Gore's embellishments persist, even in the spotlight

WASHINGTON - It has come to this: Al Gore says in a presidential debate that his uncle was gassed in World War I and then his campaign searches for records to back him up.

The campaign knows no claim by the Democratic candidate about his family or professional resume will be taken at face value. His occasional tendency to embellish has not stopped, even in the campaign spotlight.

His exaggerations, standing alone, are not earthshaking by anyone's serious estimation, although Republican operatives gleefully tally them up for public consumption, and GOP presidential nominee George W. Bush is starting to make an issue of them.

Gore said Thursday he considers such criticism a personal attack. When Bush has made a mistake, Gore said, he has not tried to portray it as ''evidence of some character flaw'' on the part of his rival.

Whether claiming to have been an inspiration for a ''Love Story'' character years ago or recently recalling the strains of a childhood song that wasn't written until he was grown, Gore has tended to go off track on peripheral things.

Does it matter? On that, opinion varies.

''When something happens once, you think about it as random,'' says Stanley Renshon, who is both a psychoanalyst and political scientist. ''When something happens twice, it's a trend. When something happens three and many more times thereafter, it's a pattern. And when an analyst sees a pattern like that, they want to know what accounts for it.

''Gore is a man who has really terrific, solid accomplishments. But he continually overstates the case on his own behalf.''

Robert S. Feldman, a social psychologist at the University of Massachusetts who researches lies, is not sure Gore's misstatements add up to much. The misfires are so easily verified that they don't seem like purposeful distortion, he said.

''Really good liars don't get caught,'' he said. ''Part of this phenomenon may just be a simple failure of memory. We remember things the way we want to remember them.''

Gore's exaggerations have placed him more centrally than warranted at the creation of the Internet, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the Love Canal toxic waste investigation, and as a champion of campaign finance legislation.

He wrongly claimed in Tuesday's debate to have accompanied federal emergency response chief James Lee Witt to Texas during a spate of wildfires.

But rather than making a grand point with that claim, he was returning some praise from Bush about how federal and state officials cooperatively handled the crisis.

Gore's personal embellishments come on top of more conventional misrepresentations made by both him and Bush - the policy distortions that crop up, or the ''real person'' anecdotes that do not stand under scrutiny.

Some voters are shrugging it all off.

''I don't think anybody considers it a huge problem - it just makes him look foolish,'' said Bonnie Shipley, 53, a Republican in Escondido, Calif.

''If he does it too often then I would worry,'' said Monica Oldenburg, 46, a Democrat in Cambridge, Minn. ''Not yet.''

Gore has mentioned the gassing of his late uncle, Reginald, for years. After the debate, his campaign contacted the National Archives seeking any World War I records in support of that.

The campaign ultimately relied on the uncle's 1959 newspaper obituary saying he had been treated for illness caused by being gassed as a soldier in France.

President Reagan was known for slip-ups, too. Although that usually meant muddling policy details, mispronouncing words or even forgetting what country he was visiting, Reagan sometimes created his own reality.

He claimed to have served as a photographer in the Army unit assigned to film Nazi death camps when he had apparently only seen such a film. And he derided a ''welfare queen'' for collecting $150,000 in fraudulent payments when the woman had gotten $8,000.

Renshon and Feldman both say Gore may have been influenced in veering from the straight and narrow.

''There have been some very obvious cases of people lying and not much happening to them,'' Feldman said. ''You don't need to look any further than President Clinton.

''When you have models like that, it really does create a climate where keeping to the absolute truth is not always necessary.''

Renshon said, ''Most people, when confronted, will do what Al Gore does - try to rationalize it away - 'I really didn't say that, didn't mean it.'

''The first step is to get them to see this is a real issue. People have real defenses against doing that.''