Serious Question

13 Comments

1. 

   TarheelDem on June 28, 2011 at 1:05 pm

   Let’s be clear what Al Gore did relative to the internet.  He pushed for and got legislation that regulated the internet as a net-neutral public carrier.  If anything had come out other than that, the carriers (Verizon,  ATT, etc.) would have killed the goose that laid the golden egg before it ever got going.  And with the assault on net neutrality, there’s still the risk of that happening.

   Without Al Gore, services like eBay, Google, and others could have never gotten going.  And TimeWarner/AOL would be the most profitable internet network.

   It was the legal environment that Al Gore built, not the hardware or the software.  Folks knew that before the 2000 campaign started.

   • 

     BooMan on June 28, 2011 at 1:14 pm

     I’m not litigating the accuracy of Al Gore’s most famous exaggerations.  The point is that he had a habit of embellishing his role in things.  The internet thing took off because it was part of a pattern, not because it was a lie.  

     In any case, Stephanopoulos is at least trying to hold Bachmann accountable.  Good for him.

     I guess John Quincy Adams was a Founding Young Boy.  

     • 

       Bearpaw on June 28, 2011 at 1:45 pm

       “Al Gore’s most famous exaggerations” weren’t his exaggerations.

       Illustrating your point with a caricature distracts from your point.

       You’re essentially wondering whether the media will treat apples now like they treated oranges in 2000.  

       • 

         BooMan on June 28, 2011 at 7:34 pm

         Al Gore did not take the lead role in creating the Internet.  Al Gore did discover Love Canal by “look[ing] around the country.”  It was evacuated months before he held the first federal hearing about it.  And Al and Tipper were not the inspiration of the Love Story.  

         In all three cases, he overstated his case.  The Republicans and the media blew it all out proportion and tainted him as a liar.  That’s true.  But Al Gore liked to embellish his record in ways that were easy to parody.  It was probably his second greatest failing as a politician, after his famously wooden personality on the stump.  

         • 

           TarheelDem on June 28, 2011 at 8:22 pm

           From a 2007 Vanity Fair retrospective Going After Gore:

           The seeds of Gore’s caricature had been planted in 1997 when he, the presumptive candidate for 2000, made a passing comment about Erich Segal’s Love Story, over the course of a two-hour interview with Time’s Karen Tumulty and The New York Times’s Richard Berke, for profiles they were writing. Tumulty recounts today that, while casually reminiscing about his days at Harvard and his roommate, the future actor Tommy Lee Jones, Gore said, It’s funny–he and Tipper had been models for the couple in his friend Erich Segal’s Love Story, which was Jones’s first film. Tumulty followed up, “Love Story was based on you and Tipper?” Gore responded, “Well, that’s what Erich Segal told reporters down in Tennessee.”

           As it turned out, The Nashville Tennessean, the paper Gore was referring to, had said Gore was the model for the character of Oliver Barrett. But the paper made a small mistake. There was some Tommy Lee Jones thrown in, too. “The Tennessean reporter just exaggerated,” Segal has said. And Tipper was not the model for Jenny.

           In her story, Tumulty and co-author Eric Pooley treated the anecdote as an offhand comment. But political opinion writers at The New York Times, it seems, interpreted the remark as a calculated political move on Gore’s part. “It’s somewhat suspicious that Mr. Gore has chosen this moment to drop the news–unknown even to many close friends and aides,” wrote Times columnist Maureen Dowd. “Does he think, going into 2000, that this will give him a romantic glow, or a romantic afterglow?” Times columnist Frank Rich followed it up. “What’s bizarre,” he wrote, “if all too revealing … is not that he inflated his past but that he would think that being likened to the insufferable preppy Harvard hockey player Oliver Barrett 4th was something to brag about in the first place.”

           Tumulty says she was stunned at seeing Gore’s remark being turned into a “window onto his soul” in the pages of The New York Times and elsewhere: “I’m in the middle of this gigantic media frenzy. It had truly, truly been an offhanded comment by Gore. And it suddenly turns into this big thing that probably continues to dog him for the rest of the campaign.”

           And on Love Canal, here’s the story:

           On December 1, 1999, Connolly–and Seelye–misquoted Gore in a damning way. Their error was picked up elsewhere and repeated, and snowballed into a political nightmare. Gore was speaking to a group of students at Concord High School, in New Hampshire, about how young people could effect change. He described a letter he had received as a congressman in 1978 from a girl in Toone, Tennessee, about how her father and grandfather had gotten mysteriously ill. He had looked into the matter and found that the town was a toxic-waste site. He went on:

           “I looked around the country for other sites like that. I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. I had the first hearing on that issue and Toone, Tennessee. That was the one you didn’t hear of, but that was the one that started it all…. We passed a major national law to clean up hazardous dumpsites, and we had new efforts to stop the practices that ended up poisoning water around the country…. It all happened because one high-school student got involved.”

           Jill Hoffman, a high-school senior in the audience who was helping to film the event, says, “I remember thinking, I really, really like what he has to say.” But what Seelye and Connolly zeroed in on was Gore yet again claiming credit for something he didn’t do–“discovering” Love Canal (which was, in fact, discovered by the people who lived there). In addition to mischaracterizing his somewhat ambiguous statement, they misquoted him, claiming he said, “I was the one that started it all,” instead of “that was the one that started it all.” The next day, Seelye offered a friendlier account of Gore’s visit to the school. Connolly repeated the misquote.

           Connolly, in this case is Ceci Connolly.  Check out her general reputation for accuracy.  She’s of the Maureen Dowd school of journalism.

           And a Newt Gingrich quote from the article:

           Vinton Cerf, often called the father of the Internet, has claimed that the Internet would not be where it was without Gore’s leadership on the issue. Even former Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich has said that “Gore is the person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to an Internet.”

           In all three cases, the charges of Gore’s exaggerating were, well, exaggerated for effect in the midst of a campaign.

           When are you going to realize that you were had by the New York Times and Washington Post coverage of the Gore campaign?

           The conventional narrative about Jimmy Carter’s presidency and about Al Gore’s exaggerations have been shaped by folks not interested in accuracy.

           And Southern progressives suspect that the motive was to not have a successful Southern progressive in national politics when conservatives were trying to reverse history in the South.  That might be a bit of oversensitivity on our part though.  But the conservatives damn well have nearly succeeded.

     • 

       TarheelDem on June 28, 2011 at 3:35 pm

       He was reported to have a habit of embellishing his role in things.  And reported. And reported. And reported.

       And not the first Democratic politician or last to be handled this way in the press, just the one whose handling by the press had the most disastrous consequences.

2. 

   BooMan on June 28, 2011 at 1:24 pm

   Bachmann’s former chief-of-staff does not have good things to say about her.  

3. 

   Bearpaw on June 28, 2011 at 1:36 pm

   “Cuz, I know Gore was severely damaged by the press’s focus on his Intenet-building, Love Canal discovering, model for Love Story embellishment.”

   For all three of these examples (and others) most of the embellishment was tacked on by his political opponents and/or the media, who then proceeded to endlessly criticize Gore for what other people pretended that he said.

   For example, the storyline was that he claimed to have “invented the Internet”, when what he actually said was:

   During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country’s economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.

   According to Vint Cerf and others who were actually involved in the original creation of the Internet, what Gore really said was correct.  If it hadn’t been for Gore, it might not have happened and definitely wouldn’t have happened the way it did.

4. 

   RAM on June 28, 2011 at 1:50 pm

   It’s definitely IOKIYAR. Remember Hillary took a lot of flak from the MSM for her “under fire” gaff, and a bunch of other things she said. I doubt if Bachmann will get the same rough treatment because the press is abjectly afraid of the right wing.

   • 

     The Voice In The Wilderness on June 28, 2011 at 2:25 pm

     Not a gaff, but an outright lie. Anyone who has actually been under fire isn’t confused about being under fire. What actually happened, yes. It’s a mind-numbing experience. But being under fire versus not being under fire? No way is anyone unsure. You don’t forget it.

5. 

   utried on June 28, 2011 at 2:43 pm

   What bothered me about the MSM coverage of the Tale of Tuzla was how serious it was that Clinton said those things. It was a delusion and she kept upping the ante.
   Clinton has always done this.
   With Bachmann, there is so much making stuff up and lying that what she says doesn’t stand out and is almost acceptable.
   If a man had talked about the Tale of Tuzla, he would have been pounded.

6. 

   Ed J on June 28, 2011 at 4:03 pm

   of exaggeration:

   “Change you can believe in”.

   Fuckin’ A.

7. 

   hz on June 28, 2011 at 4:27 pm

   “Al Gore did have a bit of a problem with exaggeration, although I think it was blown out of proportion.”

   Dude.  These irony detectors are more expensive and sensitive than you might realize.  Take it easy on us out here, will ya?