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He's as decent as a minister
He's as sober as a judge
He subscribes to every charity
And his hobby's making fudge
--From the musical Bye, Bye Birdie
In case you weren’t listening this week, let’s recap the Al Gore story.
Young Albert was a good boy growing up as the son of a U.S. Senator who pulled himself up from a hardscrabble life in Tennessee. He studied hard, went to Harvard, fell in love and married his high school sweetheart, volunteered for Vietnam, came home and worked as a local newspaper reporter and editorial writer, began fathering children, ran for the House of Representatives and won, ran for the Senate and won, tried for the Democratic Presidential nomination and lost, got picked as Bill Clinton’s running mate, was elected as Vice-President, and is now the official Democratic standard-bearer in election 2000.
Oh yes, and he's a husband still very much in love with his wife of 30 years. He’s a loving son and father. He was "proud to wear his country’s uniform." And he is going to make sure that everyone in the United States of America has safe drinking water.
FOR AND AGAINST. But that’s not all. Gore told America on Aug. 16 that he will fight for universal preschool care; against the rising tide of global warming; for a prescription drug benefit for all seniors; for better schools and smaller classes; against the stigma of mental illness; against cancer, diabetes, and HIV-AIDS; against school vouchers; for reform of estate taxes; against the marriage penalty; against a huge tax cut for the wealthy; for paying off the national debt; for family values; against Big Oil, Big Tobacco, huge drug companies, and cruel HMOs; for civil rights; for equal rights; for affirmative action; against hate crimes; for a crime victim’s bill of rights; for 50,000 more "community police" on the streets; for tougher penalties against those who use the Internet to prey on children and violate privacy; for a stronger military; for child labor standards; for the right of a woman to choose; and for campaign-finance reform.
Whew! About the only thing Gore left out was that he would fight for the rights of kangaroos to carry their young without seat belts.
Like his Republican opponent, George W. Bush, Gore had a lot riding on his acceptance speech. And neither stumbled. But Bush just had to demonstrate that he could be Presidential, that he was more than "a gentleman’s C" student, that there was some there there. He accomplished at least that.
The pressure on Gore was more intense. The Woodman had to slam one out of the park and electrify the country -- not just the partisan crowd in the Staples Center. Gore wasn’t kidding when he said at the end of his talk: "If you entrust me with the Presidency, I know I always won’t be the most exciting politician." Only the truly charitable would say he hit a double.
BELIEVABLE? Delivery aside, there remains something unsettling about a candidate who desperately tries to be all things to all people, who promises the moon. At the end of the day, America must ask itself: Can you believe Al Gore?
Can you believe a man who at the 1996 Democratic Convention brought many to tears when he described holding the hand of his sister dying of cancer -- then, we learned later, courted tobacco interests only months after her death?
Can you believe a man who says: "Campaign-finance reform will be the very first bill that Joe Lieberman and I send to Congress" -- even though he is again indebted to Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic money-raiser extraordinare who was the big cheese of the widely discredited fund-raising efforts of Clinton/Gore ’96?
Can you believe a man who talks about campaign-finance reform with fire in his eyes -- when only one day earlier Newsweek reported that his camp has paid more than $1 million to a Massachusetts telemarketing firm involved in a fund-raising scandal during the ’96 campaign?
Promise-'em-anything Al too often seems too good to be true.
Scotti is BW senior editor for government and sports business Edited by Frank Comes
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Copyright 2000, Bloomberg L.P.
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