JEFF JACOBY

Say what, Mr. Gore?

By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Staff, April 5, 1999

The cleverest response to Vice President Al Gore's odd claim that when he was in Congress he "took the initiative in creating the Internet" came from his predecessor as vice president.

"If Gore created the Internet," Dan Quayle cracked, "I invented spell-check."

If you didn't know that Quayle has a quick and self-deprecating sense of humor, don't blame yourself: It's a side of the man the media have never taken much notice of, perhaps because they have been so keen to portray him as a nitwit. Don't blame yourself, either, if you didn't know that Gore's Internet howler was just the latest in a long line of Gore gaffes. That, too, is something the media have never taken much notice of -- perhaps because it would conflict with their template of the Veep as a careful and judicious intellectual.

No politician is immune to uttering the occasional blooper. Gaffes typically result from engaging the mouth before putting the brain in gear. But sometimes they confirm what voters (or journalists) already suspected. When George Romney said his views on Vietnam had changed because he'd "had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get," it solidified a perception that his grasp of world affairs was weak. Bob Dole's 1988 New Hampshire snarl -- "Tell him to stop lying about my record" -- reinforced his reputation for surliness.

Gaffes can also be revelations. When Michael Dukakis urged Iowa farmers to diversify into Belgian endive, everyone realized how little he understood about American agriculture. Ted Kennedy's mush-mouthed answer to Roger Mudd's "Why do you want to be president?" illuminated the intellectual emptiness of his White House campaign.

But the best gaffes are just -- funny. Quayle telling that kid that he needed an 'e' at the end of 'potato' was hilarious. George Bush's assaults on the English language were pure comedy. (Bush at a Head Start center in 1992: "And let me say in conclusion, thanks for the kids. I learned an awful lot about bathtub toys -- about how to work the telephone. One guy knows -- several of them know their own phone numbers -- preparation to go to the dentist. A lot of things I'd forgotten. So it's been a good day.")

Which returns us to Gore. The world's most riveting speaker he is not. He is given to "stiff-necked condescension," in the apt phrase of Bob Zelnick, the ABC newsman turned biographer ("Gore: A Political Life"). When the vice president's oratory is memorable, it is usually for its invective. In one vile speech last year, he lumped critics of affirmative action with the racists who murdered James Byrd in Jasper, Texas.

So it comes almost as a relief to discover that even stiff, buttoned-down Al Gore can periodically stick his foot in it. "Took the initiative in creating the Internet?" That would be funny all by itself, since the earliest incarnation of the Internet, the ARPAnet, was first conceptualized in 1966, when Gore was 18. But even funnier is that just last September, according to an AP story, Gore told a steelworker that "he, too, has trouble turning on a computer, let alone using one."

The Father of the Internet, it transpires, has committed any number of verbal flubs. The watchdogs at the Media Research Center (www.mrc.org) sifted through the record and came up with a dozen examples. Some nuggets:

- En route to Washington for their inauguration in January 1993, Gore and Bill Clinton toured Monticello. Pausing before some sculpted busts, Gore asked, "Who are these people?" The curator, The New York Times deadpanned, "helpfully identified the unfamiliar faces": George Washington and Benjamin Franklin.

- In 1994, Gore told a Milwaukee audience that their city's ethnic diversity shows that America "can be e pluribus unum. Out of one, many." the national motto actually means the opposite: Out of many, one.

- Gore claimed in 1997 that he was the inspiration for Oliver Barrett IV, the preppy protagonist in "Love Story." That came as news to Erich Segal, the book's author.

- "That Michael Jackson is unbelievable, isn't he?" Gore asked Chicago Bulls fans in January 1998. Presumably he meant Michael Jordan.

- At a Hollywood party, Gore told rock star Courtney Love, "I'm a really big fan." Love promptly snapped back, "Yeah, right, name a song, Al." He couldn't.

Not every Gore gaffe is funny, of course. There was nothing comical about deriding Oliver North's supporters as "the extreme right wing, the extra-chromosome right wing." (An extra chromosome is what causes Down syndrome.) And it wasn't amusing -- just hypocritical -- when the same Gore who had boasted on the campaign trail about having been a tobacco farmer exploited his sister's death from lung cancer at the 1996 Chicago convention.

Lucky for Gore, his every gaffe and blunder hasn't been endlessly rehashed. As Quayle's experience shows, nobody's reputation can survive that kind of piling-on. It would be well if between now and November 2000, no candidate's goofs and rhetorical stumbles were used as an excuse for cruel mockery and humiliation.

Gentle jabs are OK, though. Did I mention that Al Gore, the man who invented the Internet, is the only candidate for president who doesn't have a campaign Web site?