10/20/00 1:10 p.m.
“You’re No Ronald Reagan”
Al Gore is at it again.

Frank J. Gaffney Jr., president of the Center for Security Policy, was responsible for nuclear forces, strategic defense, and arms-control policy in the Reagan defense department.

he chameleon candidate is at it again. In his run for the presidency, Al Gore has shown himself capable of more physical, tempermental, and political makeovers than Hillary Clinton has hairdos. His latest gambit, in which he tries to cast himself in the mold of Ronald Reagan, suggests however that he is more a candidate for multiple-personality-disorder therapy than the White House.

To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen, "I worked for Ronald Reagan. I knew what Ronald Reagan stood for and did. And Mr. Vice President, you are no Ronald Reagan."

Evidently, as an act of desperation, the veep's faltering campaign has just unleashed $5 million worth of TV advertisements associating him with our greatest modern president. Voters are told that Mr. Gore "worked with President Reagan to modernize our ballistic-missile forces" — a variation on the line he used in his last debate with Texas governor George W. Bush.

Interestingly, that statement in Missouri was made shortly before the vice president misspoke — or as he is wont to do, lied — in saying that he was committed to "modernizing our strategic and tactical forces." In fact, the Clinton-Gore administration has no plans for modernizing our strategic nuclear forces, not our long-range bombers, not our missile submarines, not our land-based missile forces.

To the contrary, the administration has pledged, pursuant to its Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty — an accord that is so fatally flawed it was rejected last year by a majority of U.S. senators, causing Mr. Gore to say he will make its ratification his top foreign-policy priority — that it will never again modernize our nuclear arsenal.

The truth of the matter is that Al Gore helped President Reagan to modernize our ballistic-missile forces in approximately the way Al Capone helped J. Edgar Hoover enforce prohibition. The practical effect of then-representative Gore's "help" was that Mr. Reagan was able to get only half as many modern MX intercontinental ballistic missiles built as he believed were needed. In exchange for the president agreeing to gut this centerpiece of his strategic modernization program, Gore was supposed to deliver the votes in Congress for a new, single-warhead ICBM nicknamed the "Midgetman."

In the event, Al Gore did not live up to his end of this Faustian bargain. Not one Midgetman was ever deployed, despite the expenditure of many millions of dollars in research and development of his pet missile. Since the cash-strapped Air Force has not invested all the funds needed to maintain the 50 MX missiles that did get built (in the expectation that they will be retired when the START II arms-reduction treaty comes into force), the land-based component of the U.S. nuclear deterrent will rely for the foreseeable future on Minuteman III ICBMs first deployed some thirty years ago — missiles that will inevitably become more and more expensive and difficult to maintain over time.

The other "help" Al Gore gave Ronald Reagan was in euchring the president into arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union that had the effect of legitimating the "Evil Empire" and justifying political and financial efforts that the Kremlin needed to keep the USSR a going concern. As former ABC correspondent Bob Zelnick writes in his quite unflattering biography of the vice president, Gore: A Political Life:

The irony for Gore is that on nuclear arms control, the issue that turned him from a mildly interesting and promising Tennessee representative to one of his party's premier voices on national security, he was brilliantly, studiously, imaginatively, responsibly and valiantly wrong. To Gore, the nuclear issue was part of a relationship with the Soviet Union that had to be managed. To Reagan, it was part of a struggle that had to be won.

It is especially stunning that Mr. Gore would attempt to associate himself with President Reagan on strategic matters when there are few, if any, elected officials who have done more than Al Gore to oppose and impede Mr. Reagan's most important national-security legacy — his commitment to defend the American people against ballistic-missile attack.

Throughout his career in Congress and as the vice president, Mr. Gore has made clear his personal attachment to the twenty-eight-year-old Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. That accord prohibited the United States from having effective protection for its territory against missiles strikes.

In a particularly memorable rant on the Senate floor in 1991, then-Senator Gore tried to prevent the authorization of a deployment of a limited national missile defense by 1996 because it would violate the ABM Treaty. In so doing, he established that his passion for that accord is not merely ideological; it's genetic. He claimed his father, former Sen. Albert Gore Sr., had been its floor manager in 1972.

Later upon taking office in the executive branch in 1993, Al Gore was a prime-mover — together with his former colleague and Bill Clinton's first Secretary of Defense, Les Aspin — in formally eviscerating President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative. The SDI program was renamed the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization to reflect the new direction it would have under the Clinton-Gore team, i.e., focusing on defenses against shorter-range missiles, not those longer-range ones deemed capable of reaching the United States. It was, as the Soviets used to say, no accident, comrade that the former were not limited by the ABM Treaty (at least not until Messrs. Clinton and Gore started renegotiating it in such a way as to impose new constraints on even so-called "theater" missile defenses); the latter were effectively banned.

With such "help" from Al Gore, the United States continues to be absolutely defenseless against even a single missile that might be launched at our shores, whether by accident or by design. Unfortunately, as with the Midgetman, there is precious little to show for the redirection of our strategic defense program, either. The only U.S. missile defense system fielded during the eight years of the Clinton-Gore Administration is an upgraded version of the modified Patriot anti-aircraft weapon that first saw emergency service in Operation Desert Storm. All other programs have been stretched out, underfunded, stymied by arms control and/or political considerations or simply canceled outright.

In short, the reasons why Al Gore is no Ronald Reagan when it comes to strategic matters are among the most powerful reasons why Al Gore should not be his next successor in the Oval Office.