February 17, 2000
The New York Times
THE VICE PRESIDENT
Questions Over Veracity Have Long Dogged Gore
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE with JOHN M. BRODER
LBANY, Ga., Feb. 16 -- Questions about Vice President Gore's honesty have emerged as a recurring motif of his contest with former Senator Bill Bradley for the Democratic presidential nomination. Mr. Bradley has angrily accused the vice president of a systematic effort to distort Mr. Bradley's record while whitewashing his own.
The criticism of Mr. Gore has been harsh enough that President Clinton was asked about it today and offered a spirited defense of his vice president. "My experience is that he is exceedingly honest and exceedingly straightforward," Mr. Clinton said at a news conference.
In an interview, Mr. Gore insisted that he had hewed to the facts both in describing his own positions and in characterizing those of Mr. Bradley. He said that Mr. Bradley equated policy disputes with dishonesty and that his Democratic opponent could not defend his own policies without resorting to personal attacks.
"The pattern is one of Senator Bradley interpreting disagreement with his positions as dishonesty," Mr. Gore said aboard Air Force 2 on Tuesday night. "Just because one has the temerity to point out that Senator Bradley's health care plan would be an unmitigated catastrophe for poor people and others who depend upon Medicaid funding is not evidence that one is being untruthful."
Mr. Bradley, in public appearances, press releases and interviews, insists that Mr. Gore has repeatedly and deliberately distorted his positions on health care, taxation, school funding and campaign finance in what he calls a "pattern of misrepresentation."
And, Mr. Bradley and his aides say, Mr. Gore has offered accounts of his own record and personal history that are at times at odds with the facts.
Some are familiar and fairly trivial examples, like Mr. Gore's taking credit for inventing the Internet or being the model for Erich Segal's "Love Story." But others, including his account of his service in Vietnam, his journalistic accomplishments, his views on the death penalty and abortion and his role in the Democratic fund-raising scandals of 1996, are substantial parts of his public record and rationale for seeking higher office.
Are these exchanges part of the normal give-and-take of a political contest, the exaggerations and embellishments that are the ordinary vernacular of political speech?
Or are they signs of a deeper problem that will continue to haunt Mr. Gore throughout the primary season, into the general election, and possibly into the Oval Office?
The concern about Mr. Gore's truthfulness dates back to the earliest days of his political career.
During his failed 1988 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, he exaggerated the danger he faced as an Army journalist in Vietnam and took credit for putting "a bunch of people" in jail during his stint as an investigative reporter at The Nashville Tennessean. The first was misleading; the second was false.
During his Congressional campaigns in the 1970's and 1980's, he overstated his one foray into real estate development to persuade groups of business executives that he was one of them.
That claim led Arlie Schardt, who was Mr. Gore's communications director during the 1999 presidential campaign, to warn the candidate in a memo "your main pitfall is exaggeration."
In an interview, Mr. Schardt said that his widely quoted warning referred only to this specific claim regarding the real estate development and was not meant as a generalized description of Mr. Gore's lack of truthfulness.
"I think this whole flurry about Gore's exaggerations is exaggerated," Mr. Schardt said.
But other statements by Mr. Gore -- including those made during recent debates with Mr. Bradley -- raise more serious questions about his veracity and have had a direct impact on the current campaign.
In a debate sponsored by Iowa Public Television in January, Mr. Gore asked Chris Peterson, whose farm had been inundated in the floods of 1993, to stand and be recognized.
Turning to Mr. Bradley, Mr. Gore said, "Why did you vote against the disaster relief for Chris Peterson when he and thousands of other farmers here in Iowa needed it after those '93 floods?"
Mr. Bradley, clearly thrown off balance, turned aside Mr. Gore's question and changed the subject. Mr. Gore repeated the charge in a television commercial that began airing within days of the debate.
But Mr. Gore's accusation was false and unfair. Mr. Bradley supported the 1993 legislation that provided $4.8 billion in emergency flood relief for farmers like Mr. Peterson. What Mr. Bradley and 31 other senators opposed was an amendment that would have provided an additional $900 million in disaster compensation. The Clinton Administration also opposed the amendment until literally minutes before floor debate ended.
Mr. Bradley's weak response to Mr. Gore's misleading charge has haunted him to this day.
"Our polls show the Bradley collapse began the day after the Jan. 9 debate," said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication. "You could argue that Gore built his Iowa victory on a significant deception."
Mr. Gore has also misrepresented Mr. Bradley's health care plan, charging in various appearances that it would provide a voucher worth only $150 a month for a family to purchase medical insurance on the private market.
In fact, the Bradley plan would grant each individual $150 a month and provides other mechanisms for poor families to receive health care.
"That was a serious misstatement," Ms. Jamieson said. "At least he's stopped doing it."
But Mr. Gore continues to claim that Mr. Bradley's health proposal would adversely affect blacks, Latinos and people living with HIV or AIDS. This accusation infuriates Mr. Bradley because it appears specifically designed to cut into his support among minorities and gays and lesbians.
But Mr. Gore repeated the charge in the interview Tuesday night.
"There is a tendency on the part of Senator Bradley to interpret any disagreement with his position as an untruthful statement," the vice president said. "For example, he became visibly apoplectic yesterday in arguing that it was a bald-faced lie to say that people with HIV/AIDS had experienced difficulty in obtaining private health insurance that would cover their medical expenses."
"Well, excuse me, but that's not an untruthful statement," Mr. Gore added. "It is evidence rather that Senator Bradley has made a catastrophically poor political and substantive policy judgment in designing a health-care proposal that is disintegrating in front of his eyes."
In the interview, Mr. Gore acknowledged one incident recently in which he uttered a false statement, although he preferred to call it a "mistake."
Last November, Mr. Gore said that he supported the sweeping campaign finance proposal written by Senators John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin.
"Unlike Senator Bradley," Mr. Gore boasted, "I was a co-sponsor of it."
In fact, Mr. Feingold took office in January 1993, the same month Mr. Gore left the Senate to become vice president. The two never served together.
"That was a mistake," Mr. Gore said Tuesday. "That wasn't -- what I meant to say was that I supported that."
Questions about Mr. Gore's veracity are compounded by his service to a president whose own honesty has been assailed.
"The problem for Gore," said John G. Geer, professor of American politics at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, "is that he's Clinton's vice president and Clinton is perceived as the master of this kind of campaign. His overstatements are magnified because he's been carrying Clinton's baggage for seven years."
Mr. Clinton came to his vice president's defense in a news conference today. Responding to a question about Mr. Gore's credibility, Mr. Clinton said the vice president had always been "brutally honest" with him.
"I have never seen a tough race where people fought with each other where they didn't have different interpretations of each other's record and each other's positions," Mr. Clinton said.
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