Al Gore controversies

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Al Gore, former Vice-President of the United States (1993-2001) and 2000 Democratic Party presidential nominee, has been the subject of several controversies.

Contents

1 Campaign fundraising
2 Influence on the Internet

2.1 1999 CNN interview
2.2 Background:
2.3 Trivia

3 Environment

3.1 Urging press self-censorship
3.2 Pigeon River
3.3 Gore and the internal combustion engine

4 Al Gore and the media coverage
5 Controversial Al Gore quotes
6 External links

Campaign fundraising

Main Article: 1996 U.S. campaign finance scandal

After the 1996 election campaign, it was alleged that Gore had improperly used his White House office telephone to make fund-raising calls. Even though Gore paid for the calls using a private credit card, under the Hatch Act, any use of government property for campaign purposes is forbidden.

In a press conference 1997-03-03, Gore said: "If there had been a shred of doubt in my mind that anything I did was a violation of law, I assure you I would not have done that. And my counsel advises me, let me repeat, that there is no controlling legal authority that says that any of these activities violated any law."[link]

Vice President Al Gore with Maria Hsia (left), Ted Sieong (right), and John Huang (2nd from right in background)

Gore was similarly criticized for attending 1996-04-29 an event at the Buddhist Hsi Lai Temple in Hacienda Heights, California, USA. The temple was later implicated in a campaign donation laundering scheme. In that scheme, donations nominally from Buddhist nuns in lawful amounts had actually been donated by wealthy monastics and devotees. Critics noted that the nuns, who each supposedly gave large checks to the Clinton-Gore campaign the day after the luncheon, had actually taken monastic vows of poverty. According to the conservative Washington Times, Gore attempted to dodge the criticism by claiming ignorance, saying that he "drank a lot of iced tea" at the function and, as a result, had made several trips to the bathroom and that during these bathroom breaks he missed the illegal activity. There is no evidence on the public record that the Washington Times story was accurate, however.[link] Indeed, Hsia's prosecutor, Eric Yaffe, stated at trial that Gore was among those deceived by the scheme.[link]

While a guest on the Today Show on 1997-01-24, Gore said that he did not know the event was a fundraiser, calling it a "community outreach event". Several aspects of the event confirm Gore's contention. There was no formal ticket price for the event and the speech Gore gave was a stump speech, not a typical fund raising speech.[link] The event was originally to be held at a different venue and an admission fee to be charged, but this was dropped when the venue was changed to the temple.[link] It was claimed out however that a DNC memo prepared for Gore made plain that the event at Hsi Lai Temple was a fundraiser. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Harold Ickes sent Gore a memo estimating the expected take from the event. A Secret Service document called it a fundraiser, Gore's own staff described the event as a fundraiser to reporters, and DNC chairman Don Fowler testified to the Senate that he knew "there was a fundraising aspect to this event." The Senate report says two weeks before the event, Gore's scheduler passed out a sheet showing that the luncheon had a ticket price ranging from $1,000 to $5,000 per head. Six weeks before attending the event, Gore met with temple master Hsing Yun at the White House with fundraisers Maria Hsia and John Huang. Later that day, Gore sent an e-mail saying that he couldn't be in New York on 1996-04-28: "If we have already booked the fundraiser [in California], then we have to decline". According to conservative commentator Joseph Farah, the temple has admitted shredding documents about the luncheon and shipping videotapes off to Taiwan.[link]

Attorney General Janet Reno on 1997-09-03, ordered a review of Gore's fundraising and associated statements. Based on the investigation, she judged that appointment of an independent counsel was unwarranted. Republicans accused Reno of politically protecting the Clinton-Gore administration by this decision.

Influence on the Internet

1999 CNN interview

On 1999-03-09, Wolf Blitzer had an interview with Gore on CNN's Late Edition. During this interview, Gore said,

During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system. [link].

This quote became the subject of heavy satire [link]. In some cases, Gore was misrepresented as having said he had "invented" the Internet rather than having "taken the initiative in creating" it ([Snopes, 2005]), and consequent arguments were made that the ARPANET pre-dated Gore's time in office.

Background: Al Gore was highly influenced by the 1988 report Toward a National Research Network [link] submitted to congress by a group chaired by UCLA professor of computer science, Leonard Kleinrock, one of the central creators of the ARPANET [link].

After hearing this report, Gore introduced legislation during the late 1980s known informally as the Gore Bill [link]. It was passed, however, as the High Performance Computing Act of 1991 [link] on Dec. 9, 1991 and led to the NII or National Information Infrastructure [link] which Gore referred to as the Information superhighway. Funding for the development of MOSAIC in 1993, [link], the world wide web browser which is often credited as leading to the internet boom during the mid-1990s, came from the High-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative, a program created by the High Performance Computing Act of 1991 [link].

Prior to the passage of the 1991 bill, Gore was invited to participate in the September 1991 Special Issue of Scientific American on Networks. Gore's article in this issue, Infrastructure for the Global Village joined Vint Cerf's Networks, Nicholas Negroponte's Products and Services for Computer Networks and Alan Kay's Computers, Networks and Education [link].

In February 1993, President Clinton and Vice President Gore submitted a report, Technology for America's Economic Growth [link] which outlined the ways in which their administration planned further development of the internet by the year 2000. Gore further developed these ideas in speeches that he made at The Superhighway Summit [link], on 1994-01-11 at Royce Hall, UCLA and for the International Telecommunications Union [link] on 1994-03-21.

A 2000-09-28, email written by Vint Cerf and Robert E. Kahn (key developers of internet protocols), stated that:

[A]s the two people who designed the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the Internet work, we would like to acknowledge VP Gore's contributions as a Congressman, Senator and as Vice President. No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time.

Last year the Vice President made a straightforward statement on his role. He said: "During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet." We don't think, as some people have argued, that Gore intended to claim he "invented" the Internet. Moreover, there is no question in our minds that while serving as Senator, Gore's initiatives had a significant and beneficial effect on the still-evolving Internet. The fact of the matter is that Gore was talking about and promoting the Internet long before most people were listening. We feel it is timely to offer our perspective.[link]

Trivia

Gore, himself, poked fun at the controversy. In September 2000, as a guest on the The Late Show with David Letterman, Gore read a list of the "Top Ten Rejected Gore-Lieberman Campaign Slogans." Number nine on the list was: "Remember, America, I gave you the Internet, and I can take it away!" [link].
In 2005, when Gore was honored at the Webby Awards for his role in the development of the internet, he also joked during an acceptance speech limited to five words (according to Webby Awards rules): "Please don't recount this vote" [link].
In the game Civilization 4 by Firaxis, the icon for the Internet technology research is a picture of Al Gore.

Environment

Gore's 1992 book Earth in the Balance (ISBN 0452269350) gave Gore a reputation for strongly pro-environmentalist views. This reputation was an asset with some constituencies, but because of it Gore was often accused of environmental hypocrisy, environmental radicalism, or both. Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh regularly lampooned his views by reading selected passages from Earth in the Balance and from the Unabomber Manifesto, inviting listeners to guess who wrote the respective quote.

Urging press self-censorship

In 1992, the same year Gore published his book on the subject, Newsweek journalist Greg Easterbrook wrote about calls by Al Gore and Paul R. Ehrlich for journalistic self-censorship about criticisms of climate change, saying they had "ventured into dangerous territory by suggesting that journalists quietly self-censor environmental evidence that is not alarming, because such reports, in Gore's words, undermine the effort to build a solid base of public support for the difficult actions we must soon take." Easterbrook wrote: "Skeptical debate is supposed to be one of the strengths of liberalism; it's eerie to hear liberal environmentalists asserting that views they disagree with ought not to be heard." [link]

Pigeon River

In 1987, as Gore started running for president the first time, Newsweek magazine reported that Gore was pressured by North Carolina Senator Terry Sanford and congressmen Jamie Clarke to ease up on his campaign to prevent Champion International paper mill from dumping tons of chemicals and byproducts into the Pigeon River. According to Newsweek, Gore complied with their request, writing to the EPA and asking for a more permissive water pollution standard. Sanford and Clarke then endorsed Gore, and Gore won the North Carolina primary. ("Gore's Pollution Problem", Newsweek, 1997-11-24)

Gore and the internal combustion engine

Following the publication of his book, Earth in the Balance, some conservatives criticized Gore for his call to eliminate the internal combustion engine, based on a passage of that book (emphasis added):

Consider that the United States spends tens of billions of dollars on frenzied programs to upgrade and improve the technology of bombers and fighter planes to counter an increasingly remote threat to our national security, but we are content to see hundreds of millions of automobiles using an old technological approach not radically different from the one first used decades ago in the Model A Ford. We now know that their cumulative impact on the global environment is posing a mortal threat to the security of every nation that is more deadly than that of any military enemy we are ever again likely to confront. Though it is technically possible to build high-mileage cars and trucks, we are told that mandating a more trepid transition to more efficient vehicles will cause an unacceptable disruption in the current structure of the automobile industry. Industry officials contend that it is unfair to single out their industry while ignoring others that also contribute to the problem; I agree, but their point only illustrates further the need for a truly global, comprehensive, and strategic approach to the energy problem. I support new laws to mandate improvements in automobile fleet mileage, but much more is needed. Within the context of the SEI [Strategic Environmental Initiative], it ought to be possible to establish a coordinated global program to accomplish the strategic goal of completely eliminating the internal combustion engine over, say, a twenty-five year period.

This passage was part of a chapter in which Gore discussed, at length, a wide array of policy options whereby government could foster the development of alternative technologies, energy sources, and transportation methods. Jim Nicholson, chairman of the Republican National Committee, stated that Gore was "a wasteful dreamer" who was trying to "do away with the internal combustion engine [and] the automobile". (New York Times, 1999-03-16). Nicholson also said, "That unlike Clinton (who is liberal but pragmatic), Gore is an ideologue who believes the combustible engine (i.e., the automobile) is the earth's greatest enemy. (Washington Post, 1999-04-30). Jack Kemp, former U.S. House Representative from western New York and former Chairman of the House Republican Leadership Conference, stated, "Al Gore said the other day he wants to eliminate the internal combustion engine. Now let me ask you-we've got 162 million internal combustion engines on the earth. Do we want 162 million horse-drawn carriages?"

Al Gore and the media coverage

In 2002, Democratic strategist and co-host of CNN's Crossfire, Paul Begala did an analysis on the media coverage from the 2000 presidential election and found the following:

"There were exactly 704 stories in the campaign about this flap of Gore inventing the Internet. There were only 13 stories about George W. Bush allegedly failing to show up for his National Guard duty for a year. There were well over 1,000 stories — Nexus stopped at 1,000 — about Gore and the Buddhist temple. Only 12 about Bush being accused of insider trading at Harken Energy. There were 347 about Al Gore wearing earth tones, but only 10 about Dick Cheney doing business with Iran and Iraq and Libya." [link]

Controversial Al Gore quotes

During his 2000 Presidential candidacy, Gore used arthritis medication as an example of drug pricing oddities. He claimed his mother would spend $108 for a prescription, whereas the same medication prescribed by a veterinarian for a dog would cost $37. According to the The Washington Times, Gore's mother did not take the medication in question, and Gore had simply used figures that were taken from a Democratic-sponsored survey and did not reflect Gore's family costs, the $108 price was not accurate, and dogs were not routinely prescribed the medication. When questioned about Gore's use of these contentious figures, the Gore campaign (although not Gore himself) cited the Democratic-sponsored survey as the source of the erroneous information.[link]

"Throughout most of my life, I raised tobacco. I want you to know that with my own hands, all of my life, I put it in the plant beds and transferred it. I've hoed it. I've dug in it. I've sprayed it, I've chopped it, I've shredded it, spiked it, put it in the barn and stripped it and sold it.
"Al Gore defending tobacco farmers while campaigning in Southern tobacco states in 1988, four years after his sister Nancy died from lung cancer. During an interview in 2000 Gore stated:
"It's not fair to say, ‘Okay, after his sister died (in 1984), he continued in the same relationship with the tobacco industry.' I did not. I did not. I began to confront them forcefully. I don't see the inconsistency there." (2000-03-01; San Jose Mercury News)
However in the same month Gore's sister died, he received a $1,000 speaking fee from U.S. Tobacco. In 1985, Gore voted against cigarette and tobacco tax increases three times and favored a bill allowing major cigarette makers to purchase discounted tobacco.

In a 1996 speech, Gore referred to his sister's painful death from lung cancer. Gore apologized for profiting from his family tobacco farm and accepting campaign contributions from tobacco companies in the years following his sister's death, saying
"Sometimes, you never fully face up to things that you ought to face up to."
Gore became a leading advocate for the Clinton administration's aggressive anti-smoking campaign. (San Francisco Chronicle, 1996-08-30)

On 1999-11-30 Gore described to a New Hampshire high school his reaction in the late 1970's to a letter from a student in Toone, Tennessee complaining about her family's poisoned well:
"I called for a congressional investigation and a hearing. I looked around the country for other sites like that. I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. Had the first hearing on that issue, and Toone, Tennessee — that was the one that you didn't hear of. But that was the one that started it all." [link]
While the Associated Press story that covered the speech printed the final quote correctly, both the Washington Post and The Washington Times claimed that Gore had actually said: "I was the one that started it all". [link] The Post ran a correction a few days later, but the Times never did, and continued to run editorials denouncing Gore's "boasting" of having been "the whistle blower for discovering Love Canal." [link] The Republican National Committee and several conservative commentators at the time furthered the claim that Gore was attempting to take credit for discovering the toxic waste problem at Love Canal. However, Gore's supporters have argued that the context of the speech should make it clear that what had initially sparked his interest in toxic waste issues was the Toone, Tennessee situation. [link] [link] The quote has been repeated with ", and Toone, Tennessee — that was the one that you didn't hear of. But" replaced by an ellipsis (…) which subtly alters the quote's meaning. In October 1978, Gore did hold congressional hearings on Love Canal — however it was two months after President Jimmy Carter declared it a disaster area and the federal government offered to buy the homes. After the hearings, Gore said, "We passed a major national law to clean up hazardous dump sites. And we had new efforts to stop the practices that ended up poisoning water around the country. We've still got work to do. But we made a huge difference. And it all happened because one high school student got involved." [link]

Gore was quoted in the New York Times 1997-12-14 edition as saying:
"[Erich] Segal had told some reporters in Tennessee that [Love Story] was based on him and Tipper."
The Tennessean newspaper article indeed quoted Segal as saying that Love Story was based on both the Gores. Gore's quote is therefore accurate since Gore was referring to what the Tennessean had erroneously reported. Although Segal said that the newspaper had misquoted him, and that his novel was not based on Gore's relationship with Tipper, Segal himself noted that the male lead in Love Story, Oliver Barrett IV, was in fact based on Al Gore, as well as his college roommate, actor Tommy Lee Jones. However, conservative critics claimed that Gore should have immediately known that the report was inaccurate. [link]

"You know [Bush] has never put together a budget. The governor of Texas is by far the weakest chief executive position in America and does not have the responsibility of forming or presenting a budget. He's never done that." — Al Gore during the 2000 presidential campaign as reported by the Washington Post, 2000-05-02. The Post then pointed out however that Texas law defines the governor as "the chief budget officer of the state" and orders him to distribute his budget to every member of the legislature. And Bush has in fact formed and presented budgets as governor.

During the 2000 presidential campaign, The New York Times quoted Al Gore as saying, "I have always, always, always supported Roe v. Wade." — 2000-02-20; New York Times

In 1977, Gore voted for the Hyde Amendment to prevent federal funding of abortion. Due to votes such as this one, Gore's Congressional voting record through the late 1980's was rated by the National Right to Life Committee as 84% anti-abortion. In 1984, in a letter from then-Congressman Al Gore dated 1984-07-18 to a constituent, Gore is quoted as saying
"It is my deep personal conviction that abortion is wrong. I hope that some day we will see the current outrageously large number of abortions drop sharply. Let me assure you that I share your belief that innocent human life must be protected. In my opinion, it is wrong to spend federal funds for what is arguably the taking of a human life…."
Gore did not start consistently voting pro-choice until 1988. [link]

On 1994-10-28 in Virginia, during a speech about Oliver North's Senate bid, Gore called North supporters "the extreme right wing, the extra chromosome right wing." According to Henry Miller of The Washington Times, advocates for those with Down's Syndrome, which is caused by an extra chromosome, were "outraged". [link] Gore apologized in a letter which, according to the National Review (1994-12-31), noted that he had "learned an important lession [sic]."

External links

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