As Matt Labash detailed in these pages last week, for the past 13 months Al Gore has effectively served as slumlord to the Mayberry family of Carthage, Tennessee, his tenants in a decrepit four-bedroom rambler roughly 150 yards from the Gore family farmhouse.
Overflowing toilets, peeling plaster, stripped linoleum floors, and backed-up sinks are but a few of the inconveniences the Mayberrys have endured. Not that they suffered silently. Tracy Mayberry, the family matron, says she complained more than 30 times to Gore's property managers -- to no avail. When she was finally served an eviction notice on May 26, Tracy invited a local Nashville television station to her house for a tour, prompting Gore to plead ignorance of the entire situation, reverse the eviction notice, and promise necessary repairs to her home.
Gore's rapid-response damage control anesthetized the media at large. In what nowadays passes for "journalistic responsibility," the networks ignored the story altogether, major papers ran single wire dispatches, and the Nashville Tennessean failed to do any original reporting until a full week and a half after the Mayberrys went public. The Chicago Tribune disparaged the entire affair as a "tempest in a toilet," saying Gore was too busy to have knowledge of such matters. Maybe so, but Tracy Mayberry told Labash she makes her rent checks out directly to Gore, that she was told by his property managers that they could do no repairs without his consent, that she asked them to secure Gore's consent on more than five occasions, and that she even called Gore's Carthage office some months ago to complain, but was referred right back to Gore's property managers.
Some of the promised repairs were underway when our intrepid reporter visited the Mayberrys on June 6. But a day after his visit, Tracy Mayberry reported to him that one of her toilets still leaked from its base, and that her new linoleum was buckling into gaping holes in the underlying floor. None of this seemed to matter to Gore, who said on June 14, "as soon as I found out about the problem, I took steps to make sure it was resolved." Not so, says Mayberry. From June 7 to June 13, she says she didn't see another worker. Meanwhile, Gore's property manager and lawyer suggested the disrepair may have been her family's fault. Tracy says that her boxer, Miss Lady, was poisoned and died over the weekend. Tracy doesn't know who did it, but the dog was felled by bad turkey -- which the Mayberrys haven't eaten since last Christmas.
All this was enough to make the Mayberrys pack their things; Tracy and her husband planned to drop the kids off at her mother's place and look for a new place to live. But Nashville's NewsChannel 5 revisited the Mayberrys last Tuesday and detailed the continued decrepitude. Voila! Now Tracy says she suddenly has new gutters, a (second) new tile floor, and the expectation of visits from an exterminator and painting crew. So is she happy with the vice president, whom she promised to bake a peach cobbler when he apologetically called her and invited himself over for dinner? Not very. "I'll hold out" on the peach cobbler, she says, "That's for good people." About Gore, she says, "I feel like he's lied to me, like he's let me down. If he's going to lie to me, imagine what he'll do to the country."