Captain Planet for veep

Al Gore is a family man, and he voted for Desert Storm. But his big contribution to the ticket is his environmentalism. Fortunately (for Republicans) it's all there in his book, Earth in the Balance.

JUDGE ME by my first decision," challenged Bill Clinton. He was speaking of his choice of running-mate, Al Gore. Let us indeed judge Mr. Clinton by this decision.

Pundits have rushed to label Clinton and Gore as "moderates"; Gore describes himself as a "raging moderate." However, looking at Gore's record in Congress leaves little doubt that George McGovern was right when he told the New York Times, "I have a hunch that they're much more liberal underneath and will prove it when they're elected."

Gore's 1990 Americans for Democratic Action rating of 78 per cent places him quite comfortably in the company of such notorious moderates as Howard Metzenbaum (78), George Mitchell (83), and Carl Levin (78). His lifetime record of 87 per cent support for AFL-CIO positions places him with Ted Kennedy (93), Alan Cranston (90), and Patrick Leahy (84). In addition, Gore has rarely seen a tax hike he didn't like. He has consistently opposed cutting the capital-gains tax, and in 1986 he voted in favor of creating a third tax rate of 35 per cent. Gore's National Tax-Limitation Committee rating of 15 per cent on tax issues is worse than Alan Cranston's and Daniel Inouye's 20 per cent, and equals Daniel Patrick Moynihan's and Patrick Leahy's records.

"I?hat dog won't hunt," as Bill Clinton might say of the claim that Gore is a moderate.

Gore's Fast-Track

THE SON of a U.S. senator, Gore has been on the political fast-track ever since he entered the House of Representatives at age 28. He ran successfully for the Senate in 1984, and made a fairly good showing in the Democratic presidential primaries in 1988. If the Democrats lose in November, he is perfectly positioned to garner his party's presidential nomination in 1996.

Dave Stockman wrote in 1979 that "At age thirty, Al is already a majorleague politician. Unfortunately, he inhales populist nostrums as naturally as he breathes. If there is one great service I can perform for the Republic it may be to teach Al Gore some basic economics before it is too late."

Evidently Stockman did not succeed. Gore has since consistently voted for increases in the federal minimum wage--although it is an economic fact that raising the minimum wage hurts the most vulnerable workers worst, those at the bottom of the pay scale and those trying to enter the workforce for the first time.

As a congressman in the late 1970s, Gore fiercely opposed the deregulation of the oil and natural-gas industries. Apparently buying into the dotty theory that oil companies had conspired to raise prices by as much as 300 per cent above their natural levels, Gore claimed Congress might have stumbled onto "the largest criminal conspiracy case in our history, involving billions of dollars, and it may be continuing to this day." He also argued that decontrolling oil prices would cost consumers billions of dollars and add to inflation in exchange for "benefits that are almost illusionary."

In fact, decontrol increased domestic production and helped bring about the collapse of the OPEC cartel, leading to much lower world oil prices by the mid 1980s. Similarly, the result of the deregulation of natural gas which Gore so strenuously opposed is that there is now a glut and prices have plummeted. It's particularly ironic that Gore now sees the burning of today's plentiful and cheap supplies of natural gas as a way to reduce smog in American cities and as part of the solution to the alleged global-warming crisis.

Many pundits, pointing to Gore's support of the Gulf War and the invasion of Panama, hailed Clinton's choice as a way to shore up his weak foreign-policy credentials. Gore himself seems to endorse this view: without so much as a blush, he hails the "political earthquake" that "topple[d] statues of Lenin... from Nicaragua to Angola to Ethiopia, until it brought down the Soviet Union itself." Gore forgets that he was missing in action during the last battles of the cold war: he regularly opposed aid to the Nicaraguan Contras and to the UNITA anti-Communists in Angola. The statues of Lenin didn't topple by themselves, and Gore did nothing to give them a shove.

Although Gore claims expertise in nuclear arms control, he supported the Nuclear Freeze campaign, which called for a moratorium on the testing and eventual deployment of nuclear weapons in Western Europe to counter the Soviet buildup. He consistently voted against President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, against the development of an anti-satellite capability to counter Soviet A-SAT efforts, and for cuts in the defense budget.

Gore's record on abortion is mixed. When he was in the House he consistently voted against federal funding of abortions, and in 1984 he even voted for an amendment defining a "person" under the Age Discrimination Act to include "unborn children from the moment of conception." After he became a senator, though, his position shifted; he wound up voting several times to permit the funding of abortions with government revenues in the District of Columbia.