Mustering all the charm he could, Al Gore told this story last spring to a group of newspaper editors in Washington.
He was a rookie reporter working on the obituary desk at The Tennessean in Nashville when he took a phone call late one night. Dr. Trebla Erog, a famed Swedish gynecologist living in Carthage, Tenn., had died. Gore, whose own family hailed from Carthage, carefully scribbled down all the details of the doctor’s life: member of B’nai B’rith, member of Knights of Columbus, that sort of thing. He wrote up an obit for the paper.
As he was writing, his phone rang again. There was news of an unfathomable tragedy. Dr. Erog’s wife had collapsed at the sight of her husband’s body and died, right there at the funeral home. Gore gathered in the shocking details and wrote up the news of Dr. and Mrs. Erog’s sad and ironic demise.
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As he was writing this sensational story, the phone rang a third time. The Erog children, who were driving to Carthage for the wake, had been in a terrible car accident. All had died.
This news convinced Gore he had a story that was going to bring a tear to the eye of every morning reader of The Tennessean, and he wrote with passion and fury.
After he turned in his story, someone at The Tennessean asked him to figure out what Trebla Erog meant spelled backwards.
When I heard Gore tell this to the newspaper editors, I figured it was a funny little story meant to show the vice president had a decent sense of humor. But I’ve changed my mind after watching Al Gore for the last two weeks get deeper and deeper in the Democrats’ campaign fund-raising muck.
The death of Trebla Erog was the first public evidence that Al Gore is the most gullible man in America.
Arguably, being gullible is better than being a crook, so gullibility might be Gore’s best defense for the trouble he’s in.
Gore was the kind of person who trembled at the prospect of being anything less than fine and upstanding. We’re talking about the junior class treasurer at St. Alban’s Episcopal School for Boys, a young man who counted among his youthful transgressions the time he eavesdropped on a phone call between his father and President Kennedy.
So how do you figure that, after nearly 50 years on the straight-and-narrow, Al Gore decided to become a sharpie by funneling funny money through a cloister of nuns at a Buddhist Temple?
And that, when he was feeling really rowdy, he dialed up some Democratic fat cats from his phone in the White House, knowing full well that federal law required him to go across the street to do that sort of thing.
If you still think Gore’s just another political trickster who finally got caught, consider how bad he is at being bad.
President Clinton, now he’s very smooth at explaining his way out of things. But when Gore got caught making phone calls from the wrong place, he warbled something about there being “no controlling legal authority” to say he was wrong. When Clinton plays Eddie Haskell, Gore plays Robert Shapiro.
No, I think Gore fell in with the wrong crowd. Coming from St. Alban’s and Harvard, he didn’t have much experience with the wrong crowd until he got to the White House. That’s when he fell in with the crowd that rifles through FBI files, stashes away Hillary Rodham Clinton’s legal records and sells the Lincoln Bedroom.
It’s entirely possible that when the sharpies told the vice president they wanted him to go to California to shore up the Buddhist-nun vote, he believed them. He didn’t see the money game, or any of the other money games they were playing.
Now Gore is going to pay for his gullibility.
The things he is accused of doing are paltry, but he’s in trouble anyway. The Republicans have been bloodying him at the Senate campaign-finance hearings. U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno is leaning toward a special prosecutor to look into Gore’s fund-raising calls.
For Gore’s presidential hopes, that’s the biggest danger of all. A special prosecutor will have no deadline in the pursuit of the vice president. If Reno goes that route, Gore will spend the next few years with “under investigation” tagged to his name.
All because gullible Al fell in with the wrong crowd at the White House.
Maybe it’s better that the nation finds out now, so it has plenty of time before the 2000 election to gauge whether gullibility is a disqualifier for the White House.
It’s a consideration. Gore might not be a crook, but does the nation want to risk the embarrassment of having the president dash off a letter of condolence at first word of the death of the famed Russian gymnast, Sirob Nistley?