Before the phony pet dog/Mother-in-Law anecdote enters the pantheon of Al Gore whoppers, it's worth giving proper credit to Walter V. Robinson, who first reported it in the Sept. 18 Boston Globe. As Mickey Kaus joked the next day in Kausfiles.com, Robinson "must have misplaced his orders from Media Central: He's still busting Gore for stretching the truth."
Robinson's piece was a model of thoroughness: "Vice President Al Gore," he began, "reaching for a personal example to illustrate the breathtaking costs of some prescription drugs, told seniors in Florida last month that his mother-in-law pays nearly three times as much for the same arthritis medicine used for his ailing dog, Shiloh. But Gore, the master of many policy details, mangled the facts, and late last week his aides could not say with certainty that Shiloh or Margaret Ann Aitcheson actually takes the brand-name drug, Lodine, that Gore said they do."
Well, "mangled the facts" was putting it politely. As Robinson went on to explain, Gore, "who has a history of embellishing facts about himself and his family," had lifted the figures and the comparison from a study done by House Democrats. Plus, the generic version of the drug used by 85 percent of patients turns out to be cheaper than the doggie version. Not to mention, had the amount of the drug implied by Gore's figures actually been administered to the dog, the animal might have been poisoned.
In a follow-up story on Sept. 22, Robinson highlighted the Gore campaign's failed efforts to flee the scene of the anecdote. "Even the House Democratic study, from which Gore lifted manufacturer wholesale prices and presented them as his family's own retail cost, notes that just eight of the 200 best-selling drugs in the United States can be used for both humans and animals. Those numbers suggest that comparing human and animal drug costs to underscore the high cost of prescription drugs, as Gore has done, is irrelevant except for a tiny fraction of the drugs that are prescribed." Game, set, match.
Now, the reason the origins of the story are worth insisting on is not just that Robinson deserves full credit for his scoop, but the astonishing twist given to it by the New York Times, where the orders from Media Central are still very much enforced. Rather than follow up on a story unflattering to Gore from its sister paper (the Globe is owned by the New York Times company), the Times transformed Mother-in-Law-gate into yet another sermon about nasty Republicans. The day after the first Globe story, the Times took dictation from the Gore campaign:
"Dick Cheney and his aides continued efforts today to hammer away at Mr. Gore's credibility. Karen P. Hughes, Mr. Bush's communications director, distributed an article from the Boston Globe that challenged Mr. Gore's assertions that his mother-in-law paid nearly three times as much for the same arthritis medicine that was used by his ailing dog Shiloh. . . . Kym Spell, a spokeswoman for Mr. Gore, called the Bush campaign's focus on the article 'the latest sign the Bush-Cheney ticket is very, very desperate.' And she said the campaign had verified that both Mr. Gore's mother-in-law and dog had used the same drug."
If the Gore campaign says it has verified something, that apparently is good enough for the Times, which proceeded the following day to do some hammering away of its own, again on the theme of GOP aggression. Its story the next day was headlined: "In Harshest Attack Yet, Cheney Accuses Gore of Fabrications." And the lede read as follows: "The Republicans continued a sharp assault yesterday on Vice President Al Gore over the veracity of a statement he made last month [about the arthritis drug]." So in just 48 hours, the story had changed from Gore's pathological fantasizing to an alleged Bush-Cheney "assault," which has to be a new record, even for the Times.