Econ + Politics--The Post: "Basis Point" + "Gore's Credibility Tested"
"Basis Point"
washingtonpost.com
"Gore's Credibility Tested"
washingtonpost.com
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Edited for ease of reading.
>>>Basis Points
By John M. Berry
Sunday, October 8, 2000; Page H07
The bond market continued its volatile course last week, rallying in the face of a drop in the September jobless rate to 3.9 percent because stock prices took it on the chin.
Federal Reserve officials had left their target for overnight interest rates at 6.5 percent at a policymaking session Tuesday, while stating they still are more concerned about the risk of higher inflation than overly slow economic growth.
Meanwhile, figures for the total number of hours worked by production and non-supervisory workers in the July-September period point to yet another quarter in which strong productivity growth helped hold down employers' costs and therefore inflationary pressure.
Finally, fiscal 2001 began last week. Though Congress hasn't finished work on the federal budget for the year, analysts said it now looks like the budget surplus will be significantly larger than last year's, big enough that the total amount of Treasury debt outstanding will shrink by about $250 billion.
Treasury will delay its weekly auction a day because of the Columbus Day holiday. On Tuesday it will sell $10.5 billion in three-month bills and $9.5 billion in six-month bills, followed Wednesday by $5 billion in 30-year inflation-indexed bonds. In when-issued trading Friday, the bills yielded 6.26 percent and 6.34 percent, respectively, and the bonds 3.93 percent.
© 2000 The Washington Post Company<<<
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>>>GOP Homes In on Gore's Credibility
By David Von Drehle and Ceci Connolly
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, October 8, 2000; Page A01
With a month left to Election Day and the prize he has long sought tantalizingly close to Al Gore's fingertips, Gore's opponents are mounting a final assault aimed at a long-suspected weakness –– his willingness to exaggerate, even to lie, about his past.
For more than a dozen years, friends have feared and foes have hoped that Gore could be damaged –– even sunk –– by his reputation for stretching the truth. Now these hopes and fears are likely to be tested once and for all, in political ads, in the press and in the remaining two presidential debates.
An offhand boast by Gore at the first debate last week turned out to be untrue –– and that has put straw on a fire that Republicans have been trying to feed all year. The GOP team now believes the question of casual lying by Gore will finally give them traction in their efforts to tie the vice president to the character flaws of President Clinton and make the case that it's time for a change. Finger-wagging and resume-polishing are not the same thing, but to Gore's critics, they share the same scent of deceit.
"They will attempt to link Gore's exaggerations to the culture of the last eight years," said one veteran Democrat, who believes that Gore risks serious damage on the issue. "It's dangerous because it reinforces a dangerous perception that Gore is just another arrogant politician, and we have eight more years of lies ahead of us."
Republican vice presidential nominee Richard B. Cheney fanned the flames Friday, saying of Gore: "This is a man who's got significant accomplishments. . . . He's held national office for 24 years, and yet he seems to have this uncontrollable desire periodically to add to his reputation, to his record, things that aren't true." GOP presidential nominee George W. Bush echoed the charge. "I think he is prone to exaggeration," he said.
Explaining their focus on the issue, Clifford May, spokesman for the Republican National Committee, said that "credibility" is at the core of a voter's choice for president. "Given the experience of the last eight years, Americans would like to know when their president speaks to them, he is telling the truth."
Yesterday, Gore said discussion of his embellishments was nothing more than an "ad hominem personal attack" by Republicans. Asked about several misstatements, he told reporters: "I don't want to get into each and every one of those. . . . These are negative personal attacks of the kind I simply do not engage in."
In this campaign, both candidates have been criticized, as most are, for distortions of their proposals and of their opponent's. Gore himself jabbed Bush for saying last week that the vice president has spent the most money on this campaign. In truth, Bush has spent far more in the primaries and in the general election. Gore was rapped for taking a generic anecdote – that identical medicines sometimes cost more for humans than for pets – and saying it was true for his own mother-in-law and his own dog, a style of storytelling not uncommon among platform speakers, especially in the more poetical days of his father's political career.
But the catalogue of alleged offenses Republicans find juiciest are the ones involving Gore's record of achievement.
Most recently, at the debate Oct. 3 in Boston, Gore listened as the Texas governor spoke about visiting a fire-ravaged patch of his state in 1996. Bush praised the work of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and FEMA boss James Lee Witt. "I accompanied James Lee Witt down to Texas when those fires broke out," Gore responded. It turned out that, although Gore did visit Texas and survey the damage, it was two years later and he was not accompanied by Witt.
What might seem like a small discrepancy has been magnified because Gore has a history of similar embellishments. As long ago as 1988, Gore staff members urgently counseled him to stick to the precise truth in describing his accomplishments, and from that time onward, his opponents – Democrats as well as Republicans – have seen Gore's storytelling as a possible Achilles' heel.
Given prosperity at home, and relative peace around the world –– both of which tend to favor the incumbent party –– many strategists believe Bush must damage Gore's credibility if he is to win. Although recent statewide polls suggest the electoral college math is tipping in Gore's favor, a new Time-CNN poll gives Bush a significant lead on the question of trustworthiness. From conservative talk radio titan Rush Limbaugh and the New York Post (headline: "Liar, Liar") to neutral papers across the country, the attack on Gore's credibility is resonating.
"When you get to the point where this is being talked about in coffee shops and on talk radio, it takes on a life of its own," former GOP representative Bill Paxon said yesterday. "This has gained critical mass."
Gore loyalists believe that the charge of dishonesty is unfair and irrelevant. "I don't accept the premise" that Gore has a credibility problem, says former Gore press secretary Marla Romash. "Sometimes a mistake is made because of being tired. . . . Sometimes I think it is a storyteller's flair.
"I mean, sometimes people tell me I look tired, and I say, 'Yeah, I only got an hour's sleep last night.' And really I got two hours," she continues. "So what? I don't think that's how America is going to decide their vote."
This truth-telling issue first began to haunt Gore when he ran for president, at 39, in 1988. Reporters were struck by the fact that Gore, a senator and former congressman, described himself as a farmer and home-builder. The farm was a 20-acre patch in Tennessee, where cows were trucked in to provide a backdrop for his announcement speech, while the home-building enterprise was an investment he apparently spent little time managing.
Gore told an interviewer that he had seen frequent fighting and been "shot at" in Vietnam. This overstated his experience as an Army journalist during the war. He said in another interview that he had spent more time campaigning in the South than all the other candidates combined. "That comment is not easy to defend," a staff member advised him.
Once, when he told the story of his stint as an investigative reporter at the Tennessean newspaper in the early 1970s, he bragged of work that "got a bunch of people indicted and sent to jail." Two were indicted, and in fact, no one went to jail.
Author Richard Ben Cramer, who interviewed Gore briefly during his research for a book on the '88 campaign, later told two Gore biographers that he was less bothered by "the fact that he wasn't telling me the truth" than by "the pallid bankruptcy of the lies."
Ever since, Gore's opponents, and the media, have been on the lookout for more examples, and Gore has provided them. In 1992, he described his late sister as "the first Peace Corps volunteer"; Nancy Gore Hunger did work in the Washington office of the Peace Corps but never volunteered overseas. By the time former New Jersey senator Bill Bradley began thinking about challenging Gore for this year's Democratic nomination, he and his staff were convinced that the truth factor would be important in their race. "It was a big deal to us," a Bradley adviser says. The Bradley team perked up when Time magazine reported that Gore had bragged of his role in creating the earned income tax credit –– a law passed long before Gore entered Congress.
"Why should we believe that you will tell the truth as president if you don't tell the truth as a candidate?" Bradley demanded in a New Hampshire debate with Gore. This has become a favorite quotation in Bush's rhetoric.
Over the years, Gore has been accused of exaggerating his role in arms control negotiations, in creating the Internet, in promoting campaign finance reform, in steering to an end the war in Kosovo and in building the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
Why does he do it? Biographers have posited an enduring desire to please a father whose expectations were seemingly limitless. Or it could be that a lifetime around high-stakes politics has left Gore feeling that everyone exaggerates –– that it's part of the nature of winning over voters and connecting with them. Whatever the explanation, years of warnings have not cured Gore.
Friends and supporters, who know him as an upright man, believe that Gore's statements are examined to such adversarial extent that he gets charged with the mistakes of others and prosecuted on faulty evidence. Take the "Love Story" case, for example.
As historian Sean Wilentz explains in the American Prospect magazine, Gore has been widely ridiculed for saying in 1997 that he and his wife were the models for the main characters in "Love Story," a huge bestseller of the early 1970s. "In fact, Gore never made the claim," Wilentz writes –– rather, he referred to a newspaper interview with author Erich Segal in which Segal was incorrectly quoted saying that Al and Tipper were his models. Segal has said that Gore and his college buddy Tommy Lee Jones were the inspiration for the figure of Oliver Barrett III but that Tipper was not a model for a character in the book.
Such cases show how closely Gore's anecdotes and statements are being watched, and the heightened attention to the subject ensures Gore will continue to be fact-checked in the remaining debates and on through Election Day.
An aide warned Gore in 1988 that his image "may suffer if you continue to go out on a limb with remarks that may be impossible to back up." But Gore has not proved able to heed that advice – not every day, day after day. At times, especially when he gets swept up in battle, Gore seems hard pressed to resist an impulse to gild the lily.
© 2000 The Washington Post Company<<< |
