The second big presidential debate was like nothing so much as the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava in 1854. Instructed to seize the guns, the 600 rode suicidally in the wrong direction, and Al Gore did the same when he faced George Bush in Boston. The guns he seized were his own. He sacrificed his superior knowledge and experience on all aspects of policy. He fell over himself to assure the watching millions that he agreed with Bush on this and that. And when Bush laid himself open to charges of ignorance and hypocrisy, Gore spared him.
It was the most depressing spectacle and a disservice to the several million fence-sitters who will decide who will be the next president.
How did it come about? Everybody and the polls agreed the day after the first debate that Gore won easily. Then three things conspired to change the result, manifest in a sharp rise in the polls for Bush. First, instant replay. When it came to anything other than a vacuous generalisation in that first debate, Bush was open mouthed like a fish gasping for air. The trouble was Gore showed his contempt by rolling his eyes and shaking his head. In the week following, television replayed this image without illustrating the provocation. "Where were the man's manners?" became a staple of conversation, instead of focusing the question on Bush: "Where was the man's mind?"
Next, the Dick Cheney-Joe Lieberman encounter. The press and the Democrats had written off Cheney, but he scored big time. His directness and dry wit were much more convincing than the treacly lovefest Lieberman initiated with his friend "Dick". It was hailed as a gentleman's discourse but it had no virtue except that, for the Republicans, it blurred the differences.
And then, the Republican war room swung into action and scored a major success with a lazy press. Once again, caught in story mode syndrome, they pounded a drumbeat all week on the narrative line that Gore is a liar.
Gore's staff panicked. They made him watch a parody of his debating style from television's Saturday Night Live. They abjured him to avoid anecdotes where he might misstep. Gore would indeed have been well advised to make a small correction in his style towards deference, but he over-compensated. Unlike Bill Clinton, he is tone deaf to nuance. He did not merely control his facial reactions; he put his brain on ice. He grovelled. He was utterly out of character for two-thirds of the debate and it represented a sell-out to his convictions. There were cheers across the land when he woke from his sycophantic narcolepsy, but it was too late.
And now to the campaign on lying that so rattled the Democrats. The first thing to note is that the people calling Gore a liar are liars themselves. The Gore "lies" are not so much lies as irrelevant and inconsequential misremembering of circumstance. No, on one particular visit to a Texas forest fire he was not accompanied by the director, but by a deputy. But yes he did visit Texas disaster areas many times and that was the point.
The main attack by the Republican spin machine has proven false itself. Gore quoted a newspaper report about a girl who had to stand up because she had no desk at school. The school principal, embarrassed by the revelation, denied it and the credulous national media accepted that denial as evidence of a Gore fib without any further inquiries. In fact, as the Sarasota Herald Tribune has made clear, a dramatic budget cut has high school students going without desks for weeks. Good politics for the Republicans maybe, but lousy journalism.
The most sickening thing about the Republican fib factory is that while the moralisers have been regurgitating the propaganda, they have ignored really substantive lies by Bush. Forget amazing small errors like saying, with glee, that Texas would execute three men for a hate crime, when it's two men, and he is supposed to stand aloof pending appeals. There are examples of his mendacity - or his faculty for memory-loss and myth-making - that will affect people's lives. He said in the debate that he is in favour of hate-crime laws, but he has rejected them in Texas. He asserted that the percentage of people insured for health was going up in Texas but down nationally when both have risen. He described the Kyoto agreement on global warming as imposing controls only on the US, but it is multilateral. He says he is for clean air, but has given in to the polluters in his own state. He said he favours checks on guns bought at shows, but rejects the three-day waiting period that would enable them to be effective. He says he will pay for popular new programmes by using a quarter of the budget surplus, but his own budget shows he has allocated less than half that much.
Will the real Al Gore stand up before America sells itself short to the spinners?