October 2, 2000
Gore and His Reinventions
Gore reinvents himself on an almost
daily basis. Nothing has been more comical than his "populist"
posturings about the Republicans being the ticket of Big Oil
and himself and Lieberman being the champions of the little people.
This is the man whose education
and Tennessee homestead came to him in part via the patronage
of Armand Hammer, one of the great oil bandits of the twentieth
century, in whose Occidental oil company the Gore family still
has investments valued between $500,000 and $1 million.
At the LA convention the headquarters
of the Democratic National Committee was on the 42nd floor of
the Arco building, and the symbolism was apt. In 1992 Arco (recently
merged with BP Amoco) loaned the Clinton/Gore inaugural committee
$100,000. In that same year it gave the DNC $268,000. In the
1993?94 election cycle it gave the DNC $274,000. In the 1995?96
cycle it ponied up $496,000 and has kept up the same tempo ever
since.
Was there a quid for the quo? You
bet there was. Early in Clinton-time, the President overturned
the longstanding ban on the export of Alaskan crude oil. Why
that ban? When Congress OK'd the building of the Trans-Alaska
Pipeline in the seventies, the legislation triumphed by a single
vote only after solemn pledges were made that the North Slope
oil would always be reserved for domestic markets, available
to hold prices down. Congress had on its mind precisely such
emergencies as this year's hike in prices and consequent suffering
of poor people, soon to be trembling with cold for lack of cheap
home-heating oil.
With the help of Commerce Secretary
Ron Brown and Energy Secretary Hazel
O'Leary, Arco was also, at the
start of the Clinton era, in the process of building refineries
in China. Hence Clinton's overturn of the export ban was an immense
boon to the company, whose CEO at the time, Lodwrick Cook, was
given a White House birthday party in 1994. The birthday presents
to the
favorite oil company of the Clinton/Gore
era have continued ever since. While the Democrats and mainstream
Greens fulminate about Bush and Cheney's threat to open up the
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, nary a word has been mentioned
about one of the biggest giveaways in the nation's history, the
opening of the 23-million-acre National Petroleum Reserve?Alaska.
Back at the start of the nineties Arco's Prudhoe Bay reserves
on Alaska's North Slope were dwindling. Now Arco will be foremost
among the oil companies exploiting a potential $36 billion worth
of crude oil.
Gore's "populism" is
comical, yet one more facet of a larger mendacity. What suppressed
psychic tumult drives him to those stretchers that litter his
career, the lies large and small
about his life and achievements? You'd think that a man exposed
to as much public derision as was Gore after claiming he and
Tipper were the model for the couple in Love Story, or after
saying he'd invented the Internet, would by now be more prudent
in his vauntings. But no. Just as a klepto's fingers inevitably
stray toward the cash register, so too does Gore persist in his
fabrications.
Recently he's claimed to have been
at the center of the action when the strategic petroleum reserve,
in Texas and Louisiana, was established. In fact, the reserve's
salt caverns were filling in 1977, when Gore was barely in Congress,
a very junior member of the relevant energy committee. The legislation
creating the reserve had been passed in 1975. At around the same
time as this pretense, the VP claimed to have heard his mother
crooning "Look for the union label" over his cradle.
It rapidly emerged that this jingle was made up by an ad man
in the seventies, when Al was in his late 20s.
As a clue to why Al misremembers
and exaggerates, the lullaby story has its relevance as a sad
little essay in wish fulfillment. Gore's mother, Pauline, was
a tough character, far more interested in advancing Albert Sr.'s
career than in warbling over Gore's cot. Both parents were demanding.
Gore is brittle, often the mark of the overly well-behaved, perfect
child. Who can forget the panicked performance when his image
of moral rectitude shattered at the impact of the fundraising
scandals associated with the Buddhist temple in Los Angeles?
"He was an easy child; he
always wanted to please us," Pauline once said of him. The
child's desire to please, to get the attention of often-absent
parents, is probably what sparked Gore's penchant for tall tales
about himself. Gore's official CV is sprinkled with "epiphanies"
and claims to having achieved a higher level of moral awareness.
In interviews, in his book Earth in the Balance and, famously,
in his acceptance speech at the 1992 Democratic convention, Gore
has shamelessly milked the accident in which his 6-year-old son
was badly hurt after being struck by a car. Gore described how,
amid his anguish beside the boy's hospital bed, he peered into
his own soul and reproached himself for being an absentee dad.
He narrated his entry into family therapy. But Tipper and the
children didn't see more of him as a consequence. Despite that
dark night of the soul beside Al III's bed, Gore plunged even
deeper into Senate business and spent his hours of leisure away
from the family, writing Earth in the Balance while holed up
in his parents' old penthouse in the Fairfax Hotel. Soon after,
he accepted Clinton's invitation to run for Vice President.
Gore's a fibber through and through,
just like Bill. A sad experience in the closing weeks of the
campaign is to encounter liberals desperately trying delude themselves
that there is some political decency or promise in the
Democratic ticket. There isn't.
Why talk about the lesser of two evils, when Gore is easily as
bad as Bush and in many ways worse? The "lesser of two evils"
is by definition a matter of restricted choice, like a man on
a raft facing the decision of whether to drink seawater or his
own urine. But in this election there are other choices, starting
with Nader and the Greens. It isn't just a matter of facing seawater
or piss.
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