Will scandal deflate liberal-media puff pieces on Gore?

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 7, 1997 | by L. Brent III Bozell

Al Gore is the anti-Dan Quayle. From the day he was added to the Clinton ticket, reporters have presented Gore as the cerebral antithesis of his predecessor, as well as half of the "Gold Dust Twins" (Time). So, Bob Woodward's Washington Post story exposing Gore as the Democrats' "solicitor in chief," an aggressive shakedown artist of business donors, must have come as a shock.

Weird, isn't it, that Gore seems to be getting his first vetting more than four years into office? Within hours of the announcement of Quayle's selection, the same reporters had pored over his draft record, report cards, resume, golf trips and financial statements--and they got much of it wrong. Yet, nobody's investigated Gore's military record--the strangely shortened six-month tour as a reporter in Vietnam. Lying to a nationwide audience about his sister's death spurring him to fight the tobacco menace? Nobody cares.

Gore the environmentalist making $20,000 a year in zinc-mining royalties from Occidental Petroleum, part of the cozy, slimy relationship between the Gore family and the late Soviet stooge Armand Hammer? Nobody cares. In his book, Dossier, Edward Jay Epstein noted a deal between A1 Gore Sr. and Hammer: "In 1950, Hammer had made Congressman Gore a partner in a cattle-breeding business, and Gore made a substantial profit." (Gore the elder later worked directly for Hammer for $500,000 a year.) This might explain why young A1 wrote to Dad that anti-communism was a "psychological ailment," a "national madness." Hammer's business interests in Communist countries were a family cash cow!

Al Gore had to be feeling invincible the last few years. Reporters ignored his cronies leaning on the Immigration and Naturalization Service to help left-wing Latino groups cram aliens through the machinery to vote Democratic. The networks and newsmagazines ignored Gore's bizarre Buddhist temple fundraiser--until after the election.

For years, the regular pattern for the Democratic Party press was to pile on the puff pieces for the heir apparent. Last September, Time and Newsweek competed to see who could slobber over Gore the best.

Time's J.F.O. McAllister: "The young Dan Quayle never convinced the country he had the gravitas to be veep, let alone top man. But the cerebral, private intensely competitive A1 Gore has managed the contortionist's feat of projecting an almost perfect loyalty to his boss' reelection without diminishing himself.... Gore and Clinton, both brainy, moderate Southerners with an abiding interest in the plumbing of government, speak an easy shorthand and razz each other like brothers."

And Newsweek's Bill Turque: "Though Al Gore relishes politics almost as much as his boss does, tonight he's next door in the Old Executive Office Building, doing what he really loves: thinking about complexity theory, open systems, Goethe and the absence of scientific metaphors in modern society.... Clinton may lead the country into the next millennium, but it is Gore who truly embodies the new century's possibilities and anxieties."

Newsweek's Evan Thomas came back for more: "Because Gore is a reserved politician, his sometimes messianic zeal has been overlooked. The vice president has written that his call to save the environment began with the shock of a near-fatal car accident to his son, Albert III. Characteristically, Gore felt it wasn't enough to save one child; he wanted to save all the world's children."

Now that scandals are surrounding Gore, will the puff pieces end? Will Gore's shifty, stammering, wholly unconvincing press conference taint the Gold Dust Twin image? Or will the press rush to the rescue instead? The media's credibility--as much as Gore's--is at stake.

L. Brent Bozell III is chairman of the Media Research Center