Jonah Goldberg's Attempt to Rekindle the Media's Old Gore Narratives

In the last few weeks, Al Gore has enjoyed perhaps the most favorable press coverage of his entire career. Of course, that doesn't say a whole lot given how terribly he's been treated by the media in the past, most notably during the 2000 presidential campaign. As Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler has exhaustingly chronicled over the years, Gore was savaged in 1999-2000 not just by the right-wing media, which was to be expected, but by the so-called "liberal media," i.e., the major networks, the New York Times, the Washington Post, etc. For whatever reason, the Washington press corps really disliked Gore and never missed an opportunity to ridicule him. In their eagerness to do so, they would seize upon poorly-sourced stories about Gore fed to them by the right-wing media, or in many cases, they would just make stories up. This is how Gore gained a reputation as a serial exaggerator, the man who "invented the internet" and claimed that he was the inspiration for the lead character in Love Story. It didn't matter that none of these stories were true. What mattered was that they fit the narrative which the press had settled on; Al Gore was inauthentic, a phony, a serial exaggerator.

Even today, amidst unusually positive press coverage of Gore, these narratives lurk in the background, ready to emerge again should Gore decide to throw his hat into the ring.

Just this week, Jonah Goldberg did his best to keep these old narratives alive, writing perhaps the most inane and insubstantial column I have ever seen in a major newspaper. Jonah took issue with something Al Gore supposedly told Arianna Huffington at the Cannes Film Festival premiere of his new movie. Here's the quote:

"The first was when I was 15 years old and came here for the
summer to study the existentialists — Sartre, Camus…. We were
not allowed to speak anything but French!"

Jonah then pointed to a passage from one of Gore's biographies which claims that Gore spent that summer working on the family farm and notes that he received C's in French class in high school. Based on this remarkably thin gruel, Jonah implied in his column that Al Gore is once again being dishonest.

Of course, Jonah didn't bother to do any real research on this point. If he had, he'd have discovered that Debra Saunders' attack biography--The World According To Gore--corroborates Gore's claim. And if Jonah had bothered to contact Gore's spokesman for clarification, as Greg Sargent did, he'd have learned the same thing that Greg did: Al Gore worked on his family farm and studied in Cannes that particular summer.

Apparently taking these simple journalistic steps never occurred to Jonah, nor did the possibility that the two trivial claims he focused on were not mutually exclusive propositions.

Confronted with the facts, Jonah retreated somewhat, and now claims only that Al Gore exaggerated how long he spent in France. Instead of a whole summer, as he supposedly told Arianna, he really only spent a week or two.

First, as Ezra Klein points out, this whole thing is based on a truncated quote attributed to Gore by Arianna Huffington. Perhaps the quote isn't 100% accurate. Perhaps qualifying language has been taken out (notice the ellipses). Perhaps Gore simply misspoke. Or maybe, just maybe, Gore's memory of what happened 45 years ago isn't crystal clear. Jonah seems not have considered any of these possibilities.

And there's another possibility. People often simplify anecdotes so as not to bore their audience with meaningless details. I often tell people that I spent a summer backpacking through Europe, when, in reality, I was in Europe from April through June. But people don't care what the exact dates were or how long the trip was. Most probably don't even care that I went to Europe at all. I'm not trying to deceive people by saying that I spent the "summer" in Europe; I'm just distilling the anecdote down to its key elements, for everyone's sake.

In the quote at issue, Gore was merely noting, in a bit of meaningless smalltalk, that he'd been to Cannes before. I'm positive that no one he was talking to cared to know exactly how long his trip was, and Gore surely knew that.

But let's indulge Jonah. Let's assume that Gore intentionally exaggerated a trivial fact from his past. Ezra Klein addresses this well:

It's not that, as Jonah writes, I deny the possibility that Gore
"didn't exaggerate at all," it's that I deny the possibility that he
exaggerated at all relevantly. Jonah is holding Gore to a standard
of literalness he'd never deploy elsewhere, and he's doing so on
one of the best-read op-ed pages in the country. He objects to my
characterization of it as a smear, but when it walks like a duck,
quacks like a duck, etc. What else could be Jonah's motivation for
blowing up such a questionable offense into the foundation for his
weekly column?

Jonah's motivation is pretty clear. He's trying to breathe new life into the "Al Gore the Exaggerator" narrative. Sure, the alleged exaggeration he points to is both trivial and totally unsubstantiated, but Jonah knows that many of the stories the press ran with in 2000 were even more inane and groundless. By devoting his L.A. Times column to this story, Jonah has planted a seed. If Al Gore decides to run again, don't be surprised if you hear this story casually mentioned in newspaper columns and on cable news shows as evidence of Gore's tendency to exaggerate facts. It won't matter that the story was groundless. By that time, no one will even remember where the story came from.

Jonah, of course, knows exactly how this process works. Two years ago, during the 2004 campaign, he wrote the following in a post at The Corner:

Candidates only get one theme ascribed to them. For Gore it
was "he exaggerates and lies to make himself look good" or
something like that. It wasn't always fair, but it was no more
unfair than the "Bush is stupid and ignorant" theme.

In other words, Jonah knows damn well that the prevailing narrative about Gore isn't particularly fair or accurate. Yet he chose to devote an entire column and a number of follow up posts to reinforcing that narrative, and based on nothing but the most trivial and unsubstantiated of claims. If there's a better example of pure political hackery, I've never seen it.