Where’s the Outrage?

ON a recent Tonight Show, Jay Leno opened with fulsome praise for the vice president, before noticing in mock surprise who was holding his cue cards. “It’s the man who invented the cue card, Al Gore. Wow. Nice to see you, sir,” Leno greeted his guest. Thus, Al Gore’s serial dishonesty was reduced to his pattern of making harmless boasts that he now pokes fun at in order to appear attractively self-deprecating. Previously, at the Los Angeles convention, Gore hoped to define the character issue down by portraying himself as a good family man, in contrast to Bill Clinton.

As the Bush campaign now recognizes, Gore was never a credible proxy for Bill Clinton’s manifest shortcomings, but the Bush campaign’s recent emphasis on issues doesn’t represent an abandonment of the character issue. Over the next several weeks, the campaign will be struggling with how to remind voters about Al Gore’s own fundamental dishonesty, without courting a backlash from those still uncommitted nonpartisans weary of “partisan attacks” and “name-calling.”