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HenchPAC NewsIs Al Gore nuts? After weeks of doing everything brilliantly in the presidential election contest, Gore has singlehandedly blown his lead in the polls. And he's done this not by emphasising the wrong issues or by campaign chicanery, but by telling fibs. And weird fibs at that - a practice that has proved something of a compulsion for him.
Appearing before a labour union audience last week, Gore claimed to have been serenaded to sleep as a boy by a labour union song, which he then proceeded to croak out. The song is called Look for the Union Label, and the only problem is that its lyrics were written when he was 27 years old for a television commercial that was broadcast throughout America for more than a decade.
Gore might indeed have heard the tune used for a lullaby - the new words were set to the music of the classic Jerome Kern melody Look for the Silver Lining. But rather than use that face-saving explanation, his campaign announced that he had confused Look for the Union Label with another union song written in 1901 that doesn't sound anything like it.
So obviously Gore was not sung to sleep with a working-man's song at all, or a Jerome Kern song, or maybe any song. Why would the Vice-President tell such a strange lie? Here's one theory: Gore is trying to combat the impression that he is an inauthentic person - and his method is to seek commonalities with the audiences he is addressing. But since Gore has few commonalities with any ordinary human being, having been raised in an hotel by a father who was a US senator, he can only manufacture them.
That's also what happened on a visit to Florida, the penultimate destination of many elderly Americans (the ultimate being, of course, the grave). Gore is trying to garner support by attacking pharmaceutical companies for supposedly short-changing senior citizens. So he told his listeners that his mother-in-law and his dog are taking the same arthritis drugs - but that his mother-in-law is paying three times more. In this way he could make his point and claim to have a family experience in common with his audience.
But this too was a lie. The anecdote was lifted wholesale from a study by Democrats working in the House of Representatives - a fact that became clear when it turned out that the prices Gore cited were wholesale, not retail. His team amended the numbers, but gave no proof that either Margaret Ann Aitcheson or Shiloh is taking any arthritis drugs.
The revelations of these bizarre untruths crippled Gore last week; in three major polls his support fell by up to 10 per cent. This behaviour is particularly odd when you consider that, eight months ago, Gore said the thing he most regretted having done in his life was "claim I invented the Internet".
That notorious bit of false self-puffery, uttered in March 1999 on CNN, supplied television comedians with fodder they're still using against him. It wasn't the sort of lie Americans have come to accept from Bill Clinton - the cagey use of untruth in self-defence or as a political weapon. It was something else, something almost inexplicable - a statement whose falsity is easily checked and exposed, thereby embarrassing the man who speaks it and doing him no good whatsoever.
And it's the sort of lie Gore has told repeatedly. He claimed he has always been a supporter of abortion on demand when, in fact, he opposed federal funding for abortions and wrote a letter in 1984 asserting that "it is my deep personal conviction that abortion is wrong". He claimed he was a lifelong supporter of gun control when, in 1986, he told reporters that gun-control laws "haven't been an effective solution to the problem of violent crime".
In 1996, he said that at the time of his sister's death from lung cancer, he committed himself to anti-smoking efforts - but only four years later he proudly told tobacco farmers that "with my own hands, all of my life, I put in the plant beds and transferred it. I've hoed it, sprayed it, chopped it, shredded it, spiked it, put it in the barn, stripped it and sold it".
In all these cases, the purpose of the lie was to make his audience think of him as an admirable person, interested in and a fighter for the things they believe in. But the deceptions are so glaringly obvious that they suggest Gore wants to be caught out, to be scorned for his pandering. He's not a stupid man, so what else could be motivating him?
It makes you think that deep down, he feels he doesn't deserve to be President and will do anything to ruin his chances - just as he did last week, when he could have put the election away.
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