Bad news for the Gore campaign. For months, campaign advisers have had the vice president moving his headquarters from Washington to Nashville, moving from dark suits to light suits, moving from loafers to cowboy boots. But despite all the retooling (or perhaps because of it) 50 percent of voters, according to a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll, think Gore is "insincere and somewhat phony."
Maybe they've been watching his campaign events. One of THE SCRAPBOOK's favorite such came last week in Charlotte, North Carolina, where Gore explained to a bunch of eighth-graders that he had gone to fight as a journalist in Vietnam because, though he believed the war was wrong, "If I didn't go, someone else would have to go in my place." Plus there was the fact -- which he didn't tell the students -- that his father, an opponent of the war, was in a desperate struggle to keep his Tennessee Senate seat that year (1970), and a peacenik son wouldn't have been good for the family business.
Gore's actual state of mind when he joined the Army can perhaps better be gauged by the letter he wrote to his parents that year shortly before he enlisted (a letter they astutely gave to the New Yorker just after the 1994 elections, when the political damage it might have done had it leaked during a campaign was minimized): "My own belief," wrote young Al, "is that this form of psychological ailment [anti-communism] -- in this case a national madness -- leads the victim to actually create the thing which is feared the most. It strikes me that this is precisely what the U.S. has been doing. Creating -- and if not creating, energetically supporting -- fascist, totalitarian regimes in the name of fighting totalitarianism. . . . For me, the best example of all is the U.S. Army."
Gore successfully laughed this off at the time as crazy, college-student thinking that he was cured of by joining the Army. Funny then that, unlike his more recent statements, this one actually sounds deeply felt -- sincere and not phony at all.
John Cleese, quoted in the London, Daily Telegraph, April 3, 2000