THIRTEEN years ago this week, Sen. Joseph Biden ended his quest for the Democratic nomination for president after he was caught plagiarizing from the then-head of Britain’s Labor Party, Neil Kinnock.
Biden talked about how his working-class forbears had labored hard in the coal mines and then kicked off work to play football – but could not rise in society because “they didn’t have a platform on which to stand.” That was almost word for word what Kinnock had said, as was the bit on playing football after emerging from the mines. The scandal forced Biden to withdraw, his comb-over flapping from the shame.
Now Al Gore has pulled his own plagiarism stunt – stealing a detail from a House Democrat study on prescription drugs, then claiming it had happened in his own family. Or rather, to his family dog and his mother-in-law (supply your own Jewish joke here).
Usually, when Gore seeks to exploit his personal life for political reasons, he talks about injuries suffered by his blood relations – his son’s near-fatal 1989 car accident, his sister Nancy’s death from lung cancer.
Evidently, he has run out of blood-relative tragedies to exploit. Sucking up to seniors in Florida, expressing outrage at the fact that his mother-in-law, Margaret Ann Aitcheson, is taking the same arthritis medicine as his dog Shiloh – and that Shiloh’s medicine costs three times less.
Yesterday, The Post’s editorial page took the Gore story apart piece by piece. There’s still no evidence that either Mrs. Aitcheson or Shiloh actually takes the drug in question. The costs that Gore cited were lifted wholesale prices, not what’s paid at stores. And any price comparison is ludicrous unless you know the dosage.
But what’s really jaw-dropping about this latest manifestation of Gore’s dishonesty is the plagiarism. His campaign aides saw this detail in a House study and simply personalized it wholesale (pardon the pun) – making it seem as though the Gore family had a prescription-drug crisis just like the supposed prescription-drug crisis facing the rest of the country.
What drove Biden from the 1988 race was not merely that he had stolen a story from another person’s life. Rather, Biden’s forbears simply had not suffered the way Kinnock’s had: British coal miners long led lives of hardship almost unimaginable to Americans, even U.S. coal miners, in part because of England’s hidebound class structure. It was unseemly in the extreme for Biden to appropriate suffering unlike anything his own family had know.
The same is true of Gore and his tale. Even if it were true, he’d have no moral right to compare his own experiences with those who really are suffering under the burden of high prescription-drug costs.
Besides which, if he really needed to plagiarize something, couldn’t he have aimed a little higher – like, say, his supposedly favorite book, Stendhal’s “The Red and the Black”?
But I’m not sure I believe Gore ever read that, either. It’s one of the least-read great novels of our time, and, as David Frum points out, it was “President John F. Kennedy [who] named [it] to Time’s Hugh Sidey as one of his favorites nearly 40 years ago.”
In fact, I’m beginning to believe every word Gore says is a lie, including “a” and “the.” (Bonus points for you if you know which writer I plagiarized that quip from).E-mail: podhoretz@nypost.com