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To: sandintoes who wrote (626)	10/4/2000 9:57:15 PM
From: Cisco	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1719

Cheney challenged Gore's statement that he visited Texas with James Lee Witt, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to inspect damage from 1998 wildfires. ``During a fund-raising visit to Houston in June 1998 he attended a hastily arranged airport briefing on the fires and then drove off to a political fund-raiser,'' Cheney said of Gore. Witt was in Alaska, according to FEMA. He was not mentioned on the vice president's schedule for the day, which included a lunch fund-raiser in Houston for Democratic Rep. Jim Turner and a roundtable discussion on the fires. ``The American people are tired of political leaders who don't tell it straight,'' Cheney told reporters. Gore, who has often been criticized for exaggerating and embellishing his record, especially his claim to have invented the Internet, acknowledged on Wednesday he may have misspoken. ``I was there in Texas. I think James Lee went to the same fires. And I've made so many trips with James Lee to these disaster sites. I was there in Texas, in Houston, with the head of the Texas emergency management folks and with all the federal emergency management folks,'' Gore said on ABC's ``Good Morning America.'' ``If James Lee was there before or after, then, you know, I got that wrong then.'' Mary Margaret Walker, a spokeswoman for the federal disaster agency, said Gore visited 32 disaster sites between 1993 and 2000, traveling with Witt on 26 occasions. ``In 1998, the vice president was on eight trips, six with Director Witt,'' Walker told Reuters. The Gore campaign expressed surprise that the Bush campaign devoted such attention to the statement, which was the subject of a score of e-mails that Republicans distributed to reporters across the United States. ``Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like something that nobody cares about in the real world,'' Gore spokesman Mark Fabiani told Reuters. ``It seems like the kind of negative attack that people reject from Bush.'' But Cheney, turning Gore's words against him, pointed out that the Democrat has likened the presidential election to a ''job interview with the American people.'' ``I've learned over the years that when somebody embellishes their resume in a job interview, you don't hire them,'' said Cheney, former CEO of Halliburton Co., the world's largest oil-field services firm. The Bush campaign also criticized Gore's debate comments about Kailey Ellis, a Florida High School student who was said to be forced to stand for the duration of her science class because of overcrowding. ``I think the facts that he was provided with were inaccurate because we don't really have any students standing in class, and we have more than enough desks for all of our students,'' Daniel Kennedy, principal of Sarasota High School, told a Florida radio station. The Gore campaign stood behind the vice president's education anecdote. Aides provided Reuters with a local newspaper article describing overcrowded classrooms in Sarasota, and with the letter Gore received from Randy Ellis, father of the student he mentioned in the debate. ``I hope you will have some real solutions to tell me in tonight's debate,'' Ellis said in his letter to Gore, which was received on Tuesday. ``We need an immediate impact or it will be too late for these students.'' dailynews.yahoo.com