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Al Gore, former Vice-President of the United States (1993-2001) and 2000 Democratic Party presidential nominee, has been the subject of some controversies.

Fund raising

Campaign finance

Gore was criticized for attending an event at the Buddhist Hsi Lai Temple in Hacienda Heights, California in 1996. He said he was unaware it was a fundrasing event, however in an interview in 1997 he said it was wrong for him to attend.

I did not know that it was a fund-raiser. I knew it was a political event, and I knew there were finance people that were going to be present, and so that alone should have told me, 'This is inappropriate and this is a mistake; don't do this.' And I take responsibility for that. It was a mistake — Gore on NBC's Today show, Jan. 24, 1997.

The temple was later implicated in a campaign donation laundering scheme. In that scheme, donations nominally from Buddhist nuns in lawful amounts had actually been donated by wealthy monastics and devotees.

Robert Conrad, Jr., then head of a Justice Department task force appointed by Attorney General Janet Reno to investigate the fund-raising controversies, called on Reno in Spring 2000 to appoint an independent counsel to look into the fund-raising practices of Vice President Gore. Reno eventually rejected the request.

Fundraising phone calls

After the 1996 election campaign, Charles Bierbauer and John Judis of the American Prospect magazine alleged that Gore had improperly used his White House office telephone to make fund-raising calls even though Gore paid for the calls using a private credit card. Under the Hatch Act, any use of government property for campaign purposes is forbidden.

In a press conference on 3 March 2003, Gore said: "If there had been a shred of doubt in my mind that anything I did was a violation of law, I assure you I would not have done that. And my counsel advises me, let me repeat, that there is no controlling legal authority that says that any of these activities violated any law." Charles Krauthammer, in an editorial piece for The Washington Post, wrote that Gore did not claim that what he did was legal, (Section 607 of Title 18 of the U.S. Criminal Code states there is to be no solicitation of campaign funds in federal government offices), but rather that Gore stated "There is no controlling legal authority that says this was in violation of law."

Misconceptions in the media

Influence on the Internet

Both as a Senator and Vice-President, Al Gore has been involved in the mainstreaming of the Internet since the 1970s (see Campbell-Kelly and Aspray, Computer: A History of the Information Machine, 1996:298). This involvement led to legislation during the late 1980s known informally as the 'Gore Bill'. It was passed, however, as the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991 on December 9 1991 and led to the NII or National Information Infrastructure which Gore referred to as the Information superhighway.

As a result of the publication of three articles in Wired News, Gore's 1999-03-09 interview on CNN's Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer became the subject of heavy satire. During this interview, Gore stated:

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.

Media reports surrounding this statement sometimes re-wrote it, stating that Gore claimed he "invented the internet". However, Gore received support from members of the computer industry, notably Internet pioneers Vint Cerf and Robert E. Kahn. Cerf and Kahn issued the following statement on 2000-09-28 in response to the controversy:

s the two people who designed the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the Internet work, we would like to acknowledge VP Gore's contributions as a Congressman, Senator and as Vice President. No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time.

Last year the Vice President made a straightforward statement on his role. He said: "During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet." We don't think, as some people have argued, that Gore intended to claim he "invented" the Internet. Moreover, there is no question in our minds that while serving as Senator, Gore's initiatives had a significant and beneficial effect on the still-evolving Internet. The fact of the matter is that Gore was talking about and promoting the Internet long before most people were listening. We feel it is timely to offer our perspective.

Gore, himself, poked fun at the controversy. In September 2000, as a guest on the The Late Show with David Letterman, he read a list of the "Top Ten Rejected Gore - Lieberman Campaign Slogans." Number nine on the list was: "Remember, America, I gave you the Internet, and I can take it away!"

Love Canal

On 30 November 1999 Gore described to a New Hampshire high school his reaction in the late 1970s to a letter from a student in Toone, Tennessee, complaining about her family's poisoned well: "I called for a congressional investigation and a hearing. I looked around the country for other sites like that. I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. Had the first hearing on that issue, and Toone, Tennessee — that was the one that you didn't hear of. But that was the one that started it all." While the Associated Press story that covered the speech printed the final quotation correctly, both the Washington Post and The Washington Times claimed that Gore had actually said: "I was the one that started it all".

The Post ran a correction a few days later, but the Times never did, and continued to run editorials denouncing Gore's "boasting" of having been "the whistle blower for discovering Love Canal." The Republican National Committee and several conservative commentators at the time furthered the claim that Gore was attempting to take credit for discovering the toxic waste problem at Love Canal. However, Gore's supporters have argued that the context of the speech should make it clear that what had initially sparked his interest in toxic waste issues was the Toone, Tennessee situation. The quotation has been repeated with ", and Toone, Tennessee — that was the one that you didn't hear of. But" replaced by an ellipsis (…), which subtly alters its meaning. In October 1978, Gore did hold congressional hearings on Love Canal — however it was two months after President Jimmy Carter declared it a disaster area and the federal government offered to buy the homes. After the hearings, Gore said, "We passed a major national law to clean up hazardous dump sites. And we had new efforts to stop the practices that ended up poisoning water around the country. We've still got work to do. But we made a huge difference. And it all happened because one high school student got involved."

Love Story

Gore was quoted in the New York Times December 14 1997 edition as saying " Segal had told some reporters in Tennessee that Love Story was based on him and Tipper." The Tennessean newspaper article indeed quoted Segal as saying that Love Story was based on both the Gores. Gore's quotation is therefore accurate since Gore was referring to what the Tennessean had erroneously reported. Although Segal said that the newspaper had misquoted him, and that his novel was not based on Gore's relationship with Tipper, Segal himself noted that the male lead in Love Story, Oliver Barrett IV, was in fact based on Al Gore, as well as his college roommate, actor Tommy Lee Jones.

Use of energy in home

In 2007, Gore came under criticism from the conservative think tank Tennessee Center for Policy Research. The organization issued a report which said that during August 2006 Gore burned through 22,619 kilowatt-hours at his house — more than twice the electricity in one month than an average American family uses in an entire year.

Drew Johnson, the president of the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, said in releasing the figures:

For someone in his position not to take steps to reduce his own energy consumption is disingenuous. As the spokesman of choice for the global warming movement, Al Gore has to be willing to walk (the) walk, not just talk the talk, when it comes to home energy use"

Response

There have been a number of responses to this claim. TIME stated that the Tennessee Center for Policy Research claimed to have gotten "its figures from Nashville Electric Service. But company spokeswoman Laurie Parker said the utility never got a request from the policy center and never gave it any information." TIME further quoted Kalee Kreider, a spokesperson for Gore, as saying that the source of the energy is green energy. WKRN-TV reported that the Gore family obtains their power from the Nashville Electric Service's "renewable energy initiative", The Green Power Switch program which depends upon "wind, solar, and methane gas." The Detroit Free Press further noted that "Gore purchased 108 blocks of 'green power' for each of the past three months, according to a summary of the bills. That’s a total of $432 a month Gore paid extra for solar or other renewable energy sources.The green power Gore purchased is equivalent to recycling 2.48 million aluminum cans or 286,092 pounds of newspaper, according to comparison figures on NES’s Web site." The figure of 108 blocks of green power per month corresponds to 16,200 kilowatt-hours of electricity per month, significantly lower than the figure of 22,619 kilowatt-hours cited by the Tennessee Center for Policy Research.

Keith Olbermann at MSNBC reported that the Gore home includes offices for both Gore and his wife and 'special security measures' making it unrepresentative of what the average US home consumes. Additionally, the green power purchased by the Gores increased the cost of their electricity by "$5,893, more than 50 percent, in order to minimize carbon pollution."

Kreider also suggested in TIME that the attacks on Gore's energy use were political in nature and stated: "Sometimes when people don't like the message, in this case that global warming is real, it's convenient to attack the messenger."

References

1. "Gore Admits Temple Fund-Raiser Was A 'Mistake'", CNN.com, Jan. 24, 1997
2. Fund-raising Investigation Discussion, NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, transcript, PBS, June 23, 2000, Retrieved: April 14, 2006
3. "Transcript". Election 2000. CNN. Retrieved 2006-11-17.
4. washintonpost.com: Gore's Meltdown
5. http://www.computerhistory.org/exhibits/internet_history/internet_history_90s.shtml
6. http://www.mit.edu/afs/net.mit.edu/dev/mit/jis/OldFiles/nrenbill.txt
7. http://www.ibiblio.org/nii/goremarks.html
8. http://sethf.com/gore/
9. http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,70773-0.html
10. http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/03/09/president.2000/transcript.gore
11. http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue5_10/wiggins/
12. http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200009/msg00052.html
13. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2000/09/14/politics/main233560.shtml
14. ^ http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/5920188/the_press_vs_al_gore/
15. http://www.dailyhowler.com/h120899_2.shtml
16. ^ http://www.bushwatch.com/goremarch.htm
17. http://www.dailyhowler.com/h052500_1.shtml
18. "Tennessee Center for Policy Research". tennesseepolicy.org. Retrieved 2007-02-27.
19. "Dept. of Revenue says conservative think tank 'not a legitimate group'". The City Paper. 2007-02-16. Retrieved 2007-02-27.
20. "Al Gore's Personal Energy Use Is His Own "Inconvenient Truth"". Tennessee Center for Policy Research. 2007-02-26. Retrieved 2007-02-27.
21. ^ "Critics question how green Gore really is". Detroit Free Press. 2007-02-27. Retrieved 2007-02-27.
22. ^ "Al Gore Draws Flak On Utility Bill". TIME. 2007-02-28. Retrieved 2007-02-27.
23. ^ "Green Power Switch®". Nashville Electric Service. Retrieved 2007-02-27. Cite error: The named reference "Green Power Switch®" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
24. "Controversy Surrounds Al Gore's Energy Use". WKRN-TV. 2007-02-27. Retrieved 2007-02-27.
25. "Media Matter Summary". Media Matters for America. 2007-03-01. Retrieved 2007-03-01.

External links

• Wash. Post reported "think tank's" charge against Gore, omitted its anti-environmental background - Media Matters for America
• An October 20, 2000 open letter from Ralph Nader to Environmentalists on the impact of Gore on the environment
• Al Gore and the Creation of the Internet
• World Net Daily
• The return of Al Gore
• Al Gore: An Inconvenient Truth
• Al Gore's convenient fiction
• 'Bull****': Gore and Other Administration Policy Makers Systematically Ignore Evidence of Corruption of Their 'Partners' - Chapter from U.S. House Report
• Gore, Retry, Fail:Why the "New" Al Gore can't get elected
• Gore isn't quite as green as he's led the world to believe
• Al Gore: The other Oil Candidate

• Al Gore