ONE OF the least-remarked points about Al Gore is his mean mouth. It is often obscured by his sanctimonious manner, which is usually misdescribed as "wooden." But the speaking style of the man who would be the nation's 43d president is not wooden at all; it is condescending. Al Gore knows better than you do, so pay attention while he talks down to you.
Occasionally Gore's smug self-righteousness goes too far for even his fellow liberals to ignore. At the 1996 Democratic National Convention, he described his sister's death from cancer 12 years earlier. Her "nearly unbearable pain," he said, turned him into an enemy of the tobacco industry, and at her very deathbed he vowed: "Until I draw my last breath, I will pour my heart and soul into the cause of protecting our children from the dangers of smoking."
 Al Gore knows better than you do, so pay attention while he talks down to you. |
But then it turned out that Gore had accepted money from tobacco companies for years after the death of his sister. Reporters revealed that in 1988, he had boasted in North Carolina about being a tobacco farmer himself. As for that dramatic deathbed scene, it was hard to see when he could have found time to squeeze it in: On the day his sister died, records showed, he was busy talking politics with a reporter from the UPI and addressing the Kiwanis Club in Knoxville. Today that convention speech, far from demonstrating the depths of Gore's compassion and conviction, has come to be seen as manipulative and dishonest.
But reporters don't usually focus such close scrutiny on what Gore says or on the incivility with which he often says it. They should.
It was Gore who characterized Republicans in 1994 as wanting "to create as much . . . discord and hatefulness as they possibly can." It was Gore, many liberals would be shocked to learn, who first injected the Willie Horton episode into the 1988 presidential race. It was Gore who likened George Bush's failure to save Kurdish refugees in Iraq after the Gulf War to Stalin's decision "to give the Nazis just enough time to finish butchering the Polish resistance."
The vice president routinely uncorks this kind of stuff — ad hominem attacks, low blows, gross insults. He gets away with it in part because he has many admirers in the media who share his views, in part because he has skillfully "spun" himself to voters as a sober policy moderate. Such is the power of PR.
But while Gore's image may be illusory, the harm caused by his words can be very real indeed.
In Atlanta last week, Gore addressed the NAACP annual convention. Most of what he said was boilerplate ("the most diverse administration in history . . . the glass ceiling still has not been shattered"). Much was patronizing ("we have named African Americans as secretary of energy, secretary of agriculture, secretary of commerce, secretary of veterans affairs.") And some was vicious.
"I've heard the critics of affirmative action," Gore declaimed. "I've heard those who say we have a colorblind society. They use their colorblind the way duck hunters use a duck blind — they hide behind it and hope the ducks won't notice."
That is a piece of ugliness worth parsing.
To begin with, there isn't a single serious critic of affirmative action who would claim that American society is colorblind. What many of them do claim is that American law ought to be colorblind and that affirmative action — with its racial quotas, preferences, and plus-factors — is doing more harm than good.
The critics of affirmative action believe with Justice John Harlan, who dissented from the notorious opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson, that "our Constitution is color-blind." They dream with the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. of a society in which individuals are judged not "by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." The principle that the law has no business making distinctions on racial grounds is exactly the principle that drove the civil rights pioneers. It was for strict colorblind justice that Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund battled 50 years ago. "Classifications and distinctions based on race or color," they argued in a 1947 Supreme Court brief, "have no moral or legal validity in our society."
But Gore now tells the NAACP that to insist on that principle today is to use "colorblind the way duck hunters use a duck blind." Hunters use a duck blind to kill ducks. What can Gore be saying? That affirmative action's critics want to kill — blacks? Does he really mean to imply something so foul?
It is precisely what he means to imply. The implication leaps from his text. One paragraph after denouncing those "who now call for the end of policies to promote equal opportunity" — his euphemism for racial preferences — Gore demands to know their reaction to "that heinous crime" in Jasper, Texas. And to a 1997 crime in Virginia, where a black man "was doused with gasoline, burned alive, and decapitated by two white men." And to a crime in Lawrence, Mass., where an interracial couple was attacked by thugs with baseball bats.
In the World According To Gore, opponents of affirmative action are no better than a lynching party. He has no interest in thoughtful debate — as many who have tried to debate with him have learned. They're against racial preferences? Then they must be for racism. End of discussion.
Does Gore actually believe such rubbish? Who knows? What matters is that he is willing to say it — to inject, for political gain, the worst kind of racial poison into the national bloodstream. That is vileness of a very low order. Imagine anyone so sleazy becoming president.
(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).
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