Gore's exaggerations may haunt him

Walter Shapiro

USA Today

LOS ANGELES - Al Gore wanted to hit just the right note Monday as he received his long-awaited endorsement by the Teamsters. Stressing his born-to-be-a-union-man heritage at a Teamsters conference at a Las Vegas casino, Gore said, "I still remember the lullabies I heard as a child." Then, without missing a beat, the vice president sang in a bravely off-key voice, "Look for the union label."

It was an endearing scene, one that displayed Gore's spontaneous, human side. Even though the song was the anthem of the former International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), the overwhelmingly male and burly Teamsters crowd cheered wildly. Gore's sing-for-your-endorsement gesture illustrated how tiny interludes in a campaign day can provide a window into the true nature of the candidate.

Now for the discordant detail: Gore's claim that he was lulled to sleep as a baby by the union-label melody must be labeled patently untrue. As Gus Tyler, who wrote a 1995 history of the trail-blazing needle-trades union, Look for the Union Label, put it in an interview, "If the vice president is saying he heard the song in his cradle, he's really remembering that he heard the song as a young person."

The tune was written for an ILGWU radio and TV ad campaign that first aired in 1975, when the 27-year-old Gore was a reporter for the Nashville Tennessean. The music, which sounds more like a TV jingle than an old-time union ballad, was composed by Malcolm Dodds, who directed the ILGWU chorus, and the words were written by advertising executive Paula Green.

So what are we to make of Gore's musical miscue? Does it buttress his reputation as a candidate whose words come closer to the Tennessee tall-tale tradition than they do to the literal truth? Or was it an innocuous slip of memory that should not obscure the larger reality that Gore did indeed grow up in a pro-union family?

The vice president has been dogged this week by questions about his truthfulness. The Boston Globe challenged the veracity of the precise numbers that Gore recently used to make the dramatic point that it costs his mother-in-law far more to buy an arthritis drug, Lodine, than the vice president pays to provide the same medication for his dog, Shiloh. In response, the Gore campaign conceded that the cost comparison was based on a congressional study rather than personal experience.

Tuesday afternoon, moments before Gore spoke on medical privacy in the San Fernando Valley, press secretary Chris Lehane was surrounded by 60 reporters demanding the Lodine lowdown. Lehane kept insisting that the "underlying point" about drug-price inflation remained valid: "People pay more for drugs than dogs." Even as Gore approached the microphone, the press pack remained more riveted by the Shiloh showdown than by what Gore might say in his only public appearance Tuesday.

Here are some things to consider before you conclude that these are the dog days of campaign coverage:

On Monday and Tuesday, with just seven weeks to go before the election, Gore held just three campaign events (a forum on medical privacy in San Fernando Valley and two in Las Vegas on Monday). All told, the vice president was in public for less than three hours over two days.

Gore came to California, a state in which he has a close-to-unassailable lead, for one reason: campaign cash. The vice president raised $4.2 million Monday night at a fundraiser in Beverly Hills, which proved yet again that people in the entertainment industry either don't believe Gore's attacks on their marketing practices or else are the most selfless givers in political history. Tuesday night, Gore downloaded more dot-com contributions in Silicon Valley.

It has been 65 days since Gore held a news conference. George W. Bush, in news conferences and informal encounters, is much more available to reporters. While Gore does make himself available for television and print interviews, this no-news-conference policy allows the campaign to pick and choose among reporters and permits Gore to duck awkward questions.

So if the Gore campaign is serving up a news diet as thin as the soup in a 19th century orphanage, then reporters should not be unduly faulted for seizing every morsel of nourishment they can find.

In fact, Gore may get a certain benefit of doubt, because everyone knows that he's well-versed on the issues. Talking about HMO reform Monday at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, Gore momentarily forgot the name of a common cancer examination for women. Turning around to face Nevada health-care experts sitting behind him, Gore asked plaintively, "What am I looking for?" The answer came shouted back: "mammograms."

No one treated this as anything other than an understandable inability to summon up the right word. But if the verbally erratic Bush had made a similar error, the TV news clip would have been aired constantly, and the Gore campaign might even have charged that it shows "how out of touch Gov. Bush is on women's health issues."

For all the criticism of the press pack's habit of overreacting to isolated campaign gaffes, the real problem is the media's tendency to reduce the candidates to caricatures. It is too simplistic to portray Gore as totally deficient in his respect for truth and Bush as completely lacking in his grasp of facts.

Campaigns do mete out a certain rough justice. If a candidate insists on being cloistered from both the press and the public, then he runs the risk that a minor snafu like the Shiloh affair may end up biting him in the leg.

Walter Shapiro's column is appearing Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays through Election Day.

Contact him at wshapiro@usatoday.com