I wrote up this story a few years ago, but what the heck. Al Gore might be president soon, so it’s worth telling again.
It’s a true story. Gore tells it himself.
When Gore was a rookie reporter at the Nashville Tennessean, he was assigned to write obituaries. One day, he got a call: The famed Swedish gynecologist, Dr. Trebla Erog, was dead.
So Albert Gore gathered the details on Trebla Erog’s life.
By odd coincidence, Trebla Erog lived in Gore’s hometown, Carthage, Tenn. Dr. Erog was a very busy man, a member of B’nai Brith and the Knights of Columbus.
As Gore was busy working on Dr. Erog’s life, the phone rang again. Dr. Erog’s wife had collapsed at the funeral home in grief over losing her husband, and had died. Now Gore had some dramatic story.
The tragedy, though, multiplied. As Gore hammered out the sad story of the late Dr. and Mrs. Erog, the phone rang once again.
The three Erog children, racing to Carthage upon hearing the news of their father’s death, had crashed on a Tennessee highway. All were dead.
Now Gore was thinking, this has front page all over it! He wrote the incredible story of the death of Trebla Erog, and Mrs. Erog, and the three young Erogs, and turned it in to the city editor.
A little while later the city editor ambled over to his new reporter. That was a nice writing job Al, he said. Have you figured out what Trebla Erog spells backwards?
Yes, he fell for the whole thing. And Albert Gore is supposed to be the smart candidate for president.
To paraphrase George W. Bush’s description of his own youth, when Al Gore was young and gullible, he was young and gullible.
He may or may not be so gullible now, but he seems to think the rest of the nation is.
The outlines of Gore’s fall campaign for president seem pretty clear. He will run on safe, traditional Democratic Party themes, with a subtext that George Bush is not bright enough to run the country.
This comes from the candidate who got his own share of gentlemen’s C’s at Harvard while Bush struggled at Yale.
Intelligence doesn’t guarantee a strong presidency. Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter were intelligent.
But the last few weeks in this quiet time in the presidential campaign have told something else about these candidates. Something about how they pick their battles. Something that goes not to intelligence, but to instinct.
It is Al Gore’s instinct to assume that voters are as gullible as a rookie reporter at the Nashville Tennessean, that they’ll buy any story he feeds them.
He thought Florida voters would buy that he broke ranks with the Clinton administration and ran to the rescue of little Elian Gonzalez out of genuine concern for a 6-year-old, not because Florida has 25 electoral votes. People weren’t so gullible. They saw what Gore was doing, begging for Cuban-American votes.
Gore thought he could fool everybody on China trade by siding with Clinton in public and undermining Clinton in private. Publicly, he supported the Clinton administration’s bid to push for permanent normal trade relations with China. Privately, he signaled to AFL-CIO leaders that if they could stall the deal, he’d water it down next year, when he was in charge.
But his whispered promise to labor got out. Once caught, Gore retreated, announcing that he backed China trade with every bone in his body.
Gore complicated the China effort for the Clinton administration, but fortunately he didn’t kill it. He couldn’t kill it. His word was worthless. He was frozen out of the debate.
Now look at George Bush’s instincts, particularly when his instinct is to break with his own party.
When House Republicans last fall put out a budget plan that delayed tax-credit payments to the working poor, Bush protested. The Republicans, he said, “shouldn’t balance the budget on the backs of the poor.”
The snap judgment was that Bush was following the Clinton campaign model. When Clinton needed to show independence from a core Democratic constituency, African-Americans, he picked a fight with Sister Souljah, a black rapper.
Bush, the thinking went, had found his Sister Souljah–the House Republicans. But Clinton’s move was a stunt. Bush’s decision carried consequences. Republicans listened to him and dropped the delay in payments to the poor.
A couple of weeks ago, Bush broke from his party again. As Senate Republicans got ready to vote on a measure that could have forced Clinton to start a troop withdrawal from Kosovo this summer, Bush protested.
The Senate was infringing on the president’s authority to make foreign-policy decisions, Bush said. Several Republicans listened to him again. The measure was defeated.
Another Souljah moment? That doesn’t seem likely. Bush wasn’t going to score political points by stalling the return of U.S. troops from Kosovo. He wasn’t going to score points by supporting Bill Clinton. But Bush was right, the Senate Republicans were wrong, he spoke his mind and his influence won out.
Polls say nobody is paying much attention to the presidential race right now, and that’s too bad. There’s a lot to learn from watching Bush and Gore before they get into the hustle of the fall campaign. There’s a lot to learn about intelligence and instinct.
A president can hire all kinds of smart people. But he will follow his own instincts.
———-
E-mail: bdold@tribune.com
