It's not fair that Bill Bradley should have to single-handedly keep Al Gore honest. That's too much work for any man alone. Two Gore whoppers in particular struck THE SCRAPBOOK this week.
The most egregious was Gore's preposterous claim that "the Clinton-Gore administration has ended the deepest recession since the 1930s." This is fiction through and through. As Lawrence Lindsey pointed out in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal last week, the infamous recession of 1990-91 in fact lasted only two successive quarters, "the shortest period that meets the definition of recession." And that short recession was not nearly so severe as those of say, 1974 and 1982, which Al Gore presumably should remember.
Gore also danced around his record on abortion with the artful formulation, "I have always supported a woman's right to choose."
Not so fast. As Matthew Rees detailed in a WEEKLY STANDARD article last October, during Gore's eight years in the House, he had an 84 percent pro-life voting record, as tabulated at the time by the National Right to Life Committee. He made statements like, "I have consistently opposed federal funding of abortions" and even went further, saying "innocent human life must be protected, and I am committed to furthering this goal." Indeed, in 1979 he even voted against a Henry Waxman amendment authorizing federal funding for abortions in cases of rape and incest.
Bradley knows this record well, and so he challenged Gore's evasion. Gore acknowledged that "early in my career I wrestled with the question" of federal funding. But then he returned to his script, saying "I have always supported a woman's right to choose."