The Father of the Internet Once Slopped Hogs
Gore Pushes Down-Home Image in Iowa
By Calvin Woodward
Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, March 17, 1999; 2:28 a.m. EST
WASHINGTON (AP) -- When Vice President Al Gore opened his Iowa
campaign this week, his privileged upbringing as the son of a senator was
nowhere in sight. Instead, he talked about how he slopped hogs, drove
mules, built homes and cleared land -- by hand and with a double-bladed
ax, no less.
The man running for president was a boy who lived and was schooled in
the rarefied air of Washington, spending summers and congressional
breaks on the family farm in Tennessee. But as far as Iowans could tell, it
was all sweat and no refinement.
Solid and savvy by reputation, Gore goes into his presidential campaign
with a thus-far small but nagging question -- is he also one to embellish his
past?
To his defenders, a misstep here and there is inconsequential in such a
long run under the public eye. To critics, he has shown a vain streak likely
to become increasingly exposed in the rough and tumble of the emerging
campaign.
If Gore has a tendency toward puffery, it has yet to register with the
public. When pollster Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center asks
people for quick characterizations of the vice president, he gets a mix like
'good,' 'boring,' 'OK,' 'unexciting,' and 'stable.'
Gore laid it on thick in Iowa, contending in a round of appearances and
interviews that he was a small-business person and a homebuilder --
experiences for which he has not been known. ''I lived on a farm,'' he
went on, and learned how to plow a ''steep hillside'' with mules, hose out
the hog waste and ''take up hay all day long in the hot sun.''
His ruminations were meant to contrast himself with rival Bill Bradley, the
former pro basketball player. The last time Gore tried to draw distinctions
with Bradley, a week earlier, he overstepped.
Republicans threw gleeful barbs when Gore suggested then that he'd
created the Internet, that huge, amorphous communications vehicle that
got rolling long before he entered politics. More than a year ago, he
claimed he and his wife were models for the romantic novel ''Love
Story,'' leaving the author of that book ''befuddled.''
The ribbing over the Internet claim was playful, but the GOP obviously
senses future opportunity to hammer the early favorite for the Democratic
nomination.
''Earnest boastfulness does not play well,'' said William Kristol, editor of
the conservative Weekly Standard magazine. As former chief of staff for
Vice President Dan Quayle, Kristol has painful personal knowledge of
how a public figure's blunders can blow up in one's face.
''Certain gaffes hurt when they fit into a stereotype,'' he said. ''I think
Gore's comment taking credit for the Internet is an example of that. I think
it's a damaging gaffe because it reinforces something out there.''
Andrei Cherny, senior speechwriter for Gore in 1997 and 1998, disputes
that view. He also contends Gore, whose stiffness is the stuff of
self-parody, won't become even more so out of fear of saying something
silly.
''He's been in public life for almost a quarter century now and has been
under a great deal of scrutiny for at least the past seven years,'' said
Cherny, now editing a magazine of Democratic ideas called Blueline. ''I
think in many ways he is who he is, and that's not going to change because
of a bit of a good-natured ribbing because of one stray remark.''
Gore's claim to have coined the phrase ''information superhighway'' has
not been seriously challenged, and he was an early and enthusiastic
supporter in Congress of communications technology. But a father of the
Internet? Histories of cyberspace barely mention him, if at all.
In December 1997, Gore told a reporter he and Tipper Gore were
models for the characters in ''Love Story,'' Erich Segal's 1970s bestseller.
A surprised Segal said Gore, whom he knew at Harvard, inspired one
side of his male hero's personality -- the one controlled by a domineering
father -- but his book had nothing to do with Mrs. Gore.
Back in his 1988 campaign for the presidential nomination, Gore defended
his use of a brochure with a picture of him carrying an M-16 rifle in
Vietnam, denying he was trying to make people think he served in
combat. He had also appeared in TV ads wearing an olive-green field
jacket and saying: ''I'm a Vietnam veteran -- one of the lucky ones.''
Gore spent five months in Vietnam as a military information officer, a
noncombat role that he says included brushes with enemy fire.
© Copyright 1999 The Associated Press
>>>Must be tough growing up and inheriting a Congressional seat. |
