Will Al Gore dissemble and say whatever is necessary to further his own political career?
Many people have used marijuana, including our most recent two presidents. But, a willingness to repeatedly dissemble about it raises questions of truthfulness that are much more important than the marijuana use itself. Because Al Gore’s candidacy is predicated upon his claim that he is a "new man", who is different from the "old Al Gore", an analysis of the character of Al Gore requires us to weigh these questions:
- Do Al Gore's youth marijuana use and his alleged adult attemps to cover it up raise issues about his forthrightness?
- Did Al Gore's subsequent failure to finish 2 graduate school programs contribute to an ongoing tendency to discredit himself by embelishing his accomplishments?
- Is it fair to other Democrats that we rest our 2008 hopes on the credibility of Al Gore's "new man" premise?
Many readers do not wish to learn more about Al Gore, and they will find this diary repetitive and boring, if not outright maddening. They should read no further. For the rest of us, there is certainly plenty that is good to be said about Al Gore, along with the bad, including the real accomplishments he and others list in biographical statements:
Since the 2000 election, Vice President Gore has re-channeled his energy to focus on an all-out effort to help save the planet from irrevocable change. In demand by the media, Vice President Gore has been a featured guest on television's most watched programs -- The Jon Stewart Show, Jay Leno, Saturday Night Live, and Anderson Cooper 360°. With a funny, engaging, open and downright-on-fire style, he urgently delivers the stirring truth about what he calls our "planetary emergency." . . .
During the [Clinton] Administration, Vice President Gore was a central member of President Clinton's economic team, helping to design the program that led to the strong U.S. economy, and casting the tie-breaking Senate vote for the plan in 1993, thus helping to pass the first balanced budget in 30 years. He helped usher in the longest peacetime economic expansion in American history -- with over 18 million new jobs, wages rising twice the rate of inflation, the lowest African-American and Hispanic poverty on record, the highest level of private home ownership ever, more investment in our cities, and the lowest unemployment in 29 years.
Vice President Gore served as President of the Senate, a Cabinet member, a member of the National Security Council, and as the leader of a wide range of Administration initiatives, including the fight for the V-Chip, the Family and Medical Leave, and more high-quality children's programming on TV. He has worked to dramatically expand lifelong learning for the 21st century, and increase investments in quality after-school care. He has taken the lead in reinventing government to make it cost less and work better. And he has been a champion of administration efforts to create new jobs and growth in cities across America, to build more livable communities, to fight terrorism and make air travel safer, and to enact the toughest-ever measures to cut off children's access to tobacco. SLA.ORG
One of Al Gore's favorite quotes is:
I believe also that - for all of us - there is an often poorly understood link between ethical choices that seem quite small in scale and those whose apparent consequences are very large, and that a conscious effort to adhere to just principles in all our choices - however small - is a choice in favor of justice in the world. By the same token, a willingness to succumb to distraction, and in the process fail to notice the consequences of a small choice made carelessly, or unethically, makes one more likely to do the same when confronted with a large choice. Both in our personal lives and in our political decisions, we have an ethical duty to pay attention, resist distraction, be honest with one another and accept responsibility for what we do - whether as individuals or together. [Al Gore; Earth in the Balance, p.368] Al-Gore-2004
However, Gore’s film may also point out a significant theme in Al Gore’s own life: the theme of dissembling, covering up and hiding past failures while claiming to be "new" and improved. According to a considerable body of research by the New York Times, Newsweek, and Al Gore’s hometown newspaper, the Tennessean, one of Al Gore’s "old" qualities – before he became an environmental evangelist - was a propensity to tell half-truths about himself and manipulate others for the purpose of salvaging and promoting his own political career.
ABC news says,
Once dubbed "Ozone Man" by George H.W. Bush, . . . Gore's new film, "An Inconvenient Truth," documents the former vice president's journey toward environmental evangelism. ABC.NEWS
For a moment, Al Gore left the political stage after his 2000 defeat in the US Supreme Court. "But now,
Al Gore is back. Not as a political candidate, but as a Baptist preacher with a moral message. His favorite sermon is about the judgment day that will come upon us if we do not mend our ways and stop contributing to global warming.
In the five-and-a-half years since he won the popular vote but lost the presidency, Gore has talked to more than a thousand different local audiences about climate change . . . With the urgency of a Baptist preacher with a judgment day sermon, the former politician is spreading the bad news of global warming—including in a new film. Christians would do well to listen up," says Christianity Today. CHRISTIANITY TODAY
Not everyone is convinced by Al Gore's "new man" efforts. The conservative National Review Online says, "The new Al Gore is not only old, but an old fraud." Among other things, the question of Al Gore’s marijuana use, the effect it may have had on his stunted academic career, the questions about his resume, and the way he has failed to address these issues raise doubts about the "old" Al Gore as well as the "new one".
It has been established by the Washington Post and others that Al Gore did mediocre work at Harvard, even in his signature science field, and enrolled but failed to graduate from two consecutive graduate school programs, one in divinity and one in law. It is reasonable to question, as others have, what role his illegal marijuana use played in these failures. NORML
In 1987, Al Gore admitted to his use of marijuana while an under grad at Harvard, as an Army news correspondent in Vietnam, and while a reporter in Nashville. Gore stated, "During my junior and senior year of college, it was looked at in the same way moonshine was looked at in Prohibition days." Newsweek, 11/16/87
In the past, "Gore said he used marijuana "when I came back from Vietnam, yes, but not"[a lot]. Gore said in 1987 that his use of marijuana, which began in college, had been "infrequent and rare." Pressed further, Gore said: "When I was young, I did things young people do. When I grew up I put away childish things." WaPOST ISSUES-2000
Questions about Al Gore's use of marijuana first arose in Gore's campaign for Congress in 1976, but only in an off-the-record conversation with a reporter from the Nashville Tennessean. Not until his presidential run in 1988 did the matter force significant public comment from Gore.
At a 1988 press conference, Gore admitted to experimenting with marijuana a few times during his Vietnam years and immediately afterward. But this, he argued, needed to be understood in the context of a great "period of change" in the nation, as well as in himself. "Like many others in my generation," he said, "my life reflects the times." The matter seemed to be over before it started.
No sooner did Gore answer one question, however, when he was confronted with another: Had he truthfully characterized the extent of his marijuana use? Gore did not answer this question directly. A reporting team from the Tennessean investigated, interviewing forty people, mostly Gore's former colleagues from the paper. In the resulting article published on November 10, 1987, only one person voiced personal knowledge of Gore's marijuana use, saying "I can remember only one specific time, and I think it was right after he got back from Vietnam in 1971 . . .
Once he was into life back in the States, I just never saw him involved in anything like that." Who was it who seemingly broke ranks with the others in offering any details of Gore's drug use? One of Gore's closest friends from Nashville, a man whose wife introduced Tipper Gore to photography--a Tennessean reporter named John Warnecke. Perhaps because his account seemed only to confirm Gore's own, nothing more was made of it. PBS.ORG
Al Gore worked as an investigative reporter with the Nashville Tennessean from 1971-1976, where John C. Warnecke was a reporter also. INFO.PLEASE
But Warnecke, now living on disability in the San Francisco area, decided to take matters into his own hands. A former member of the Tennessee chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), Warnecke alerted the Web site of the Drug Reform Coordination Network that the piece had been pulled, hoping to somehow get his story out.
It worked. The group's online site, DRCNet, published an interview with Warnecke on Friday that was picked up and linked to by Mediagossip.com, a Web site popular with reporters and editors.
Gore spokesman Chris Lehane says, "This is old news. [Gore] brought it up himself in 1987 and was definitive at that time that he's never used it since entering public office." Lehane continued, "He's said he used it in college, used it in Vietnam and used it in Tennessee, but definitely hasn't used it since entering public service." SALON.COM
The most sensational material in Turque's book is an old friend's claim that Gore smoked far more pot in his youth than he has previously admitted. The friend, John C. Warneck e, says that as a newspaper reporter in Nashville, Gore smoked three or fou r times a week, and didn't give it up until he ran for Congress in 1976. Gore's account, laid down during his 1988 presidential campaign, is that he tried pot only on "rare and infrequent" occasions and gave it up entirely in 1972. SALON.COM
During the 2000 Democratic Primary campaign,
On Friday, Jan. 14, [2000]editors at Newsweek magazine pulled an excerpt of "Inventing Al Gore: A Biography," a book by their own reporter Bill Turque. According to a knowledgeable source, the editors were concerned that the excerpt focused too much on Gore's past drug use. SALON
Turque was Newsweek's White House correspondent for two years, a senior writer about national affairs for the magazine for five years and worked as a newspaper reporter for a decade before that, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 with a team of reporters at the Kansas City Star. SALON
In an interview with "The Week Online", "former Gore pal and colleague at the Nashville Tennessean" John C. Warnecke, a recovering alcoholic currently in a 12-step program, according to Salon.com SALON tells says he used to regularly smoke pot with Gore, and that the vice president's marijuana use was far more extensive than Gore has indicated. INFOPLEASE
Explaining to The Week Online why he felt the need to come forward with this information, Warneck said,
The drug laws in this country are ruining the lives of hundreds of thousands of young people, mostly poor young people, people who don't come from privileged backgrounds and wealthy families. It just doesn't make sense that we have a war on drugs. It doesn't work, and the politicians refuse to talk about it. That suffering and that hypocrisy has weighed very heavily on my conscience. DRCNET.COM
Rotten.com offers a very helpful timeline of Al Gore’s life.
Gore, as part of the Clinton Administration, [] presided over a drug war policy that has led to the arrest and incarceration of record numbers of non-violent drug offenders. In 1998, according to the Justice Department, there were 682,885 Americans arrested on marijuana charges, 88% of whom were arrested for possession. A recent study by the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice (www.cjcj.org) reported that the incarcerated population of the U.S. will reach two million on or around February 15, 2000. Of those, more than half are non-violent offenders according to CJCJ. DRCNET.COM
Jake Par of Salon.com wrote on January 22, 2000,
Jan. 22, 2000 | WASHINGTON -- As Vice President Al Gore's presidential campaign prepared for its anticipated win at the Iowa Caucuses Monday, Washington media circles were agog with news having to do with crops other than corn. After Newsweek pulled a report on Gore's pot-smoking past, the story's main source started speaking out.
At the last minute on Friday, Jan. 14, editors at Newsweek magazine pulled an excerpt of "Inventing Al Gore: A Biography," a book by their own reporter Bill Turque. According to a knowledgeable source, the editors were concerned that the excerpt focused too much on Gore's past drug use.
The chapter in the book addresses the veracity of Gore's claim in 1987 that his past pot smoking was "rare and infrequent." That same year, as Gore was gearing up for his doomed presidential run, he said to reporters that it had been approximately 15 years since he last toked up. SALON
Warneck, Al Gore’s friend from when Gore worked on the Staff at the Tennessean, says that during the 1988 Democratic Primaries, when Gore was running to defeat progressive Jesse Jackson, Al Gore specifically and repeatedly demanded that Warkneck mislead the press about Gore’s marijuana use.
Al was putting out a story, and I helped him. In 1988, when Douglas Ginsberg withdrew his nomination to the Supreme Court because he admitted he had smoked pot, that was in the middle of the 1988 campaign. So they asked all the candidates if they had smoked pot. And Al called me and asked me to stonewall. I argued with him, I said, "If you get everybody to stonewall, then you're just raising the red flag, and the press will scrutinize you even further." But he put pressure on me to stonewall.
What do you mean by "pressure"?
He called me three times in one morning, and he said, "Don't talk to the press at all about this." That's a stonewall, and it's another form of lying. But I couldn't do that. But I was torn. I felt a debt to the Tennessean, a paper that taught me everything about the truth. And I had a friendship with Al. So I came up with this half-truth. And that was, that Al had tried it a couple of times with me and he didn't like pot. SALON
Warnecke said that, while Al Gore did not explicitly tell him to lie, Gore made it clear that Warnecke should not tell the truth about Gore's marijuana use.
He wanted me to stonewall. But the story I said was the opposite of truth. Because he and I smoked every day for I don't know how long. And he loved it. But by saying what I did to the Tennessean, that basically killed the issue. When asked about this, Gore spokesman Lehane says the vice president has no recollection of this conversation. SALON
Warneck, when asked why he was coming forward with the information about his old friend, Al Gore, said,
I think certain drugs should be decriminalized, like pot. I was on the board with NORML http://www.norml.org/ in Tennessee . . . The main reason has to do with the fact that I reached a point in my life -- and in my sobriety -- when I realized I was carrying a lot of people's lies. And I was tired of carrying other people's lies. People were putting me in positions that I had to say something about them that we both knew just wasn't true. And I had been working with my psychiatrist on this lie I told about Al, and about the truth of Al's pot smoking with me. I did it with his pressure. And I've never been comfortable with it. He did it at a time, in 1988, so he could stay as a viable candidate. And later he was picked to be Clinton's VP. And all the while there was this story out there, that I had told, and it wasn't the truth. SALON
In a statement on January 24, 2000, Gore did not directly deny Warnecke's claims, but, rather, dismissed the matter out of hand as "something I dealt with a long time . . . old news." A writer at the conservative Weekly Standard countered, "Old it may be, but if Gore is willing to fudge on this, what else is he trying to hide?" PBS.ORG
Meanwhile, Gore’s use of his family tradgedies in his speeches has raised as many questions as it has generated sympathy.
Gore made a ghoulish riff out of his son's near-fatal car accident at the 1992 Democratic convention in New York (the son was sitting in the audience, so the cameras could cut back and forth from Gore to his subject). NATIONAL REVIEW
Al Gore’s signature film, "An Inconvenient Truth",
touches briefly but with emotion on three events in Gore's life and how they inspired his environmental activism: the car accident that almost took the life of his son; his defeat in Florida to Bush; and perhaps most foreboding, the death of his sister, a lifelong smoker, from lung cancer . . . and the fact that his family farmed tobacco and didn't stop until after her death. Gore underscores that this is the way people are, that it is hard to change old habits, be it smoking or growing tobacco or emitting carbon dioxide . . .
But just as Gore grew tobacco while his sister died of cancer, Gore acknowledges that he has felt guilty over car accident that put his child oldest child in a full-body cast.
In "An Inconvenient Truth", Gore recounts the day in 1989 when a moment of inadvertence led to the hospitalization of his oldest son:
We stopped at the curb with some neighbors after a long walk toward the lot where out car was parked. Suddenly, one of Albert’s friends, who was walking just in front of us with his dad, bolted off the sidewalk and took of running as fast as he could across the busy one-way street – even though traffic was heading toward him from only a block away.
Then, in an instant, with no warning, my son pulled his hand out of mine and jumped off the curb, running to chase his friend across the street. But just before he got to the far lane, he was hit by a speeding car. I watched what no parent should ever see: My son was knocked into the air . . . [An Inconvenient Truth, p. 68]
This is certainly a very emotional story, like the story Gore tells about the death of his sister from cancer, and Gore’s subsequent decision to stop growing tobacco. Certainly, we all interpret and recount the stories of our lives in a manner that fits the narrative that helps us to understand ourselves and project ourselves to others, unconsciously including, excluding and sculpting details in a way that fits the narrative we want and need to project for others.
"Gore began writing [his first ecology book,] Earth in the Balance, in the hospital where his son was recovering, and he describes the accident in the introduction." NATIONAL REVIEW
This is the version of the same story that Al Gore tells in "Earth in the Balance": The crash happened in April 1989 when, as Gore tells us, he had lost his first presidential run and just turned 40. Leaving a baseball game, he saw a car strike his 6-year-old boy (his youngest child and only son), who sailed through the air and scraped along the pavement. Gore ran to him and "called his name, but he was motionless, limp and still, without breath or pulse. His eyes were open with the nothingness stare of death, and we prayed, the two of us . . . with only my voice." Gore's son struggled to hold on to consciousness, two passing nurses gave him first aid, and teams of doctors saved his life and, over months, restored him to health. NAT. REVIEW
To read Earth in the Balance with a view to what it tells us about its author, apart from whatever it may tell us about the earth or Western culture, is to confirm the impression. In the key philosophical chapter, "Dysfunctional Civilization," Gore writes that "[f]eelings represent the essential link between mind and body or...between our intellect and the physical world. ...Modern civilization assumes a profound separation between the two."
But Al Gore, speaker and campaigner, has been enacting just such a separation for years.
Quoting Al Gore:"The unnatural task of a disembodied mind is to somehow ignore the intense psychic pain that comes from the constant nagging awareness of what is missing: the experience of living in one's body as a fully integrated physical and mental being." But who in modern politics is less integrated, physically and mentally, than Gore? Whose powerful mind is more disembodied? "But the cleavage between mind and body, intellect and nature, has created a kind of psychic pain at the very root of the modern mind..."
Enough. Earth in the Balance purports to analyze our civilization. Leave aside the question of how well it does that; it certainly seems to describe its author. The book is subtitled Ecology and the Human Spirit; it might also be subtitled Al Gore Out of Balance. NAT. REVIEW
Probably for the purpose of hurting Al Gore and helping the Republican candidate, the National Review has attempted to harmonize the various "old" and "new" Gores, and has concluded that "old" and "new" are both fake:
IN 1991, with President George Bush still riding high, then-Sen. Al Gore announced he wouldn't make another bid for the Democratic presidential nomination -- partly because two years earlier his son had nearly died after being struck by a car. "My family -- my wife and four young children -- are more important than politics and personal ambition," he avowed. Half a year later Gore's manifesto on the ecological crisis, Earth in the Balance, appeared -- also a result, he writes in the introduction, of his son's accident. The experience made him uncomfortable with the compromises and tawdriness of practical politics, "increasingly impatient with the status quo, with conventional wisdom." By his own telling, Gore had been transformed into a politician of extraordinary virtue, willing to forsake ambition for his family, determined to embark on a quasi-spiritual crusade to save not just America or even democracy, but the planet.
Then, Bill Clinton called. Gore took the second spot on the ticket in 1992 and decided the wife and kids could wait while he spent his days disavowing the implications of Earth in the Balance in national debates and defending the compromises and tawdriness of the former Arkansas governor. Why the reversal? Well, it turns out, because his son had nearly died in a car accident. Accepting the vice-presidential nomination, Gore told the Democratic National Convention how immediately after the accident his son "was limp and still, without breath or pulse." Gore was running for national office because, like his son, "our democracy is lying there in the gutter, waiting for us to give it a second breath of life." His son's near-death, then, was now a kind of qualification for higher office. In fact, it seemed to be a justification for anything, a charm that Gore could rub whenever he needed an aura of virtue.
Gore's father raised him to be President, and everything around him becomes automatically subsumed in the lifelong Al Gore for President campaign. His son's near death becomes a nice metaphor, his sister's painful, losing struggle with cancer a useful rhetorical riff, pandering and playing loose with the truth a necessary expedient (except when renouncing the same is even more expedient). And none of this is calculating or low because it is in the service of a goal whose purity is beyond reproach -- elevating Al Gore. NAT. REVIEW
Gore has gone through one make-over after another, but all have been with one overriding purpose: to maintain his political viability.
As a congressman, he had a knack for grabbing headlines by championing goo-goo causes like nutritional standards for baby formula. In the Senate, GOP staffers still drip with contempt for him as "a joke," who never matched his rhetoric with substance . . .
The attitude suffused Gore's 1988 presidential bid, an exercise in ham-handed and utterly predictable cynicism. Gore ran at the urging of a group of wealthy Democrats who thought he could fill the "moderate" niche in the campaign. But his candidacy never developed a rationale. One of his first acts was to fly to Los Angeles with Tipper to tell music executives his wife didn't really mean the nasty things she had said about rock lyrics. Then he tried on successive campaign themes. The one he settled on was that he was the super-hawk in a field of liberal wimps NAT. REVIEW
In 1999, when Wolf Blitzer asked Gore what he had done that distinguished him from the other Democratic Presidential candidates, Gore said:
I'll be offering my vision when my campaign begins, and it'll be comprehensive and sweeping, and I hope that it'll be compelling enough to draw people toward it.... I've traveled to every part of this country during the last six years . . . During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. WIRED.COM
Ironically, precisely because Gore was determined to present himself as the "new Gore", downplaying his service in the Clinton Administration, he stretched back to before the Clinton Administration for a signature accomplishment from his time in the Congress, and this extraordinary claim provided the basis for, and led directly to, the most intense ridicule of the 2000 campaign. MACJOURNALS.COM
One reason the 2000 election was close enough to let Florida happen was that the GOP suceeded for most of that year in portraying Gore as a liar, a politician who only stands for what other people want to hear. Many progressives think the "invented the Internet" story was a big part of that, especially since Gore never said it . . . . Gore did take the lead in Congress to advance the Internet as you know it. He pushed technology initiatives, he supported funding for the Internet's precursors, and he "showed an appreciation of technology that was far from usual on Capitol Hill." MACJOURNALS.COM
It is all too easy to discount the significance of past overuse of alcohol and other mood-altering drugs. Yet, many substance abuse professionals insist that substance abuse is a generational problem that affects families, and not just individuals. Claudia Black, Ph.D. In any case, the 2003 drug arrest of Albert Gore III, his history of substance abuse and the effects on his education, raise the same fundamental issues of fairness and drug policy that are raised by Al Gore, Jr.'s presidential aspirations. Why is it possible for white men to commit drug offenses and proceed with their lives while for others the same behavior leads to imprisonment, lack of education and joblessness?
Albert Gore, III was detained my Montgomery County, MD police in 2003 and charged with possession of marijuana. Unlike his father, Albert Gore, III was arrested and charged for his marijuana possession. And it was not the first time. Al Gore, III’s had been stopped on other occasions because of erratic "reckless driving" and driving under the influence of substances, which endangered the public.
The young indulging in pot these days are mostly the children of the baby boomers, who, once upon a time in the '60s, took to reefer as their recreational sacrament, their generation's almost universal drug of defiance. Now the boomers, who were raised on episodes of Ozzie and Harriet (and, if anything, identified with David and Ricky), find, to their astonishment, that they themselves have become Ozzie and Harriet: middle-aged! Parents! Conventional! It is a discomfiting transition, as if former members of a Dionysus cult were asked to take up duties as parole officers. The boomers raised hell with authority in the '60s; now some have mixed feelings about exerting that authority themselves--as if it would somehow turn them into their own enemies. TIME.INC
WASHINGTON (CNN), Sunday, December 21, 2003 -- The son of former Vice President Al Gore was arrested Friday night on a marijuana possession charge after police stopped the car he was driving for not having its headlights on, according to a news release from the Montgomery County, Maryland, Department of Police Services.
Albert Gore III, 21, was behind the wheel of a Cadillac driving in downtown Bethesda at 11:30 p.m. EST Friday when it was spotted by a unit with the Montgomery County Police Holiday Task Force, the statement said.
After he pulled the car over, Officer Robert Cassels noticed all of its windows and the sunroof were opened despite the freezing temperature, and he "smelled the odor of marijuana coming from inside the car," the statement said.
A search of the car found "a partial marijuana cigarette" and "a cardboard cigarette box with a baggie containing suspected marijuana," the police statement said.
In addition to Gore, police charged two male passengers in the car with a misdemeanor count of possession of marijuana. The three were released from jail, pending trial.
Gore, a Harvard University student, has had previous brushes with the law. He was ticketed for reckless driving by North Carolina police in August 2000 when he was clocked going 94 mph. Military police arrested him for drunk driving near a military base in Virginia in September 2002. CNN.COM
In fairness, TalkLeft questions the veracity of police allegations, based on a hearsay account by some who claims to be friend of Al Gore, III. TALK.LEFT
However, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) reports that:
Al Gore III (13), son of Vice President Al Gore (D), was caught smoking what appeared to be marijuana by school authorities at St. Alban's School. Al III was suspended as a result of the incident. While the story appeared in the foreign press, the story was suppressed in the US media. London's Daily Telegraph charged, "The crusading American media and Washington's political elite have closed ranks to protect Vice President Gore from embarrassment over his teenage son's indiscretion." Source: James Bovard, Playboy; July 1999 NORML
Certainly, many but not all Americans drink alcohol and smoke marijuana. A minority of those substance users also operate motor vehicles while under the influence, in spite of all of the laws intended to protect the public from substance-impaired drivers. But, can we consider it irrelevant when the sons of wealthy white men break the laws that apply to others, flunk out of school, and then present their candidacies for our nation’s highest office? How much of Al Gore, Jr.’s inability to succeed and excel academically was directly related to his reported prodigious consumption of drugs and alcohol?
The Washington Post pointed out in its March 19, 2000 article, highlighted recently in a DailyKos diary, that Al Gore, Jr. drank and drugged his way through Harvard University, where he went to college and did unexceptional or poor academic work. WaPOST cited in a recent DK diary.
That was the year Gore's classmates remember him spending a notable amount of time in the Dunster House basement lounge shooting pool, watching television, eating hamburgers and occasionally smoking marijuana. His grades temporarily reflected his mildly experimental mood, and alarmed his parents. He received one D, one C-minus, two C's, two C-pluses and one B-minus, an effort that placed him in the lower fifth of the class for the second year in a row.
For all of Gore's later fascination with science and technology, he often struggled academically in those subjects. The political champion of the natural world received that sophomore D in Natural Sciences 6 (Man's Place in Nature) and then got a C-plus in Natural Sciences 118 his senior year. The self-proclaimed inventor of the Internet avoided all courses in mathematics and logic throughout college, despite his outstanding score on the math portion of the SAT. WaPOST
If Bill Turque’s book is to be believed, in which he quotes Al Gore’s close friend John C. Warnecke, who worked with Gore at the Tennessean, the we have to conclude that Al Gore was using marijuana regularly at the same time that he was failing academically at his divinity studies at Vanderbilt University, and then failing again at Vanderbilt’s law school. Al Gore attended but never graduated from either of these institutions and the result remains with him even today. He still does not have a law degree or any other graduate degree from the days he spent drinking alcohol and smoking pot.
Moreover, Gore's graduate school record - consistently glossed over by the press - is nothing short of shameful. In 1971, Gore enrolled in Vanderbilt Divinity School where, according to Bill Turque, author of "Inventing Al Gore," he received F's in five of the eight classes he took over the course of three semesters. Not surprisingly, Gore did not receive a degree from the divinity school. Nor did Gore graduate from Vanderbilt Law School . . . LE
This really differentiates Al Gore from other presidents and contenders such as President Bill Clinton, (reportedly) Senator Barack Obama and even President George W. Bush. While these Presidents and contenders have (reportedly) acknowledged using substances, they were able to balance this with their academic responsibilities. Bill Clinton graduated from college and went on to become a Rhodes Scholar, based on his earlier academic achievements. Al Gore, Jr. on the other hand, reportedly drank and drugged as much as daily during the same period when he did mediocre work at Harvard and then failed to graduate from two graduate programs at Vanderbilt University.
Many online Gore biographies claim that Al Gore graduated "with honors" from Harvard university, ELECT-GORE-2008 which perhaps intentionally obscures the fact that Gore graduated "cum laude", which means that half the students at Harvard did worse than he did but half of them also did better. Al Gore’s resumes rarely if ever mention that he failed to graduate from the two graduate programs that he cites for proof that he attended graduate school.
Al Gore’s inability to tell the whole truth about himself has often been the subject of comic skits, although the comics may have been unaware of Gore’s academic history. FIRSTMONDAY.ORG
Although many of us have tried marijuana and apparently survived unscathed, Al Gore and his once close friend John Warnecke, who is an admitted drug abuser in recovery, seem to be among those who were not able to use drugs without it hampering their ability to function, perhaps because of the very extent to which they engaged in the practice. If John Warnecke is to be believed, the extent of Al Gore’s use of alcohol and drugs may well be directly related to the fact, if not the sole reason, that Al Gore did not complete graduate school.
The questions that remain for voters are questions of fundamental fairness as well as questions of objective qualifications. While Al Gore was Vice President, President Clinton signed a law to prevent those who had been convicted of marijuana use from receiving Federally-guaranteed student loans. NORML
That law would not affect people like Al Gore, Jr. and his son Albert, because they are wealthy enough to go to Harvard without depending upon school loans. But when wealthy whites drink and drug and fail out of graduate school, should they still be able to present themselves for public office and be considered equally as qualified as people from humble background who followed the rules, worked hard and succeeded? CRASHING THE WHITE MALE SUPREMACY PARADIGM
But, according to the group Common Sense for Drug Policy,
Thousands of young people have been denied student loans because of the HEA drug conviction loan ban, federal figures show. USA Today reported on April 17, 2006 ( "Drug Convictions Cost Students Their Financial Aid") that "One in every 400 students applying for federal financial aid for college is rejected because of a drug conviction, an analysis of Department of Education numbers by a drug policy overhaul group found. A study to be released today by Students for Sensible Drug Policy says 189,065 people have been turned down for financial aid since the federal government added a drug conviction question to the financial aid form in the 2000-01 school year." CSDP.ORG
Under 21 U.S.C. 862(2)(b),
(b) Drug possessors
(1) Any individual who is convicted of any Federal or State
offense involving the possession of a controlled substance (as such
term is defined for purposes of this subchapter) shall -
(A) upon the first conviction for such an offense and at the
discretion of the court -
(i) be ineligible for any or all Federal benefits for up to
one year;
(ii) be required to successfully complete an approved drug
treatment program which includes periodic testing to insure
that the individual remains drug free;
(iii) be required to perform appropriate community service;
or
(iv) any combination of clause (i), (ii), or (iii); and
(B) upon a second or subsequent conviction for such an offense
be ineligible for all Federal benefits for up to 5 years after
such conviction as determined by the court. FINDLAW.COM
So, Al Gore used marijuana illegally and extensively, screwed up and failed to complete graduate school, which was dysfunctional, passed a law to deny graduate school loans to others who used marijuana, and he now seeks to become President without completing graduate school in front of others who did complete graduate school in spite of the barriers Gore placed in the way. Certainly, Gore does not intend to by a hypocrite, yet there is an undeniable irony in the circumstances.
In the article, "How to Construct an Underclass", Blumenson and Nielson explain how laws such as this create even greater barriers to success by minorities and poor people, which effectively increases the competitive chances of wealthy people who can afford to ignore drug laws and their consequences. DPFMA.ORG
So, what does it mean, finally, that Al Gore failed to obtain a graduate degree while regularly using alcohol and marijuana? The value of any attainment increases with the difficulties that one encountered along the way. A runner who wins a race with ten-pound weights on his legs must be more capable than another who finishes the race at the same time, but without the weights to slow him down. It is equally true that the shame and disqualification associated with failure must be all the greater when those who fail had everything laid out for them to succeed, and then failed anyway.
We are a nation that believes in forgiveness and redemption, and so we do not endlessly condemn those who whose lives have been marked by drug use. But neither do we let people practice as physicians after their drug use causes them to fail medical school, unless they have gone back to complete the work that their drug use caused them to leave unfinished.
The United States is, at its best, a meritocracy, where those who have worked hardest and achieved the most are rewarded with the highest opportunities for additional service. Al Gore has never made amends to himself for the effects of marijuana use and alcohol on his college and aborted graduate school careers. Before he presents himself as a candidate for the highest position in our land, competing with candidates who achieved excellence academically, he should finish the graduate school work that the other Presidential candidates completed with honors. DK DIARY
Now, Al Gore would prefer that we not concern ourselves with the "old" Al Gore - the one whom John Warnecke claims lied repeatedly about his drug use, the one who continues to inflate his resume by saying that he "attended" Vanderbilt University Divinity School and Law School, without ever specifically acknowledging that he never graduated, the Al Gore who never adequately explains why.
One pro-Gore website says,
Vice President Gore was born on March 31, 1948, and is the son of the late U.S. Senator Albert Gore, Sr. and Pauline Gore. Raised in Carthage, Tennessee, and Washington, D.C., Vice President Gore received a degree in government with honors from Harvard University in 1969. After graduation, he volunteered for enlistment in the U.S. Army and served in Vietnam. Returning to civilian life, Vice President Gore became an investigative reporter with The Tennessean in Nashville. He attended Vanderbilt University Divinity School and Vanderbilt Law School. AL-GORE-2004 ELECT-GORE-2008
Some would say that Gore misleads by omission, and that the reasons for his academic failure to succeed are relevant to weighing the relevance in his resume of the schools he "attended". Why not just leave those graduate schools off the resume entirely, unless he is slyly trying to receive credit for work he did not do and degrees he did not receive?
Some would argue that the inclusion of the schools without mentioning that he did not graduate or why burden raises legitimate doubts about the honesty and forthrightness of the candidate. But, many Gore supporters are so religiously enthralled with him that they are willing to overlook these inconsistencies and even endeavor to deny them. DK
What is clear is that Al Gore does exaggerate on the campaign trail, including his current claim that producing a film and going around talking about it make him the savior of the earth’s environment. Of course, if Al Gore joins the Presidential campaign the Republicans are going to want to cast doubt upon these claims, just as they successfully used against him his apparently exaggerated claim about his role in the creation of the Internet.
It’s not fair, but people who exaggerate even a little bit provide all to much fodder for their critics, and they undermine their own campaigns. While other candidates may not be crisscrossing the country touting their progressive accomplishments, they retain for 2008 the moral and strategic advantages that come from not having exaggerated their accomplishments in the past. In fact, Gore’s exaggerations of his accomplishments inspired and provided fuel for Republican efforts to label him "self-aggrandizing", "delusive" and "insane". FREE REPUBLIC.COM
In order to be elected President, Al Gore must first convince Democratic Primary voters that the facts presented here are irrelevant to his "new man" persona. Then, he must also convince some independent and perhaps even some Republican voters that his marijuana use, lies about his marijuana use, failing to graduate from graduate school, dissembling about his failure to graduate from graduate school, and his simultaneous growing and decrying of tobacco are not relevant to the question of whether he is a "new man" worthy of the Presidency.
Sometimes, writers spread half-truths and innuendo about a candidate to make him seem unqualified for the Presidency. In Al Gore’s case, the facts themselves cast doubts. When a Presidential candidate who claims to be a "new man" is so clearly a fugitive from his own past, we have an obligation to explore and weigh and determine the relevance of the history of offenses from which he runs with such vigor.
Ultimately, the only way to choose the person "most qualified to be President" is to carefully examine the qualifications of each candidate in turn, facing shortcomings honestly and courageously, lest they hurt the Party's chances in 2008.
Finally, one might ask if this diary itself is not "flame bait", which is defined as:
A posting intended to trigger a flame war, or one that invites flames in reply.
As was discussed at length in a previous diary,
That question, in turn, raises the question of whether DailyKos is a place where one can discuss matters involving justice and equality. In America, such matters often generate heated discussion; they are contentious and they remain largely festering and unresolved in our society. To the extent that DailyKos addresses the relevant issues of the day, including issues of justice and equality, it is inevitable that heated discussion will sometimes ensue.
Even though DailyKos is a forum wherein the majority establishes speech rules and norms that apply to minority opinions, to the extent that people are able to control the temptation to prevent other people from sharing facts and opinions about matters of equality, and other matters of pressing debate, such a forum can still be useful for discussion and even amelioration of injustices that exist here and in the larger society. DK DIARY
AUTHOR’S DISCLOSURE STATEMENT AND NOTES:
(1) I have authored this diary completely on my own and independent of any political campaign or other entity because I have always disliked Al Gore, ever since he emerged in the 1988 Democratic Presidential nominating campaign touting himself as the conservative (white male) alternative to the progressive and Black Rev. Jesse Jackson. I do not want Al Gore to be elected President, I do not believe Al Gore should be elected President, and so I raise these issues and questions in the hope that he will not be nominated again in 2008.
(2) For the most part, the author will not participate in comments about this report, but will instead give readers time to check the citations offered here and evaluate the credibility of the sources cited. The author will mostly forego participation in comments, because such participation would encourage DailyKos participants to immediately "troll-rate" the diarist rather than taking the time to honestly, openly and objectively consider the many citations and facts that are presented here.
(3) DailyKos participants who disagree with the opinions expressed and facts reported in this diary are encouraged to do so by offering other opionions and facts rather than by deleting the diary Tags that enable other readers to find this diary. Only trusted DailyKos users (TU's) can delete tags. DK FAQ RE: TAGS DailyKos is a responsible political blog, not a frat house. Deleting Tags is a form of censorship and/or childish vandalism that has no place and should not be tolerated at DailyKos.