The Gore campaign must have been relieved last week when the latest "Internet Al" gaffe failed to gain traction. According to the initial New York Times account, Gore had claimed credit for discovering one of the key environmental disaster stories of the 1970s, the dump leaking toxic waste under a school and subdivision in Love Canal, N.Y. But the Gore campaign quickly responded that the Times had misheard their candidate. And indeed, last Friday the Times published the following correction: "An article on Dec. 1 about a campaign appearance by Vice President Al Gore in New Hampshire rendered a passage incorrectly in a comment he made about the contamination of Love Canal. Mr. Gore said: "I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. I had the first hearing on that issue and Toone, Tenn. But that was the one that started it all.' He did not say 'But I was the one that started it all.'"
Gee. So that isn't bragging? Gore had in fact chaired a hearing on the matter in October 1978, but that was after the state of New York declared Love Canal a health hazard and after President Carter declared it a national disaster and after over 250 families were already being evacuated. Indeed, following the Times's story, Gore was quick to give "credit to Lois Gibbs and her neighbors for raising Cain."
But there's another interesting story here besides AL Gore's well-documented propensity to brag: Namely, why would Gore -- why would anyone? -- still want to take "credit" for discovering Love Canal? The truth is that the Love Canal toxic-waste evacuation was a scandalous example of mass hysteria, fed by governmental malpractice. And this has been known by anyone who cares to know for almost two decades.
The only party to the Love Canal scandal that consistently showed concern for the dangers of toxic waste was the Hooker Chemicals and Plastics Corporation, which had safely sealed away and buried chemical waste in Love Canal in the 1950s, in compliance with the law. As a thoroughgoing 1981 investigation by Reason magazine showed, Hooker was forced to deed the land it had used as a dump to the Niagara Falls Board of Education, all the while imploring the city never to disturb the site.
Despite Hooker's letters and statements at public hearings to that effect, the Board of Education decided to develop the land for a school. The city of Niagara Falls then further endangered its residents by building a new sewer system that pierced the underground chemical fill. None of these facts discouraged Lois Gibbs, spokes-person for nearby residents, from laying the blame squarely at Hooker's feet. And the anti-corporate screeching continues even today. "Communities at risk," Gibbs wrote in the Boston Globe last year, "believe their neighborhoods were targeted, chosen deliberately by corporations to be sacrificed in the name of economic growth and profits."
So apparently does Gore. Love Canal is the last thing he should want to take credit for.