Silicon Valley entrepreneur Ron K. Unz endorsed John McCain for the
Republican presidential nomination today, in an exclusive interview with
NR. "He's the candidate whose courage on such a wide range of issues can
carry the GOP to victory in November," said Unz, who was the mastermind
behind California's Proposition 227, passed by voters in 1998 to overhaul
bilingual education. Unz is currently sponsoring a campaign-finance
initiative.
The new biography of Vice President Gore by
Newsweek reporter Bill Turque
will probably be remembered mainly for its charge that Gore was something
of a pothead before he ran for Congress in 1976. This week,
Newsweek
finally ran an excerpt from "Inventing Al Gore," after delaying the item's
appearance last month. But its content had already saturated Washington:
credible allegations that Gore has inhaled many more times than the
handful of occasions he previously acknowledged.
Yet this makes up just a short section in an otherwise full biography;
Matthew Rees spills more ink on the topic in a recent Weekly Standard
article than Turque does in his entire book. Turque's pot-smoking story,
however, is emblematic of how the Washington press corps views Gore:
Liberal reporters approve of his politics, but they think he's a hopeless
liar.
Turque calls Gore "an unusually thoughtful politician who has been an
important, even prophetic voice on issues such as global warming, arms
control, and the changes wrought by the Information Age." He admires parts
of Gore's radical manifesto, Earth in the Balance (1992). "It's not every
public policy tome that draws on both Joseph Conrad and Saturday Night
Live to drive home its arguments, and Gore works hard to pump life into a
narrative that could have been as dry as the Aral Sea, which he visited,"
writes Turque (who also criticizes the text for its "overheated erudition"
and "alarmism," and even quotes Ronald Bailey's review for NR). And he
refers to Gore's using "the vice presidency as an outspoken pulpit for
racial and sexual tolerance," then approvingly cites Gore's praise of
Ellen DeGeneres for publicly announcing her lesbianism three years ago and
Gore's flamboyant rhetoric in defense of racial preferences.
But Turque also returns again and again to what he calls Gore's "games
with the truth." In fact, Gore comes off poorly in comparison to his boss:
"Where Clinton's lies have been those of self-protection and survival,
Gore's have by and large been ones of self-aggrandizement and
glorification." In other words, Clinton lies out of necessity, Gore out of
aspiration. This, writes Turque, is the "real paradox of Al Gore, a man
who at critical moments has proclaimed his independence and then retreated
from it, stood on principle and deferred it to political ambition."
