5.19.00
The Smartest Little Boy in Class

5.18.00
Blaze Days At Los Alamos

5.18.00
90210: A Generation Duped

5.18.00
Peter Angelos In Foul Territory

5.18.00
Fourth Amendment Sneak Attack

5.16.00
Always a Rerun

5.16.00
Grabbing the Rail

5.16.00
Califonia's School Quackery

5.15.00
A Critical First Step

5.15.00
Federalists Rejoice

5.15.00
The Real Gun Lobby

5.15.00
Stopping The Triumph of Quotas

5.15.00
Bush's Best Idea

5.15.00
The Madness of Gun Buybacks

5.15.00
Taking Aim At The Constitution

5.12.00
The Great GOP Land Grab

5.12.00
Million Mom March: Much Less than Advertised

5.12.00
New York's New Archbishop

5/19/00 11:15 a.m.
The Smartest Little Boy in Class
Is Gore really so bright, after all?

By Geoffrey Norman, author of the upcoming "Two for the Summit" (Dutton)

aul Begala, the former Clinton adviser who now partners with Oliver North on one of those political entertainment shows, was on the Imus radio program the other morning, pushing the theme of George W. Bush's lack of brains. "Down in Texas," Begala said, "people say if ignorance is bliss, then George W. is the happiest man in the state." Heh, heh, heh.

Limp jokes aside, the intelligence gap is a shared assumption of the media elite, all of whom are Mensa material and know brains when they see them. And when they look at George W., they don't see them. What they see in Al Gore, however, is the other thing entirely. Gore is smart. Really, really smart. Laser beam, high-speed processor, Harvard University, Yale Law, working journalist, wrote his own book, deep-think policy wonk, breathtakingly smart. Michael Kelly has suggested that the election could turn on what he calls "the pinhead factor." Gore's obvious intelligence will shine through in the debates against Bush who showed in the Republican primary-season debates "not only that he is not smarter than the average bear but also that he knows this, and is afraid of exposure."

So what about this widespread (among the sophisticated thinking set) agreement about Al Gore's self-evident intelligence? Is there any reason for skepticism among the rest of us? Any possibility that the intelligence gap is as phony as the missile gap that everyone assumed existed in 1960 because the press (which was not yet The Media) told us so?

Well, one wonders, if Al Gore is so smart, why does he so often seem like the man who can tell you everything about how a car works but can't learn how to drive. Or the economist who writes lucidly about price elasticity but can't balance a checkbook. Why, in short, does he act like he is so dumb?

Consider, for instance, the whole Buddhist Temple business, which succeeded in raising almost $100,000 for the Clinton/Gore campaign in 1996. The striking thing about this is: Only Al Gore, of all the people involved, didn't know that there was fundraising going on in the temple that day. ("I am shocked, shocked, Rick, to find there is gambling going on ...") Gore, it seems, was exceedingly obtuse, which is another word for dumb.

Or, take tobacco. Everyone remembers Gore's impassioned address to the Democratic convention in 1996 in which he vowed to fight, until he drew his last breath, against the evil weed that had killed his sister. Gore's sister died of lung cancer in 1984. In 1988, when he was running for President, Gore was telling tobacco farmers that he was their eternal soul mate. That he had held the young plants in his own two hands and so on and so forth. Very moving.

The curious thing here, of course, is that Gore was singing hymns to tobacco, and cashing tobacco subsidy checks, years after his sister died from using the stuff. Then, in 1996, he found religion. When he was asked about this, Gore explained that he had been in "denial." In other words, at a time when virtually everyone in America, even people who had not been to Harvard, knew that cigarettes caused cancer, Al Gore still didn't believe it. This means that Al Gore was one of the last people in America to tumble to the truth that smoking is bad for you. Even executives in the tobacco industry got it before Gore did. There is a word for people who refuse to accept the evidence and deny the reality in front of their faces. The word is not "intelligent."

Finally, what about the whole Monica business? Al Gore, according to a long and highly sourced story in the New York Times, was nearly devastated when Bill Clinton told him, after months of denying it, that yes, indeed, there had been some "inappropriate'" behavior. Gore had been doing trench warfare for the President because he believed him. The President had told Gore that he was innocent, that there was nothing to the charge that he'd "had sex with that woman," and Gore bought it wholesale. Right up until the time that Clinton confessed.

Well, this made Gore, in 1998, one of the few people in the world willing to take Bill Clinton at his word. Not many days after the name Monica Lewinsky began trading publicly, all grownups suspected strongly that something had gone on between the President and the intern. Common sense — as opposed to intellectual brilliance — tells you that a man who is innocent of fooling around on his wife, and can prove it, will do so just as fast as he can. If he has proof, it doesn't take a subpoena to pry it out of him. "Honey, just call Al, he'll tell you we were down at the office crunching numbers. And I've got the sign-out logs if you don't believe him ."

It was clear, to anyone with an ordinary understanding of the real world, that something was going on. That the question was not "Did he do it?" but "Can they prove it?" Nobody could predict the blue dress.

But Al Gore had better reason to be skeptical than the ordinary citizen of average intelligence. Gore had been moving in Democratic party circles for a long time, at least as long as Clinton, and the rumors of Clinton's habits in those parts were abundant and graphic. If you hadn't heard them, then you were not an insider. And while there might not have been an airtight legal case that Clinton was an energetic philanderer, you would have to be naive, at the least, not to consider the possibility. In other words, the Monica allegations shouldn't have come as a surprise; the sincere denial shouldn't have been accepted wholesale; and the eventual admission shouldn't have been a shock. Not, anyway, to anyone who lived in the real world and had a working knowledge of human nature.

But Gore was stunned. By what? The only real stunner was the blue dress, and Gore is a cutting-edge guy who knows about all that DNA stuff, so that couldn't have been it.

Stunned that Clinton would lie to him? Come on. Did Gore think he was the only person Clinton wouldn't lie to? That isn't intelligence, it is megalomania. Or was he stunned that Clinton would actually take a little loveless sex outside the bonds of holy matrimony? Could Gore really be that ... er, dumb?

Actually, he almost certainly isn't. He probably knew that Clinton had fooled around with "that woman," just like he probably knew the Buddhist temple thing was actually a shakedown and that cigarettes killed his sister. In other words, he wasn't telling the truth in these matters. In the end, this is what it comes down to. Gore is either exceedingly dumb or a calculating, big-time liar. This is the choice and one can't have it both ways. He is a either a clueless man of integrity or a real bright liar. Common sense tells you which. As Begala's friends down in Texas might say, Al Gore is the kind of man who would rather climb a tree and lie than stay on the ground and tell the truth.

Columns / Current Issue / Goldberg File / Nota Bene
Washington Bulletin / Subscribe / Ad Info / Home