By ROGER FRANKLIN
NEW YORK - Like Al Gore or loathe him, anybody who has watched his progress across the public stage in recent years cannot help wondering if there are really two men from Tennessee.
The first is the more-or-less mainstream politician whose ambitions took him from the House of Representatives to the Senate, to the office of the Vice-President.
Along the way, he introduced his share of worthy legislation, kissed the requisite babies and kept a weather eye on the prevailing winds of public opinion.
The other Al Gore is the one who appears to inhabit the Vice-President's imagination, a man who has always been loyal, steadfast and true, never shrinking from the hard decisions and unpopular public positions.
So let's compare them - the real Al and his fabulist doppelganger - by contrasting words with facts.
Claim: That Gore learned his values from his father, a Senator whom his son says lost his seat for supporting Martin Luther King's crusade for civil rights.
Fact: Like most Southern Democrats at the time, Gore's father voted consistently to defend segregation. He once called King "a menace," supported arch-bigot Governor George Wallace, and was turfed out of office in 1972 for opposing the Vietnam War, not racial discrimination at home.
Claim: After watching his sister die of lung cancer, Gore renounced his ties to the same "Big Tobacco' that he now vilifies, stopped growing the weed on the family farm, and has been its most fervent enemy in Washington ever since.
Truth: As a congressman, he voted at least three times after his sister died to indemnify tobacco companies from lawsuits and continued cultivating the crop on his property for another seven years.
Claim: He went to Vietnam, where he recalls experiencing "the cold fear" of hunting the Viet Cong "in the leeches and sweat of the elephant grass."
Truth: Gore spent only six months in Vietnam, every day of it behind a typewriter in a United States Army public relations unit far from the front lines. He has never explained why he came home early while the sons of less prominent citizens did their full 12 months.
Claim: "I have always fought the National Rifle Association."
Fact: Until he became Bill Clinton's understudy, Gore enjoyed the NRA's unqualified endorsement. He even voted against a bill that aimed to stop Americans owning Thompson sub-machineguns.
Claim: "I have always supported a women's right to choose."
Fact: Gore was anti-abortion until the late 1980s. A fundraising letter he sent out in 1986 that decried "the taking of innocent human life" was, he now claims, "a misunderstanding."
Claim: His mother sang him to sleep as a baby by crooning Look for the Union Label - something he said was proof that he had been pro-union "all my life."
Fact: The song was not written until 1978.
It is true that some of those twisted truths and distortions are par for the course in politics.
After all, Ronald Reagan once claimed to have been liberating concentration camps when he was actually back in Hollywood making educational newsreels for the US Army about how unpleasant it can be to contract VD.
Nobody held those fibs against the Gipper, nor has Clinton's standing in the polls suffered for all the bare-faced lies he told about his fling with Monica Lewinsky.
In fact, if the reaction to the tall tales Gore uttered this week during the first debate - the spurious claim that his uncle was gassed in the Balkans during the First World War, to name but one - is any indication, then telling whoppers on the stump has become a virtue rather than a liability.
"Bush made a big mistake by launching a personal attack on Gore's credibility. The American people don't like negative campaigning," wrote Wall Street Journal commentator Albert Hunt as he dismissed George W. Bush's tongue-tied efforts to focus attention on Gore's distortions as worse than contemptible.
That is one way of looking at it.
Another reason might be that this country's citizens do not appreciate being reminded of the choice they will have to make next month: Should they mark their ballots for the fellow who cannot tell fact from fiction, or the guy who cannot quite put together a coherent sentence describing why the former is better than the latter?
Some choice, America. No wonder the pollsters' projections all say you will send few voters to the voting booths next month than ever before.
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