Another look at Gore

Vanity Fair has an in-depth article about how Gore got skewered by the media during the 2000 election. Many of his original detractors are taking a second look at how easily they joined the anti-Gore bandwagon, misconstruing his words and presenting him as a liar. In fact, Eric Segal did admit that Gore was the basis of the character Oliver Barrett in Love Story. And Gore sponsored a bill that led to the Information Superhighway (a term he coined), as verified by Vinton Cerf, father of the Internet. "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."" But these truths were presented as the mutterings of a delusional, egomaniacal mind.

How these deliberate misquotes were used to turn the public tide against Gore, making him look like a flake and liar, and possibly costing him the election, is stomach-turning, to say the least. At the time, even I was led to think that Gore was sort of an egomaniac. In retrospect, nearly everyone in the press got it wrong and now Americans are left to ponder a lot of "what if's", particularly "what if Gore had been president during 9/11?" Would we even be in this quagmire we call Iraq today?