The Smooth Talker Ducks Hard Questions
There's a reason Al Gore is afraid of Tim Russert.
BY PEGGY NOONAN
Friday, September 8, 2000 4:22 a.m. EDT
Has George W. Bush bottomed out, and is he starting to come back? There is reason to think so, and not only because every newspaper in America has "Bush Done For--GOP Panics" stories on the front page which, considering your usual journalistic time lag, suggests his comeback is well under way. Mr. Bush's campaign this week took on an urgency, with substantive proposals on Medicare and education, and an aggressive look at Al Gore's programs. And the debate debate, which looked flaky at first, seems to deserve greater scrutiny, and bears the potential for dividends. I think this because I've been reading transcripts of "Meet the Press." Mr. Bush agreed to debate Mr. Gore in a prime-time version of NBC's "Meet the Press," hosted by Tim Russert, because he had to make a virtue of necessity.
Mr. Gore is a gifted debater--disciplined, seasoned by four national political cycles, possessed of a killer's instincts. Mr. Bush is not a great debater. He hasn't even shown himself to be a good debater. In the primary debates he looked like he was sliding down in his chair so teacher wouldn't notice him. And when he tried to speak candidly, saying for instance that Jesus was his favorite philosopher, he couldn't explain why except to assert that Christ had changed his heart, which seemed both believable and inadequate. So Mr. Bush is bad at debate and Mr. Gore is good, but the latter has reason to fear a grilling from a persistent questioner and the former doesn't. Mr. Gore wants to debate but not to be interviewed, and Mr. Bush wants to be interviewed but not to debate.
The brilliant answer: have a "debate" in which Mr. Russert, who has his own killer instincts, asks questions. That way Mr. Gore, who has the talent to dominate, will not be allowed to. It won't be Big Al versus the Shrub. It would be a moderator with two equals. Mr. Gore had clearly agreed to this format and venue. In an interview with Mr. Russert on July 16, he even pushed for the CEO of General Electric, which owns NBC, to get Mr. Bush to agree: Mr. Gore: I've accepted for two or three months now your invitation to debate on this program. Have you gotten a yes from Gov. Bush yet?
Mr. Russert: His campaign says he will debate you, and the request is under active consideration . . . Mr. Gore: "Well, how are you going to persuade him to say yes, Tim?" Mr. Russert: "Well, maybe you're helping today." Mr. Gore: "Well, do you think so? But what kind of approach--can you get Jack Welch involved?" But when Mr. Bush accepted the debate this week, Mr. Gore suddenly refused to take part. The media are letting him get away with it for several reasons, including (a) the other broadcast-network shows failed to get the debate and are not happy, and (b) the debate would be good for a competitor, and helping Tim Russert isn't their job.
It isn't mine either, but getting both candidates in a setting in which they will reveal things about themselves, their history and their thinking is. In the 40 years since John F. Kennedy debated Richard Nixon, presidential debates have declined as venues in which revelation and insight occur. They are now what was once said of flying--hours of boredom punctuated by a few seconds of sheer terror. ("Mr. President, are you saying that Poland is a free country?") Modern debates consist of a 90-second sound bite in which one candidate asserts, followed by 60 seconds in which another rebuts, followed by 30 seconds of answer to the rebuttal. It is rote, ritualistic, unrevealing. It is perfectly suited to Al Gore, the human Conair 2000, who opens his mouth, flips the switch and blows, and who also wrote a college paper on how presidential news conferences can be handled through prefab sound bites. But what has frozen and hardened in these debates could be broken up and made fluid again by the presence of a seasoned interviewer. Mr. Bush thinks Mr. Russert is tough but fair; Mr. Gore thinks Mr. Russert is--well, he thinks he's the man who put him through this: Mr. Russert: "I want to ask you a very simple question. Do you believe that life begins at conception?" Mr. Gore: "No. I believe there is a difference. You know, I believe that the Roe v. Wade decision wisely embodies the kind of common-sense judgment that most Americans share.
" Mr. Russert then showed a letter Mr. Gore had written in 1987, in which he said he consistently opposed federal funding of abortions because government shouldn't take part in "the taking of what is arguably a human life." Mr. Gore answered that he had changed his mind on that "10, 15 years ago." Mr. Russert: "But you did vote to define a person as including an unborn child." Mr. Gore said it was a "procedural vote." Mr. Russert: "When do you think life begins?" Mr. Gore: "I favor the Roe v. Wade approach, but let me just say, Tim, I did--" Mr. Russert: "Which is what? When does life begin?" Mr. Gore did not answer, but referred instead to changing his position on federal funding of abortions. The interviewer pressed again. Mr. Russert: "But you were calling fetuses innocent human life, and now you don't believe life begins at conception. I'm just trying to find out, when do you believe life begins?" Mr. Gore replied that Roe v. Wade "proposes an answer to that question." Asked what it is, he replied that there is "a developmental process during which the burden kind of shifts over time." He vowed to protect "a woman's right to choose."
Then Mr. Russert changed approach. Mr. Russert: "Should there be a restriction on minors getting abortions without parental consent?" Mr. Gore: "Difficult question, because there are all kind of circumstances where you have some children kind of raising themselves in situations where their families are fractured . . ." He added that the decision needs to "be worked out in the context of a woman's right to choose." Mr. Russert: "But a child needs permission to have her ears pieced." Mr. Gore: "I understand." Mr. Russert: "You don't want parental permission for an abortion." Mr. Gore said some proposals on this "have been a backdoor effort to eliminate a woman's right to choose." Mr. Russert asked why not support parental notification in which a judge could intervene in the kind of cases he refers to. Mr. Gore said, "Well, I'd want to look at that." So Mr. Russert changed approach again. Mr. Russert: "Right now there's legislation which says that a woman on death row--if she's pregnant, she should not be executed.
Do you support that?" Mr. Gore: "I don't know what you're talking about." Mr. Russert: "It's a federal statute . . . that if a woman is pregnant and she's on death row, she should not be executed." Mr. Gore: "Well, I don't know what the circumstances would be in that situation. I would--you know, it's an interesting fact situation. I'd want to think about it." It was stupendous, an hour of relentless and informed questioning on Social Security, the surplus, tax policy, and whether the Boy Scouts should be allowed to exclude gay members (Mr. Gore couldn't say). It was the most revealing presidential interview since Roger Mudd met Ted Kennedy in 1980 and showed us Mr. Kennedy's utter inability to make a case for his own candidacy. Mr. Russert is becoming the first indispensable television journalist since Walter Cronkite.
With his happy-killer mug, and his desire to bore in, he makes you think of what was said of Lenin: "He could exhaust you by listening." (Idiotic but defensively necessary note: I worked for MSNBC, which is part of NBC, during the political conventions this year; I also did a half-hour interview with Mr. Russert when my book on Hillary Clinton came out, and emerged exhausted though not horrified.) Mr. Gore has his reasons for not wanting to be subjected to another grilling; but the public might benefit greatly from it, as it would be what we want all such events to be: revealing. Mr. Bush, at this point, should speak frankly of his underdog status in whatever debates finally occur.
He should start making jokes about it, too, and making people laugh at the difference between his lack of gifts in that area and Mr. Gore's abundance of them. He might even come right out and declare Gore the winner going in. Mr. Bush should also explain frankly how you can be both best candidate and worst debater, the right man with the right ideas and the lesser talent for asserting them. Which brings us to the old empty-chair gambit. Mr. Bush says he'll show up at the debate time with an empty chair, put it down on the sidewalk and offer to debate. Some joker has already answered, "Watch out, the chair will win!" That is one great line, but it begs for a comeback, and perhaps if Mr. Bush meets with the press for an hour or two that night and takes all questions, the comeback will be his. Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "The Case Against Hillary Clinton" (Regan Books, 2000).
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Panel Calls Gore Tax Breaks Vague
By CURT ANDERSON
WASHINGTON (AP) - A non-partisan congressional panel found that 19 of Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore's proposed tax breaks are too vague for an official estimate, leading to Republican charges that Gore isn't living up to his call for specifics on campaign issues. ``The vice president has talked a lot about the need for specificity and detail, but apparently he didn't mean it to apply to his own tax plan,'' said Rep. Bill Archer, a Texas Republican who chairs the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee. The Joint Committee on Taxation, which estimates all tax legislation on Capitol Hill for Democrats and Republicans, released documents Friday showing that such Gore proposals as a health insurance tax credit, cuts in the estate tax and education tax breaks ``require additional specification'' in order to be estimated. Ari Fleischer, spokesman for Republican candidate George W. Bush, said, ``This is a classic example of Al Gore saying one thing and doing another. He won't even provide enough details about who gets the tax cuts, which suggests that not many people will get them.'' Gore has regularly chastised Bush for what he says are a lack of specifics in the Texas governor's ideas, leading Bush earlier this week to submit a detailed plan for a Medicare prescription drug benefit. On the tax front, however, the Joint Committee on Taxation was able in May to fully estimate Bush's 10-year plan centered on gradual reductions in income tax rates and elimination of the estate tax.
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The Great Exaggerator Strikes Again!
"Vice President Al Gore, reaching for a personal example to illustrate the breathtaking costs of some prescription drugs, told seniors in Florida last month that his mother-in-law pays nearly three times as much for the same arthritis medicine used for his ailing dog, Shiloh.
But Gore, the master of many policy details, mangled the facts, and late last week his aides could not say with certainty that Shiloh or Margaret Ann Aitcheson actually takes the brand-name drug, Lodine, that Gore said they do. "Even if they take the drug, Gore's assertion that his black Labrador retriever's monthly bill is $37.80 and Aitcheson's is $108 is wrong.
The Gore campaign admitted that it lifted those costs not from his family's bills, but from a House Democratic study, and that Gore misused even those numbers: They represent the manufacturer's price to wholesalers, not the retail price of the brand-name product. What's more, the costs Gore cited presume that his dog and mother-in-law take the same dosage - which could put 14-year-old Shiloh at risk for stomach ulcers. " ...
When they were asked last Thursday whether Aitcheson and Shiloh actually take the brand name of the drug, two of the vice president's aides were unable to say whether that was the case or how much the family pays for each. For Gore, who has a history of embellishing facts about himself and his family, the remarks he made in Florida are a blend of erroneous family detail and questionable statistics on an election issue of growing significance."
- Boston Globe, 9/18/00
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BYLINE: John McCaslin;
THE WASHINGTON TIMES BODY:
GORE'S BEST FRIEND?
Inside the Beltway has learned that D.C. animal-control authorities recently received an emergency call from a guard posted at an entrance gate outside Vice President Al Gore's mansion on Massachusetts Avenue. The officer, apparently with the uniformed division of the Secret Service, told the authorities that a sick dog had been lingering around the vice president's property, and could they please send somebody out to pick up the pooch.
The animal-control people arrived and quickly determined that the dog, a poodle, required immediate emergency veterinary care. According to our source, who works in veterinary medicine, the dog was suffering from "maggot infestation of the muscles, resulting from an open, untreated wound." The dog, it turned out, belongs to the family of Vice President Al Gore. The dog was transported to Friendship Animal Hospital in the District, a 24-hour facility that provides emergency care under director Dr. Peter Glassman. "No, I have no comment," Dr. Glassman said when we contacted him yesterday. Earlier, an employee in Dr. Glassman's office said the staff was under "strict order" not to discuss the case.
"I told my staff not to comment on anything that goes on here," Dr. Glassman said when we repeated the charge. A D.C. animal-control official also confirmed our story earlier this week but said that agency is also "under a gag order." The employee said any official comment would have to come from Mary Healey, executive director of the Washington Humane Society. Reached yesterday, Ms. Healey confirmed: "We had received a call to pick up a dog in the vicinity of the vice presidential property and we responded to the call. We located the dog; I believe it was a poodle . . . named Coconut.
The dog was apparently injured in some way. "Our normal procedure . . . is to transport such an animal to Friendship Animal Hospital, and that was the end of the road for us." Ms. Healey said she didn't believe Coconut carried a name tag, but she confirmed that authorities were able to determine at the scene that the dog did have an owner and was not a stray. Our initial source said the guard who reported the dog's condition to authorities "claims not to have realized the dog belonged to the Gores, but the animal-control people think he was just trying to get the suffering animal some help without jeopardizing his job."
Tipper Gore, speaking yesterday afternoon through spokeswoman Sally Aman, said: "What happened is we've been having construction on the house and Coconut got out, and was missing for a couple of days. It's an amazing dog. She's 16 years old. It had been outside the grounds and found its way home, and that's when it was discovered." She said the dog, after its surgery, was nursed back to health by the Gore children. It could not be determined whether the Gores had reported the dog missing.
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