God 18 times when Al Gore introduced him in Nashville last week, while the Democratic party supports excommunicating God from the classroom and kicking him off the football field across the USA.

The hypocrisy has just begun. Joe Lieberman, who is being touted as the standard bearer with religious and moral convictions, is now reinventing himself to match the scripture according to Al Gore. While the new moralistic Gore team has castigated and made Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez, D-Calif., persona non grata at the convention because she scheduled a fund-raiser at Hugh Hefner's Playboy mansion, the Clinton-Gore administration certainly has not returned those campaign contributions from the master of the bunny house. Maybe they though that no one would notice who signed the checks, after all Gore still maintains that he went to a Buddhist temple function never knowing it was a fund-raiser.

While Loretta was publicly spanked for her indiscretion, the leader of Democratic morals, Sen. Lieberman, was the honored guest at a Democratic fund-raiser at the home of the producer of the "Jenny Jones" show. Yes, it is the same television talk show that Lieberman had severely criticized in the past for its immoral subject matter. When money talks, morality walks: tickets were priced from $5,000 to $25,000.

In the past Lieberman has been a vocal critic of the fund-raising methodology of Clinton and Gore. According to Bill Sammon in the Washington Times Lieberman was deeply troubled that those invited to White House coffees were solicited afterwards for campaign contributions. He, like most Americans, understood what being invited to a White House coffee really meant. It was the equivalent of an invitation to your neighbor's Tupperware party.

It doesn't matter that one pays for the coffee or Tupperware later, everyone knows why one is asked to attend and opens their wallets accordingly. Gore, like Clinton, has taken to rationalizing that since no money was transferred at the "coffee," the event was not really a fund-raiser. In 1977 [typo - 1997] Lieberman denounced that kind of event as well as Gore's legalistic obfuscation. Now he has forgotten his being troubled by the White House's questionable fund raising tactics and has adopted Gore's legalistic evasive answers.

Ann Coulter in her column for Capitol Hill Blue calls the vice-presidential nominee the "The Hand-Wringing Hamlet From Hartford." She recalls how "troubled" Lieberman was about the Monica affair, the accusations against Clarence Thomas, and the violence and "trash" on television. Yet, with every "troubling" event, he has somehow assuaged his conscience and voted to protect Democratic interests.

We saw it in his vote against Clarence Thomas. We saw it in his vote against the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Now we are seeing it in his relationships to his newfound friends in Hollywood. Like Tipper Gore who dropped her attacks against the filth and vulgarity in Hollywood and the television industry when Al became a vice presidential candidate, Joe Lieberman doesn't seem to find it incongruous that he gave out "Silver Sewer" awards to the same people he now solicits for funds.

One of the major purposes of a religious education is to teach our children right from wrong. It was wrong of Bobby to seek absolution for his sins and then repeat them all over again as soon as church was over. But he was only a child. Adults are charged with the duty of teaching and reinforcing proper behavior. The way we teach is not by our words, but through our deeds. If the deeds were immoral yesterday, there is no absolution today even if they are accompanied by a sizeable campaign contribution.

from TPDL 2000-Aug-14, from Canada's National Post, by Mark Steyn:

Al's chutzpah has a New York flavour

On Tuesday, making his debut campaign appearance with Al Gore, Joe Lieberman rejected suggestions that he was closer to George Dubya Bush on most issues. "That's like saying that the veterinarian and the taxidermist are in the same business, because either way you get your dog back," he told supporters in Carthage, Tenn. He turned to give Al a high-five and added, "I love that line."

Oy vey! The first Jewish Vice-President: he doesn't just do funerals, he does bar mitzvahs! This is a historic moment for the Republic: In 2008, President Lieberman could well be the first ever Jew behind the Oval Office desk. That is, if you discount Monica Lewinsky, and discounting Monica is what this is really all about. Lieberman insists that he and Gore are in full agreement on the issues. But that's like saying the barber and the circumcisionist are in the same business, because either way you come out with a bit off the top.

And anyway, while Joe and Al might not agree on missile defence, school vouchers or a zillion other things, they're agreed on this: When you're in love, the whole world's Jewish. When JFK became the first Catholic to run nationwide in 1960, he was at pains to run a scrupulously secular campaign. But on Tuesday, with the first chosen person from the chosen people, it was Carthage in the Catskills, as Al Gorstein unveiled the out-of-town tryout of My Yiddisher Running Mate. "There are some people who might call Al Gore's selection of me an act of chutzpah ," said Senator Lieberman -- or, as The Boston Globe put it, "Lieberman quipped." With quips like this, who needs jokes? Al's got chutzpah! It turns out he's a mensch, not a schlemiel! Which is more than you can say for Louisiana Democrat John Breaux: "I just think people don't care so much where he goes to church on Sunday," said Senator Breaux, "but just that he has the moral values and principles to lead the country." Sunday? Who goes to church on Sunday, you schmuck?

A few months back the Vice-President let it be known that, when he's in a quandary, he asks himself "WWJD? What Would Jesus Do?" I think it's safe to say that one thing Jesus wouldn't do is serve as Bill Clinton's Vice-President for eight years, but, that aside, Al has evidently come to the conclusion that, if Christ were the Democratic nominee for president, the first thing he'd do is get himself a nice Jewish boy. That way you can talk about religion all you want, and the media won't give you a hard time over it, like they do when Dubya invokes Jesus as his favourite philosopher. At one point in Tuesday's speech, Senator Lieberman was mentioning God every six seconds. "Dear Lord, maker of all miracles, I thank you for bringing me to this extraordinary moment in my life," he said. Or as he put it a few minutes later: "I'm really hot now!" In his own interminable introduction, Al solemnly explained that he'd always supported a woman's right to Jews.

The Democrats set this up brilliantly. It began when Ed Rendell, National Committee chairman, observed on Saturday that "if Joe Lieberman was Episcopalian, I think he'd almost be a slam dunk" -- i.e., the Jew thing might cost the Dems a few votes. But then he expanded the thought: "I'm not sure that the people who would vote against us because Joe is Jewish aren't going to vote against us anyway" -- i.e., all the anti-Semites are registered Republicans, so, if we do pick Lieberman and people start criticizing him, you'll know why. Now some of us are reluctant to bring up the fact that most on-the-record anti-Semitism from public figures in the past few years comes from the Democratic side -- Jesse Jackson on "Hymietown," Al Sharpton on innumerable occasions -- but fortunately we don't need to. On Monday, Lee Alcorn, president of the Dallas chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, went on KHVN Radio: "If we get a Jew person, then what I'm wondering is, I mean, what is this movement for, you know?" he said. "I think we need to be very suspicious of any kind of partnerships between the Jews at that kind of level because we know that their interest primarily has to do with money and these kind of things."

Mr. Alcorn is dumb enough to say that sort of thing on the radio, but the question is how many more people agree with him and are canny enough not to say so into a microphone. As always, Al Gore's "chutzpah" is self-serving and reflects his own weaknesses: In the wake of the Republican Convention, he was urged to demonstrate his independence from Bill Clinton, and the easiest way to do that was to hire someone who'd already demonstrated his independence from Bill Clinton. But Gore is now gambling on several factors: that blacks who dislike "Jew persons" because of their "interest in money" will swallow their distaste because they've nowhere else to go; that Ralph Nader supporters who dislike Lieberman's voting record will also realize they've nowhere else to go; ditto, the Hollywood crowd who think he's an uptight social conservative droning on about porn and how the sitcom Friends is unsuitable for prime time. And that, if these various groups don't get on board, they'll be offset by independents and moderates who like the way Lieberman stood up to Clinton.

Dream on, Al. Lieberman is now routinely spoken of as "the conscience of the Senate," which is like being African-American outreach officer of the Ku Klux Klan: the position isn't really necessary, and it's strictly comparative. Lieberman is one of those Democrats, like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who's always "wrestling with his conscience," which would be fun if every match didn't end the same way -- with his conscience on the ropes staring groggily into the sweaty thong of political viability in the modern Democratic party. Lieberman spoke out against Clinton? Big deal. In the end, he voted with the rest of the lockstep Democrats to keep him in office. Likewise, having spoken up for education reform and social security privatization, Lieberman is now being whipped back into line by the Gore team. On the evidence of Tuesday's performance, he won't solve Gore's Clinton problem, only add a few more.

Meanwhile, for a sense of what Al's up against, consider a recent campaign appearance by Hillary Rodham Clinton, New York Senate candidate, in Edgartown, Mass. Massachusetts isn't actually in New York but, when you're pulling 150,000 bucks per fundraiser, who cares where the state line is? Or even who you're running against? "We're going to have a very stark choice in this election," said Hillary, "between me and my opponent at the Presidential level as to whether we continue the policies that have worked or we go a different direction."

"Me and my opponent at the Presidential level"? Steady on, Hill. The plan was to run for the Senate this year and then the White House in 2008. Or, if Al insists on going full speed ahead on the oblivion express, to run for the White House in 2004. But, at least until November, you're supposed to be trying to pretend you're just a regular New York Senate candidate. It's a tricky business. The other week, when the First Lady decided to favour a shoestring radio station called WLKK in Erie County, Penn., with an exclusive interview, the official explanation was that she'd thought she was on air in Erie County, N.Y. "She even promised jobs for our area," said host Jeff Johns proudly. But it's just as likely that everyone's favourite New Yorker sees no reason why she shouldn't promise jobs to parts of Pennsylvania. Poor Al: he has to follow a double-act which knows every line in the biz except "Thank you and good night."

And that's the irony: Joe Lieberman's Jewishness has no electoral advantage except in New York, where a Democrat can't win without Jews, a big chunk of whom have been noticeably cool toward Hillary. With Lieberman on the ticket, they'll be out in force on election day. He was picked by Al to bring the Clinton era to a close. Instead, he's likely to be the main reason it's extended another six years.

from TPDL 2000-Mar-30, from Scripps Howard News Service, by Richard Noyes, director of the Free Market Project at the Media Research Center:

Letting it slide

(March 30, 2000 12:01 a.m. EST http://www.nandotimes.com) - TV reporters usually love to publicize any gaffes made by presidents or presidential candidates. In Houston on March 11, Vice President Al Gore stated that the Bush-Quayle administration's economic record included "the worst depression since the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s."

That's a ludicrous charge, but there hasn't been a single word of criticism from any of the networks.

First, we must ask, can Gore's assertion possibly be true? Depressions and recessions are measured by how severely a nation's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) contracts. The GDP is the total value of all of all goods and services produced in a year. During the Great Depression, our GDP contracted severely, shrinking by 12 percent in 1930, another 16 percent in 1931 and 23 percent in 1932. Those statistics are the signature of a steep and prolonged downturn, marked by huge numbers of business failures, unemployment and economic misery.

What about the Bush-Quayle years? The total length of the downturn for which they were blamed was just nine months, with the worst GDP performance coming in the fourth quarter of 1990 (October to December) when GDP shrank by a seasonally adjusted annual rate of three percent. That wasn't good for anybody, but it was a far cry from the pain of the Great Depression.

It's also hardly the worst performing quarter in recent times. In fact, according to data gathered by the U.S. Department of Commerce, it ranks eighth on the list of the ten worst quarters since 1959. The worst performing quarter belongs to Jimmy Carter, who presided over an annually adjusted 7.7 percent contraction in the spring of 1980, a brief but nasty economic downturn that helped cost him that year's election.

Gore knows all of this, of course, yet he inexplicably chose to link the relatively mild early '90s recession with the worst economy in living memory. That should have made the vice president a ripe target for ridicule, but ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC all ignored the mistake, as did nearly every newspaper reporter on the campaign trail.

Only one newspaper reporter even mentioned Gore's gaffe: the New York Times' Katherine Seelye, and she focused exclusively on the strategy behind the veep's decision to target Bush-Quayle instead of Reagan-Bush in his rant against GOP economics. Amazingly, she did not question Gore's questionable economic assertions, even as she described his strategy of attempting to undermine Texas Gov. George W. Bush's credibility on economic matters.

But for most political reporters, there's apparently little desire to unmask the real Al Gore. It's not that most journalists think he's above twisting the truth; as Slate's Mickey Kaus wrote during the primaries, most reporters hate Gore. They really do think he's a liar. And a phony... They see Gore as a bully, and a hypocritical one at that, bellowing about Bill Bradley's negativity when the New Jersey senator finally brings up some fairly obvious Gore vulnerabilities.

Liberal columnist Al Hunt documented several Gore mendacities, including the assertion that the vice president was the principal proponent of efforts to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit when, Hunt wrote, that label properly belonged to rival Bill Bradley, and the claim that Gore was a "co-sponsor" of the original McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill, when, as Hunt correctly pointed out, Gore had resigned from the Senate the day before Russ Feingold was sworn in.

These tactics have produced a national cynicism toward Gore in the national press that may be more intense than at any time since Richard Nixon, Hunt wrote in his Feb. 3 Wall Street Journal column.

Many journalists believed that then-Vice President George Bush was given a free ride during his 1988 campaign against Michael Dukakis, and they vowed to henceforth make a better effort to tell voters when candidates were engaging in unfair campaigning.

"I don't know what the hell we get paid for if we don't make an effort ... to keep those guys honest," veteran reporter Richard Threlkeld said in 1989, adding "if we don't, who will?"

President Bush's re-election campaign suffered when network journalists organized themselves into self-described "truth squads" that condemned Republican TV ads while shrugging at most of the Democratic spots. In 1996, the truth squads were much more muted, even though President Clinton ran commercials claiming he "fought four years for campaign finance reform," even as federal marshals were hunting for Democratic fund-raiser John Huang in connection with several suspected - and later proved - campaign illegalities.

In a debate with Bradley in January, Gore said, "There has never been a time in this campaign when I have said something that I know to be untrue." With a cornucopia of readily available facts that prove otherwise, will the networks revive their "truth squads" for Campaign 2000, or will they just admit they were one-time instruments designed to punish George Bush for his winning 1988 campaign?

from TPDL 2000-Sep-9, from the Boston Globe 2000-Sep-7, by Jennifer C. Braceras:

Gore's dubious school record

When will the liberal media stop treating left-wing ideology as a proxy for intelligence? For months the press has questioned the intellect of Republican candidate George W. Bush, while describing Al Gore as ''serious,'' ''intellectual'' - even ''wonkish.''

The basis for the media's unfair attacks on Bush's intelligence is his 30-year-old Yale College transcript (purloined last fall and published by The New Yorker). Yet The Washington Post's subsequent revelation of Gore's unimpressive academic record has done little to alter the media's false portrayal of Gore as ''the smartest kid in the class.'' It is a record that is worth reviewing, if only to debunk the myth of Gore as a serious student.

Gore's undergraduate transcript from Harvard is riddled with C's, including a C-minus in introductory economics, a D in one science course, and a C-plus in another. ''In his sophomore year at Harvard,'' the Post reported, ''Gore's grades were lower than any semester recorded on Bush's transcript from Yale.'' Moreover, Gore's graduate school record - consistently glossed over by the press - is nothing short of shameful. In 1971, Gore enrolled in Vanderbilt Divinity School where, according to Bill Turque, author of ''Inventing Al Gore,'' he received F's in five of the eight classes he took over the course of three semesters. Not surprisingly, Gore did not receive a degree from the divinity school. Nor did Gore graduate from Vanderbilt Law School, where he enrolled for a brief time and received his fair share of C's. (Bush went on to earn an MBA from Harvard).

But whereas the liberal press has described Bush's college days as a time of misspent youth, media accounts of Gore's undergraduate years are grossly fawning. (The New York Times: ''As Mr. Bush was frolicking around Yale, a young man named Al Gore was studying at Harvard''; ''Harvard nurtured the part of [Gore] that is in love with the world of ideas.'' The New Republic: ''At Harvard, Gore set himself formidable intellectual challenges.'')

And then there is the laughable October issue of Psychology Today. As part of a cover story entitled, ''Gore and Bush on the Couch,'' the magazine reports the results of a spurious ''analysis'' of 10 of the candidates speeches and/or interviews. The authors claim that the study ''verifies'' the popular stereotype that ''Bush is not as deep a thinker as Gore.''

Two pages later, readers will be shocked - shocked! - to learn that the magazine's (no doubt scientific) study of the candidates' facial gestures reveals that Gore is the ''more serious, constrained, controlled, weighty, ponderous, [and] dominant of the two candidates.'' More ponderous, perhaps ... but, please, spare me the pop psychology.

Biased reporters, however, are not the only ones to blame. Indeed, the vice president himself has cultivated this genius persona (one of many). Thus, he did not correct PBS News anchor Gwen Ifill when she referred to him as a graduate of Vanderbilt Law School. Even more significant was the line in Gore's convention acceptance speech in which he stated, ''I know my own imperfections. I know that sometimes people say I'm too serious, that I talk too much substance and policy.'' Poor Al, he's just too smart for the job.

Of course, the stereotyping of conservative candidates as dumb and liberal candidates as ''brilliant'' is nothing new. During the 1950s, the media lionized Democrat Adlai Stevenson as an intellectual, while ridiculing Republican Dwight Eisenhower as an ineffectual simpleton. Back then, the members of the press knew full well that Stevenson attended Harvard Law School and, yet, had not received a degree. But the media gave Stevenson a pass. (Sound familiar?) Had resourceful journalists investigated, they might have learned (as we now know from Stevenson's biographer John Bartlow Martin) that Harvard Law School Dean Erwin Griswold had hidden Stevenson's transcript in a locked cabinet in his office. What was he hiding? Stevenson, the so-called ''thinking man's candidate,'' had, in fact, flunked out of Harvard Law.

In the end, neither intellect nor academic performance is an especially important criterion by which to judge our presidents. Ronald Reagan and Harry Truman were no scholars, but they rank among the best presidents in our country's history. And what about many liberals' favorite president - Franklin Roosevelt? Social, popular, and famously unserious as an undergraduate at Harvard, FDR had an undistinguished academic record. Yet, later in life, Roosevelt's charisma and his ability to persuade, compromise, and lead helped him to become a ''reformer with results.''

This election is not an I.Q. test; it is about which candidate has better judgment. And that is why, despite the media's love affair with the celluloid image of Al Gore the policy-wonk, it is the affable, authentic, and sensible Bush who would make the better leader.

Jennifer C. Braceras is an attorney and research fellow at Harvard Law School. Her column appears regularly in the Globe.

from TPDL 2000-Mar-23, from the Houston Chronicle, by Philip Terzian:

So much for the idea of Al Gore, Harvard scholar

IF you read the newspapers and watch television, you've gotten to know the two presidential candidates reasonably well.

Al Gore is stiff, didactic, condescending, and lacks Bill Clinton's political skills, but more than makes up for any deficiencies with his rigorous intellect and thorough mastery of complex subjects. George W. Bush is a hail-fellow-well-met, natural campaigner and successful governor of America's second most populous state, but a rich man's son with a second-class intellect and first-class sense of entitlement. George W. Bush may have lived in New Haven, Conn., for four years, but his Yale education seems to have made little impact on him. Al Gore, by contrast, is Hollywood's idea of a Harvard undergraduate: An earnest, professorial, ingratiating grind.

This image of the two candidates is so well ingrained that it may be impossible to dislodge. Indeed, when The New Yorker magazine dug up George W. Bush's Yale transcript a few months ago, and published the details with a sneering narration, the snickering began and has never quite stopped.

So imagine my surprise the other morning when I picked up The Washington Post and found a front-page story with this headline: "Gore's Grades Belie Image of Studiousness. His School Transcripts Are a Lot Like Bush's."

It turns out that the undergraduate Al Gore was not only a mediocre scholar -- "in his sophomore year ... Gore's grades were lower than any semester recorded on Bush's transcript from Yale" -- but no slouch at wasting his parents' money, either: "Gore's classmates remember him spending a notable amount of time in the Dunster House basement lounge shooting pool, watching television, eating hamburgers and occasionally smoking marijuana." The father of the Internet and author of Earth in the Balance not only managed a "D" in Harvard's natural-science course for nonscientists (called "Man's Place in Nature") but avoided all instruction in mathematics and physical science.

By contrast, Bush's grades are not only better than Gore's, but reflect a more wide-ranging curiosity. Gore's electives are almost invariably related to government, his field of concentration, or gut courses in the social sciences. But Bush tried his hand at relatively exotic disciplines: astronomy, geology, anthropology, city planning, Japanese, classical civilization, philosophy. He wasn't brilliant in any of them, but seems to have used his time at Yale to sample the higher learning. Gore's record reads like a high school transcript.

What all this means, as a practical matter, is open to question. The authors acknowledge that, compared with Al Gore, George W. Bush's "studiousness and brainpower have been more open to question during this campaign." And The Post story seems to have sunk without a trace. The op-ed pages of our nation's newspapers are full of bilious, sarcastic accounts of Bush's primary victories, while Al Gore has been transformed from a clueless second fiddle into a master tactician and embryonic statesman.

The image of Bush as a lucky mediocrity, and Gore as a lifelong student/public servant, is now the media wisdom. Even Gore has taken to solemnly suggesting that voters might want to think long and hard about Bush's "qualifications" for the White House.

The problem with all this is that success in the presidency has little to do with academic performance, or even intellect. Our two greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, never darkened a university corridor; some of our smartest chief executives -- John Quincy Adams, Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter -- have been among our least effective. The only thing we have learned from the revelation of Gore's grades is a certain personal insight: Only an academic mediocrity would spend his adult life cultivating the image of a pedagogue. And the most important thing we know from Bush's record is that, in his self-described alienation from the '60s spirit at Yale, he showed uncommonly mature judgment.

The presidency is not an academic appointment; as Franklin D. Roosevelt said, it is "pre-eminently a place of moral leadership." For the last seven years, the White House has been inhabited by a president of high intellect and low character.

Reasonable people may differ about the wisdom of policies, but no one can argue that the life of the nation has been enhanced by Bill Clinton's ethical blindness, reckless personal behavior or estrangement from the truth. In that sense, the distinction between Vice President Gore, Clinton's chief helpmate, and Gov. Bush, a "reformer with results," is more important than we think. So the challenge is not to settle on a president who did better on his SATs than the other guy -- a statistical dead heat, in this instance -- but one who will restore some luster to the office.

from TPDL 2000-Apr-3, from NewsMax 2000-Mar-24, by Reed Irvine:

Al Gore's Skeletons:
The Hammer Connection

In January 1997, Bob Zelnick, a veteran ABC News correspondent, obtained permission from ABC to write a biography of Vice President Al Gore Jr.

In September, 1997, after he had spent eight months researching it, and only weeks before his contract was up for renewal, ABC News told him that if he wanted his contract renewed, he would have to give up writing the book and return the advance he had received from the publisher.

Zelnick says that he was told that it was a conflict of interest for him to write a book about someone he might be covering in the presidential contest a few years down the road. Zelnick commented, "This is a standard that has never been applied by any network or any other news organization to any journalist. You should be happy when there are journalists who know enough to author a book on the subject."

Zelnick refused to comply with the ABC demand, and "Gore, A Political Life" was published by Regnery last year. He is now teaching journalism at Boston University. His book is not one that the Gore campaign will be recommending to voters.

It would be out of character for the Clinton White House not to let ABC News know that it would prefer that Bob Zelnick not write a biography of Al Gore, and that is the most reasonable explanation for ABC's sudden withdrawal of its approval of the project. The TV networks have shown that they like to do favors for the Clinton White House.

Early on in the project, Zelnick says he was informed by the vice president's office that Gore had decided against cooperating with him.

Zelnick says that Gore's office told him that he would "personally resent attempts to contact his family, particularly his aged parents." This is understandable.

The Gore family has a closet full of skeletons, and when you aspire to the presidency of the United States you don't want a nosey reporter opening up closet doors.

Zelnick has a good reputation as a reporter. During his more than two decades in the media, he covered Capitol Hill, the Middle East, Russia and the Pentagon. He won numerous journalism awards, including two American Bar Association Gavel Awards and two Emmys.

Hammer Ties "Extremely Sensitive" Roy Neel, a former top Gore aide, told Zelnick that Gore was "extremely sensitive" about his father's connection with the late Armand Hammer, the head of Occidental Petroleum, who was notorious for his close ties to the Soviet Union.

When Gore Sr. was first elected to Congress in 1938, he was a poor schoolteacher. But by the time he was elected to the Senate in 1952, he had become rich enough to live in a plush hotel on Washington's embassy row and send Al Jr. to the expensive St. Albans School in Washington.

Armand Hammer had helped make Al Gore Sr. a wealthy man. Zelnick's book and a new book just released in January, "The Buying of the President 2000" by Charles Lewis and published by his organization, the Center for Public Integrity, tell how Armand Hammer bought the services of Al Gore, Sr. and helped Al Jr. launch his political career.

Hammer's father, Julius, had linked up with Lenin in 1907 and had agreed to become part of Lenin's underground cadre dedicated to the proletariat revolution. After Lenin seized power in Russia in 1917, Julius used his company, Allied Drug and Chemical, to ship goods to the Soviet Union, and used money from the sale of diamonds smuggled to the United States to finance the Communist Labor Party. That name was later changed to the Communist Party, USA.

Lenin granted young Armand Hammer a monopoly on the manufacture of pencils in the Soviet Union. He used him to raise money in the United States through the sale of confiscated Czarist art and jewelry.

FBI director J. Edgar Hoover wanted to prosecute Hammer for his activities on behalf of the Soviet government, but Charles Lewis says that "Hammer had friends in Congress who, Hoover believed, would attempt to protect him from prosecution." Hammer had bragged that he had Sen. Albert Gore Sr. "in my back pocket."

Hammer helped Gore Sr. get started raising Black Angus cattle, giving him sperm from his own prize stock.

Zelnick says residents in the area where the Gore farm was located claim that Gore was able to sell his cattle at much higher prices than anyone else in the area.

They say that "lobbyists and others with an interest in Gore's work" would come to Carthage and "bid outrageously high prices for Gore's stock." One of them was Joe DiMaggio, who in 1958 bought ten calves from Gore "on behalf of clients whose identities he refused to disclose."

Zelnick says the prices paid cannot be documented, but newspaper records show that "many distinguished folks" came to buy the Gores' cattle. He quotes former Governor Ned McWherter, a staunch ally of Al Gore Jr., as saying, "I've sold some Angus in my time too, but I never got the kind of prices for my cattle that the Gores got for theirs."

Zelnick also claims that in 1969, when Hammer bought the Hooker Chemical Co. (of Love Canal fame), he sold Gore Sr. 1,000 shares of Hooker stock for $150 a share, far less than the stock was worth. House majority leader Hale Boggs accused Hammer of having violated insider trading rules in buying Hooker, but "a Securities Exchange Commission investigation proved inconclusive."

When Gore Sr. was defeated for reelection in 1970, Hammer made him president of Occidental's coal division, paying him $500,000 a year, which was extremely generous compensation at that time.

Al Gore Jr.'s Debt To Armand Hammer

"The Buying of the President 2000" tells about a suspicious land deal between Armand Hammer and Gore Sr. that appears to have been a way of putting Gore Jr. on the Hammer payroll.

After Gore Sr. informed Hammer that zinc ore had been discovered near the Gore farm in Smith County, Tenn., Occidental Minerals Corp., a subsidiary of Hammer's Occidental Petroleum, bought 80 acres in 1972 for $160,000, double the only other offer.

A year after he bought the acreage, Hammer sold the land and the mineral rights to Gore Sr. and his wife for the same price he paid for it, but he also paid them $20,000, ostensibly to cover royalties for the coming year even though no zinc had as yet been mined. The same day, the Gores transferred the property to their son and their daughter for $140,000.

Lewis says, "Perhaps even more astounding than Hammer's decision to sell the land and pay royalties is that Occidental never actually mined the land. In 1985, Gore began leasing the land to Union Zinc, Inc., a competitor of Occidental Minerals Corp. Gore still receives $20,000 a year in royalties.

In all, the Hammer-engineered sweetheart deal has put hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits in Gore's pocket." Gore refers to this land as his "farm," supporting the false claim that he is a farmer.

Zelnick says that Hammer helped finance Gore Jr.'s runs for the House and Senate, met frequently for lunch or dinner with Gore during Hammer's visits to Washington, and put his private jet at the disposal of the Gores. This relationship continued throughout the 1980s.

He discloses that Hammer was involved in Gore's 1988 quest for the presidency. He called Senator Paul Simon of Illinois who was also seeking the Democratic nomination. Hammer told Simon that if he would drop out of the race and endorse Gore, he could have his choice of cabinet positions.

Repaying The Debt

What did Gore do for Hammer and Occidental in return? Zelnick reports, "Hammer was Gore's guest at the 1981 Reagan inauguration and used the Tennessee senator to obtain a favored place at the 1989 inauguration of George Bush."

With the election of Clinton and Gore, things changed. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Occidental sought to develop Russian oil and gained access to important Russian officials through the late Commerce Secretary Ron Brown's trade missions.

Occidental chairman Ray Irani accompanied Brown on a trade mission to Russia in March and April of 1994. Occidental gave $161,014 to the Democratic Party in the 1993-94 election cycle, including a $25,000 contribution on March 29, 1994, a day when Irani was in Russia with Brown. In the fall, he was one of 130 guests at Clinton's second official state dinner for Russian President Boris Yeltsin.

David R. Martin, president of Occidental Oil & Gas Corporation, accompanied Brown on the trade mission to the Middle East in January, 1994.

Today, Occidental is lobbying the administration for permission to return to oil fields it once managed in Libya. However, Libya must be dropped from the State Department list of state sponsors of terrorism, United States economic sanctions on the regime of Moammar Gadhafi have to be dropped, and diplomatic relations restored. The upcoming trial of two Libyans for their role in the 1988 Pan Am 103 bombing case is another hurdle this pro-Libya policy must overcome.

It is believed that the Clinton-Gore administration, in order to facilitate the resumption of diplomatic relations with Libya, has agreed not to charge Gadhafi in the case.

With the help of the administration, Occidental has also tripled its U.S. oil reserves. The Energy Department in October 1997 sold the 47,000-acre Elk Hills oil reserve in California to Occidental. This had been held in reserve since 1912.

Both Nixon and Reagan had tried to open it up to development, but were blocked by Congress. Vice President Gore, despite his reputation as an environmentalist, recommended that the president give oil companies access to this land. Although the Energy Department was supposed to review the environmental impact of the sale, it did not do so.

It turned the job over to a private company whose board of directors included Tony Coelho, who is now the general chairman of Gore's presidential campaign.

The acquisition of this land tripled Occidental's domestic oil reserves. Al Gore Sr. owned over half a million dollars of Occidental stock. He died in 1998, and Al Jr. became the executor of his estate.

If he played any role in the decision to sell the land to Occidental, he could be accused of feathering his own nest. Occidental is said to have been the highest bidder, but if the handling of the environmental impact statement was irregular, who is to say the bidding was not flawed as well?

According to "The Buying of the President 2000," Occidental "loaned $100,000 to the Presidential Inaugural Committee to help pay for the ceremony and the celebrations surrounding it.

"And Gore used his connections to bring in money from Occidental for the Clinton-Gore reelection campaign. According to a memo from White House Deputy Chief of Staff Harold Ickes, Occidental gave $50,000 in response to one of Gore's 'no-controlling-legal authority' telephone calls from his White House office.

"Since Gore got the vice presidential nomination in 1992, Occidental has given more than $470,000 in soft money to various Democratic committees and causes." The book also reports that Occidental provided $100,000 to the Democratic National Committee two days after its chairman, Ray Irani, slept in the Lincoln Bedroom.

Credibility-Enhancing Deceptions

The Gulf War Vote - Zelnick's book is critical of Gore, but it is not nearly as damaging as it might have been. It tells how Gore agonized before voting to support the resolution approving the Gulf War in 1991.

Zelnick says this vote "deserves to be recognized as an act of conscience and moral courage ... If military action failed, the Democratic Party would likely discard him for higher office. Had he voted the other way, following the party line, he could have safely hidden behind the caution of expert opinion."

Senator Alan Simpson, the Senate Republican whip in 1991, tells a different story.

He recently said on MSNBC's "Hardball" that the day before the vote, Gore asked him and Bob Dole, the minority leader, how much time they would give him to speak in the floor debate if he supported the resolution. He told them that the Democratic leadership had offered him seven minutes. Dole offered him 15 minutes, and Simpson said he thought he could raise that to 20.

Gore said he wanted to think about it overnight. They later sweetened their offer, sending word that they would schedule his remarks during the news cycle.

Gore accepted it, and was the only Democratic senator with presidential aspirations to break with his party. It appeared to be "an act of conscience and moral courage," as Zelnick said, but if Sen. Simpson's recollection is accurate, Gore really sold his vote for 20 minutes of time in front of the Senate's television cameras. Pot-Smoking Denials

Zelnick's book has only this one sentence about Gore and drugs: "Marijuana was abundant (in Vietnam) and Gore smoked his share." He did not mention, much less dispute, Gore's claim that his use of marijuana was "rare and infrequent."

At the time, this was hailed as an indication of Gore's honesty because he volunteered the statement without being asked. Thanks to Bill Turque, a Newsweek reporter who has written the book, "Inventing Al Gore: A Biography," we now know his claim was a lie.

In November 1987, Judge Douglas Ginsburg withdrew his name as a Supreme Court nominee when it was reported that he had used marijuana while he was teaching at Harvard Law School. Reporters then began asking potential presidential candidates if they had smoked pot.

Turque says in his book that Gore had a meeting with some of his campaign staff and his father to discuss what he should do. He decided to make a public statement, saying that he had smoked marijuana only occasionally and not since 1972.

He assured his father, who was angry when he learned that his son had smoked marijuana, that the statement he planned to make was the truth.

Turque says: "Supporters hailed Gore for breaking new ground with his candor about drugs. `Al Gore is the first real political leader of his generation ... to come clean on the '60s,' said the late media adviser Bob Squier. `It's an indication of his honesty.'"

Turque had interviewed three of Gore's friends who had smoked pot with him after he returned from Vietnam. One was John Warnecke, who had been a close friend of Gore's since 1970 and had worked with him when they were both reporters for the Nashville Tennessean.

Warnecke, the son of a famous architect, claims he smoked pot with Gore hundreds of times, often on a daily basis, over a six-year period. He says he supplied, free of charge, the high quality marijuana they smoked and that Gore "loved it." This went on until 1976, when Gore ran for Congress.

Bill Turque confirmed Gore's frequent use of marijuana in that period with two other Gore friends, Andrew Schlesinger, the son of Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and another who didn't want his name used.

Warnecke says Gore personally telephoned him in 1987 and demanded that he tell reporters nothing about his use of marijuana. Warnecke said Gore wanted him to stonewall the press, but he did not want to do that.

When asked, he told reporters that Gore smoked pot a couple of times but he didn't like it. He says his conscience has bothered him ever since because he had lied.

Gore was angry because he had said anything, and they haven't spoken since 1987. Warnecke says he still intends to vote for Gore, but he feels betrayed by him.

He favors decriminalizing marijuana and thinks that Gore is a hypocrite, having spent years smoking the stuff and now being part of an administration that is carrying out a war against it. He admits that he abused both drugs and alcohol, but he says he has been "clean" for 21 years. He is being treated for depression, and a former Gore aide has tried to discredit him by calling him "a schizophrenic who hears voices."

The "Old News" Gambit Works

Just before Newsweek's January 24th issue went to press, Richard M. Smith, the chairman and editor-in-chief, canceled plans to include the excerpt from Turque's book that covered Warnecke's charges.

At the same time it was announced that Houghton Mifflin was delaying publication of the book until March.

Angered, Warnecke gave his story to a pro-drug-legalization Web site, with greater detail and minor differences from Turque's account. This was picked up by Matt Drudge and Salon, an Internet magazine, on the weekend of January 15-16.

It was downplayed or ignored by the establishment media. The Associated Press put out a 144-word story that gave Gore's denial that he had smoked pot on a daily basis after returning from Vietnam. "No," he said, "When I came back from Vietnam, yes, but not to that extent ... This is something I dealt with a long time ago. It's old news."

The 1987 lie that had elicited praise for his candor now helped Gore divert the media from reporting the truth. It was successfully dismissed as "old news."

When the excerpt from Turque's book was finally published in the February 14 issue of Newsweek, it was treated as old news squared. It was posted on MSNBC's Web site, but we saw no stories about reporters challenging the truth of Gore's claim that his use of marijuana was rare.

No one reported Turque's claim that Andrew Schlesinger, a friend who had joined the Gores in New Hampshire to celebrate the primary victory, had said that "in 1971, he had smoked with him `at least a dozen times' at the Warneckes'."

Useful Lies Versus Harmful Truths

Bill Clinton has been called a pathological liar. To hide serious misdeeds and crimes he tell big lies, such as "I never had sex with that woman," with no shame and with such conviction that millions of people believe them.

Al Gore is a frequent liar, but he is not as good at it as Clinton. From force of habit, he tells little lies designed to make himself look better than he is. These are almost always quickly exposed as false, making him look worse.

But he also tells big lies to cover-up his wrongdoing or damage his opponents. Lying to cover up a harmful truth is more serious than exaggerating one's achievements, but both reflect badly on one's veracity.

Gore's denial of his heavy use of marijuana from 1970 to 1976 was a lie told to conceal a harmful truth. In 1987, when it was first told, the truth would have been enough to derail his presidential campaign, as it did Judge Douglas Ginsburg's nomination to the Supreme Court.

In 1992, it would have kept him from being the running mate of "I didn't inhale" Bill Clinton. In these more decadent days, many more voters appear willing to overlook marijuana use by the baby boomers, but those who are sick of Clinton's lies may prove to be equally sick of a candidate who denies claims by his friends that he was a heavy smoker of pot.

There are other serious lies that call Gore's veracity into question the denial that he knew the event at the Buddhist temple was a fund-raiser, his denial that he knew that fund-raising calls he made from his office were illegal, because there was "no controlling legal authority," his claim that he has always been pro-choice, and his claim in a televised debate with Bill Bradley on January 26 that he has never said anything during the campaign that he knew to be untrue are all efforts to replace a harmful truth with a useful lie.

Two days after that debate, the Boston Globe published an article on Gore's veracity record. The writers unearthed two memos written to Gore during his run for the 1988 presidential nomination, one by Mike Kopp, his press secretary, and the other by Arlie Schardt, his communications director.

The Kopp memo of September, 1987 warned him that his image "may continue to suffer if you continue to go out on a limb with remarks that may be impossible to back up." Six months later, this was still a problem. Schardt wrote, "Your main pitfall is exaggeration."

In a New York Times op-ed column on Feb. 16, Schardt argues that Gore's exaggerating is being exaggerated. Listed below are 17 Gore lies. Those in bold face were addressed in Schardt's column.

Al Gore's Lies

(1) His use of marijuana was "rare and infrequent." (2) He didn't know the Buddhist temple event was a fund-raiser (3) He didn't know that fund-raising calls from his office were illegal. (4) He has always been pro-choice. (5) He has never said anything in the campaign that he knew to be untrue. (6) He was cosponsor of the McCain/Feingold campaign finance reform bill in the Senate. (7) He took the initiative in creating the Internet. (8) He and Tipper were models for "Love Story." (9) He uncovered the pollution at Love Canal. (10) His reporting for the Nashville Tennessean "got a bunch of people indicted and sent to jail." (11) His views on the Vietnam War were written into Hubert Humphrey's speech to the 1968 Democratic National Convention by a journalist who had interviewed him. (12) His claim that as an army reporter in Vietnam: "I pulled my turn on the perimeter at night and walked through the elephant grass and was fired upon." (13) One reason he enlisted and went to Vietnam was to spare some other family the agony of sending a son. (14) He had been a small businessman and a homebuilder, helping develop a subdivision on his father's land in 1969. (15) He is responsible for the "one-click-away" tool that helps parents block, filter or monitor Internet content to protect their children. (16) He was taught how to clean out hog waste, how to clear land with a double-bladed ax and how to plow steep hillsides with a team of mules. (17) His claim at the Des Moines Register offices in January that he bought his own farm when he came back from Vietnam and that he has owned and operated it for 26 years. [This is the 80 acres Hammer sold to his father on which he has collected $20,000 a year in mining royalties since 1974.]

Schardt addresses only numbers 1, 4, 7, 12, 14 and 16.

#1. He repeats Gore's 1987 lie, but gets the date wrong.

#4. He says, "Let's just say his position evolved."

#7. He says, "That can be interpreted anyway you like."

#12. "Our campaign always presented him as an army journalist, nothing more." [Attached to an engineering brigade at Bien Hoa, Gore did not have to do guard duty on the perimeter or trod through elephant grass under fire.]

#14. This is what prompted Schardt's "pitfall" memo. He says it was written to warn Gore to be careful in answering questions from a reporter who was looking into Gore's claim that he had worked briefly as a homebuilder. [He had not.]

#16. "Al Gore naturally talked to farmers about working on his family farm." [But how much hog waste had he cleaned, how much land had he cleared and how many acres had he plowed on steep hillsides with a team of mules?]