Jeffrey St. Clair will be featured at a reading at
The Lucky Labrador Brewpub
(915 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 236-3555)
at 6 pm Sunday, Oct. 22,
sponsored by Larry Tuttle and the Center for Environmental
Equity.
For the PBS news show Frontline's in-depth investigation
of the pasts of Gore and Bush, including interviews with
childhood friends and former colleagues, check out www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/choice2000.
For the first time in decades, polls show that the presidential
beauty contest is a statistical toss-up. Many green-leaning
voters who were flirting with Ralph are deciding that maybe
Al isn't such a bad guy after all. Not Jeffrey St. Clair.
The Oregon City writer, a veteran of the Northwest's forest
wars, authors a nationally syndicated column with California-based
writer Alexander Cockburn for The Nation and other
left-leaning periodicals. In September, the duo released
a book, Al Gore: A User's Manual, a scathing portrait
of Gore's flirtation with the Christian Right and miscellaneous
corporate villainy.
St. Clair, who will read from the book next week in Portland,
talked with reporter Nick Budnick about why he thinks enviros
have nothing to gain from either major-party candidate.
Willamette Week: How do you reconcile Gore's
liberal image with the record you lay out?
Jeffrey St. Clair: Well, Gore was tutored on the rhetoric
of liberalism. His father, Al Sr., was one of FDR's lieutenants
in the building of the New Deal--basically an honorable
liberal Democrat. So Gore Jr. knows the rhetoric of liberalism.
That is his greatest political gift, to be able to perpetrate
almost with impunity a dual personality.
What's his real personality?
In his first campaign in 1976, Gore ran as a conservative
Democrat: tough on crime, "Let's get over Vietnam syndrome"....
He referred to homosexuals as "abnormal." Later, Gore and
Clinton built a slate of issues on crime, welfare reform,
immigration, cutting the budget. You can apply an almost
Freudian analysis to Gore's career. Brick by brick, he was
taking out the very foundation that his father helped build.
What's the story on welfare reform?
The Republicans didn't want Clinton to sign a welfare reform
bill because they wanted to use that against him in 1996.
Closing in on the '96 election, Dole and Gingrich pushed
through a bill that was almost identical to ones that had
been vetoed five times before. The White House commissioned
a study that said this is going to make millions of kids
go hungry. Clinton's top advisers said, "Mr. Clinton, you
are way up in the polls, veto it." Gore says, "No, the Democrats
may take control of the House, so this may be your last
chance to sign welfare reform." Clinton signed it.
Where's the record of Gore's not being an environmentalist?
Where is the record of Al Gore being an environmentalist?
His voting record in Congress was anemic: a 64-percent rating
by the League of Conservation Voters. Here in the Northwest,
under President Bush, we had an injunction on logging in
ancient forests that was handed down by a Reagan-appointed
judge in 1992. Within six months of getting elected, the
Clinton administration came in and demanded that environmentalists
relinquish the injunction. That was really the beginning
of the end, and the chain saws have been going ever since.
The first six months of the administration was one dizzying
reversal after another. I remember when Jay Hair, who was
CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, was asked, "How
do you describe this new relationship?" And Jay Hair said,
"Well, it's like date rape."
But isn't it better than what we'd get under a Republican
administration?
We've all heard the threats that the Republicans are going
to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska
for oil drilling. What we don't hear is that Clinton-Gore
already opened up the 24-million-acre National Petroleum
Reserve in Alaska for oil drilling, which had not been exploited
since 1917 when it was created. In 1994 Clinton and Gore
signed an executive order that overturned the ban on the
export of Alaskan crude oil. One of the big beneficiaries
of that was ARCO, which has contributed hundreds of thousands
of dollars to the Democrats; it now can export that Alaskan
oil to China, Japan, South Korea, the Far East. It's hypocrisy
for Gore to say, "I'm fighting for the little guy to keep
home heating oil prices low in the Midwest," when he's had
a big hand in overturning one of the fail-safe mechanisms
on oil prices. My friend David Brower [longtime director
of the Sierra Club] says that Clinton and Gore in eight
years have done more harm to the environment than Reagan
and Bush did in 12 years. It's not because they're more
to the right than Reagan and Bush, it's because when Clinton
and Gore were elected, the public interest groups swallowed
their pride and their principles for reasons of political
expediency.
How have we been hurt in Oregon?
Well, I don't think there's much chance of Gore losing
Oregon or Washington or winning the state of Idaho. So he
could take the principled stand on salmon policy. His federal
biologists and the EPA have told him the only solution to
saving these salmon runs is to breach the dams on the Snake
River. So Gore's response is, "We're going to put together
a salmon summit." The delay is going to spell extinction.
Isn't your book just a call to vote for Nader?
It's not a call to vote for Nader, but I think progressives
ought to vote for Nader. If you vote for Gore, you shouldn't
be suffering under any illusions about what this man stands
for. One vote for Nader is worth a hundred votes for Gore,
because if Nader gets 5 percent it's going to mean that
federal money's going to kick in to build the Green Party
as an effective force across the country.
If you had to cast a vote for either Gore or Bush, who
would you support?
My inclination would be to vote for Bush, for this reason:
It would energize the opposition.
If liberals heed your advice, they'll help Bush get
elected.
Al Gore has voted for the death penalty at every opportunity.
We're told you've got to vote for Gore because of Roe
vs. Wade--but he's got an 84-percent pro-life voting
record. You look at what it means to be a liberal or a progressive
and I think you'll find very few areas where Gore is on
your side.
What are those?
I don't know, you tell me. We looked for them, we really
did. One of our colleagues asked, "Can't you find anything
nice to say about Al Gore?" My response was, "Yeah, he doesn't
like golf."
We have young people marching in the streets risking
police violence, yet they don't bother to vote.
I think we fetishize the voting booth. I'm very excited
about the political activism of kids on campus. Look at
the work that's been done by anti-sweatshop groups. It really
is an almost global movement on their part. If you look
at the most exciting thing that's happened in the United
States in the last decade, it would have to be the uprising
in Seattle over the WTO, about these free-trade deals which
are sticking it down the throats of working people and the
environment and human rights. I think these kids know more
about street theater, about politics, about the way the
global economy works than I did at their age. I'm inspired
by that.
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