1997 was rotten year for Al Gore

Will Veep Self-Destruct in 1998?

If President Clinton had a boffo 1997 with high ratings and low expectations, his designated heir apparent, Al Gore, had a disastrous year. It was so bad, it raises the question whether the Vice President might self-destruct in 1998.

From his Buddhist-temple fundraising fiasco to his romantic delusion he was the hero of the novel Love Story, his weird tobacco fairy tales, his nutty environmental extremism and his call for global humility to his defense of Hollywood perversion, Gore has traced a political course that has the whole country wondering.

Is he for real? Does he inhabit a make-believe world? Is he subject to flights of fancy?

Put bluntly, the record suggests Gore is one foot this side of the cliff. At best, he's flaky.

Do You Want This Man's Finger on Nuclear Button?

And that raises the biggest question of all: Would you want a man like Al Gore with his finger on the nuclear button?

The country thinks not. While Clinton's approval ratings are in the stratosphere reaching up to 60%, Gore's are in the cellar at 21%.

The Vice President-Rush Limbaugh calls him the "vice-perpetrator"-has muffed the job so badly that he faces a formidable task to win the Democratic presidential nomination in 2000.

Clinton is doing everything in his presidential power to anoint Gore his successor,

even to the extent of taking the country out on Gore's shaky environmental limb to try to give him some credibility.

It's not working-and House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt (D.-Mo.), Gore's chief rival for the party nomination, is looming larger.

Gore's problems are his questionable priorities, quirky judgment, strange lapses and his sorry record for telling the truth.

He has made the environment his hobby horse to ride into the White House in 2000. He was the first American politician to sound the alarm that the earth was threatened by global warming. He put it all down in his book, Earth in the Balance.

To this day, there is not one scintilla of scientific evidence that there is such a thing as global warming, much less that it endangers the earth's existence.

During the past 50 years, carbon-dioxide levels have risen in the atmosphere, but temperatures have in fact tended to go down. A large body of scientific opinion thus insists that global warming is a myth. Some say it does exist. Others are unsure.

But not Al Gore. He has staked everything-his name, position, career and ambition-on the pitch that unless we heed his wisdom, we're all at risk.

Projects Himself As Savior of Earth

He is projecting himself as the Savior of the earth.

He told the international global-warming conference in Japan last month, "We have reached a fundamentally new stage in the development of human civilization."

Reducing greenhouse gases, he said, must be humanity's first priority. "To do so requires humility, because the spiritual roots of our crisis are pridefulness and a failure to understand and respect our connections to God's earth and to each other," Gore said.

No wonder Gore is at 21%. This is gibberish, another example of his wacky Walter Mitty flights of imagination, unconnected to reality.

He claimed that if we didn't listen to him, the world would be inundated with "more record floods and droughts, diseases and pests, crop failures and famines."

Jack Kemp, the Republican vice-presidential candidate in 1996, exposed Gore's phony scare tactics. "If global warming is so important to Al Gore, why did he suggest that we meet no standards until [the year 2012] after he is even projected in his wildest dreams to leave office [as President] in 2008?" Kemp asked.

"I'm going to take him head-on on this issue and tell the American people the truth that they do not cause the warming of the earth."

Twenty years ago, the same alarmists were putting the fear of hell into the gullible, with mad claims that the earth was about to be overtaken by a new ice age. It was called global cooling.

Role Models for Hero And Heroine of Love Story

Gore's environmental hang-up springs from the same mental gymnastics that pictured himself and wife Tipper as the hero and heroine models for Erich Segal's weepy 1970 best-seller Love Story. When the author refuted the tale, Gore told Segal it was all a "misunderstanding."

This bizarre episode comes on top of Gore's muddy claims about his fundraiser with Buddhist nuns at the Hsi Lai Temple, his wavering untrue assertions about fundraising from the White House, his pathetic, lying yam about giving up tobacco funds after his sister died of lung cancer.

By mid-October, Gore was out in Hollywood praising the TV show "Ellen" for bringing its lesbian title character out of the closet. "When the character Ellen came out, millions of Americans were forced to look at sexual orientation in a more open light," Gore said.

George Stephanopoulos said the remark was "stupid" and Time magazine promptly labeled Gore a "loser."

Nobody can be sure what Gore is likely to do or say next. But one more gaffe, one more leap into the jumbled world of his mind, might be enough to wrap it up.