No one has yet mentioned the horrifying downside of Al Gore's having transferred his campaign headquarters from Washington to Nashville: Being "back home" in Tennessee only gives him that many more excuses to ponder his increasingly mythopoeic roots. True to form, while cutting the ribbon on his new Nashville headquarters on Oct. 6, the vice president waxed nostalgic. According to Ceci Connolly's account in the Washington Post, Gore told the audience that his "mother Pauline, celebrating her 87th birthday today, was raised at a time when 'poor girls were not supposed to dream.'" And when, exactly was that?
Reader Herbert J. Boothroyd of Weston, Mass., alerted THE SCRAPBOOK to an even more poignant version of this uplifting parable. According to the Weston Town Crier, when Gore was in Massachusetts in September, he related "the story of his mother's journey from a poor rural town in Tennessee to Nashville, where Mrs. Gore -- now 86 years old -- earned a law degree while waiting tables for 25 cent tips. It was during a time when women didn't even have the right to vote."
And when exactly was that? Gore's own state of Tennessee approved women's suffrage in August 1920, 79 years ago. So not only was Gore's mother an uppity dreamer, she must have been an exceptionally precocious law student, too. About eight years old.