To follow up, the Gore team unveiled a "Bush lite" link on its campaign Web site to, as the New York Post put it, "highlight Bush's misadventures with pronunciation." The DNC is running ads trying to make voters blame Gov. Bush for Houston's smog problem. Quite some chutzpah, given that air pollution standards are set by the federal government. Which means Houston's smog got so bad under whose watch? That's right: while Clinton and Gore were running America's environmental regulatory agencies, natch. The Bush campaign is pooh-poohing the new approach. "The American people," said a Bush spokesman, "would rather have a president who occasionally mispronounces a word than someone who makes up words and facts."
I agree. It's hard to see this new Gore campaign doing anything but backfiring. True, George W. Bush's "frat-boy quotient" runs a little high for my taste. But who would you rather see droning on your TV screen for the next four years: a good ol' Yale boy who mangles a word or two, or a spawn of Harvard who not only thinks he's better and smarter than everybody else but mistakes his high IQ for a license to lie and to slander and to bully, because after all, ordinary people won't catch him at it?
Ordinary people are a lot smarter, I'm betting, than Al Gore thinks.