Republicans say with some reason that the transcript of the Justice Department's interview of Al Gore regarding his 1996 fundraising shows a vice president who can shave a definition or split a hair almost as brilliantly as Bill Clinton. But what is really illuminating about the transcript is the vivid picture Gore paints of the sheer grind that is the modern politician's life, and of the quotidian steps by which a man can deal away his reputation.
Let's say you're standing in your kitchen in your hometown, a few days after Christmas of 1988. Your top aide calls from Washington and says, "Hey, boss, I just heard about a chance for you to get on a plane to Taiwan with a bunch of strangers who want you to make them feel good about the Democratic Party." You agree, without knowing anything about the group; you're in the business of agreeing to things like this.
Later, two of your hosts on that trip throw a fund-raiser for your Senate reelection campaign. They produce a measly $20,000. ("I remember thinking at the time that it was a little out of keeping with the high expectations I had for this dynamic new group chomping at the bit to be active participants in the political process," Gore told Robert J. Conrad, chief of the Justice Department's campaign finance task force, with a rare note of bitterness. He admitted to adding up "the many hours on the airplane to and from Los Angeles, and couldn't help but add in the many hours to and from Taiwan.")
One member of the Taiwan party, Maria Hsia, comes in and out of your life over the years, a face in that sea of faces into which you are always smiling. She gives money; you send her staff-written letters full of polite lies, adding "personal" notes in your own handwriting. ("This is the kind of routine overstatement that is quite common, both in PS's to letters of this sort, and in captions on pictures, et cetera," Gore told Conrad. " 'You're a great friend, thank you; you two are great friends, thank you; see you soon.' It's a typical expression from me in a context like this.")
Years later you will find yourself explaining to an endless series of questioners that in your world a "friend" isn't the same as a friend. Just as you'll end up explaining that a "finance-related event," at which you get together with these non-friend friends to stroke them and soften them up for more money pitches, isn't the same as a fundraiser. ("It was then and has for a long time been common practice to have meetings with people who are interested in various subjects, spend time with them, cultivate the relationship, show them the respect that the time signifies. . . .")
This is what you're used to, being "put" here and "sent" there, like a suitcase; you gave up years ago trying to string the hours of your days together into anything like the coherent days that normal people take for granted. ("If you look at my schedule . . . it may give you some indication of what it was like to go from one event to the other, day after day after day," Gore told Conrad. And: "[I]t was very common to trigger the initial impulse and then it's massaged and looked at and talked about and fit in with all the other thousand moving pieces and it shows up on the schedule and I pick it up. I pick up my schedule for that day and when I get to it, there it is, and it's either a pleasant surprise or an unpleasant surprise.")
These are just the facts of life: the arbitrary distinctions (you can call from this phone but not that phone); the thinly veiled quid pro quos (you can offer a cup of coffee in the Oval Office to someone who knows he will later be asked for $50,000, as long as you don't explicitly connect them); the surprises, pleasant and un-. Cognitive dissonance is such a familiar state of mind that you don't even notice it any more.
And then one day, the conveyor belt delivers you, at the behest of Maria Hsia, to the Hsi Lai Buddhist Temple in Hacienda Heights, Calif. By now your old pals from Taiwan have become so dynamic they are delivering large quantities of cash, including some from illegal foreign sources. You sort of know this event is a fundraiser, because after all the Democratic National Committee finance people arranged it, and they're all over the place. But you don't think much about it because you know that you pay people to worry about it for you, and to stay on the right side of the arbitrary distinctions that rule your life. And you're in the business of only-sort-of-knowing.
And suddenly you wake in a room full of shouting reporters, and then a room full of polite, gimlet-eyed lawyers, all of them bent on holding you personally responsible for every weary gesture; all of them happy to spend years taking apart your precious distinctions, one by one.
