Just when you thought the US Presidential election could not become more depressing or the choices more dreary comes this new book to persuade you otherwise. Its premise is simple, though not simplistic: Al Gore is much worse than you thought.
Veteran journalists Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair make a compelling case against Vice President Gore. Known for muck-raking and left-wing reportage, these writers contend that Mr Gore is more than the average ambitious, say-anything-get-elected politician that Americans are accustomed to. He is in their book completely without principle, ethics or honesty. "Al Gore distills in his single person the disrepair of liberalism in America today, and almost every unalluring feature of the Democratic Party. He did not attain this distinction by accident but by sedulous study from the cradle forward," they write. "It's hard to find noble moments in Gore's political career."
The authors resist the tendency to write the kind of pop psychological profile that is passing for much political analysis of candidates these days. They do not ignore Mr Gore's privileged childhood as the well-to-do son of a US Senator. They attribute his tendency to exaggerate his accomplishments as an effort to please his often-absent parents ("He was always an easy child, he always wanted to please us," said his mother Pauline.) They find his consistent employment of family tragedy in political speeches to be unseemly and exploitative, such as the 1992 Democratic Convention speech in which he discussed his six-year-old son's serious injuries after being struck by a car, and the 1996 Democratic Convention speech in which he described in vivid and prolonged detail his sister's death from cancer.
The latter speech was a vehicle for Mr Gore to discuss smoking and the tobacco industry. But the authors point out that for seven years after his sister's death, Mr Gore continued to accept donations from the tobacco industry and continued accepting government subsidies for his own tobacco holdings in Tennessee. Confronted with the time lapse between his sister's death and his new-found resolve on the issue, Mr Gore said it had been a "process of growth".
On issue after issue, Mr Gore has altered his views to win whatever election he was facing. As a congressman from a conservative district, Mr Gore was a supporter of the National Rifle Association, voting against federal regulations for handguns and opposing all forms of abortion ("It is my deep personal conviction that abortion is wrong," he wrote to a constituent in 1984.) On gay rights: as a Senator, Mr Gore voted in favour of three anti-homosexual measures proposed by arch right-wing Senator Jesse Helms. He also voted for a Helms amendment in 1987 requiring HIV testing for immigrants, thus prohibiting HIV-positive people from settling in the US.
The authors contest even Mr Gore's reputation as an environmentalist. They cite his early role as an ardent defender of the Clinch River Breeder Reactor, a $3 billion nuclear reactor that was scheduled to produce weapons-grade plutonium in Tennessee. The battle over Clinch River stretched from the mid-1970s to 1983, when, amid growing concern about nuclear power, it went down to defeat in Congress.
This book is clearly aimed at the liberals and progressives who support Mr Gore out of a misguided sense that he is one of them. It presents its case effectively and, occasionally, with wit. What it does not do is give liberals an alternative for election day on November 7th. Several outspoken Hollywood figures, including the actor Alec Baldwin, have suggested recently, not entirely in jest, that they might leave the US if George W. Bush is elected president. After reading this book, they might want to start packing now.
Elaine Lafferty is a journalist with The Irish Times