The Solomon Scandals A Washington newspaper novel by David Rothman

Oil-enriched pols vs. a green Al Gore: New York Times story unfair to ex-VP?

It’s alchemy. Take a middle-class or mod­er­ately wealthy politi­cian and send him or her to Wash­ing­ton long enough. Presto! Sud­denly his wealth may not be so mod­er­ate any­more, thanks to the right friends; and The Solomon Scan­dals is partly about the golden futures of cer­tain pub­lic ser­vants. The lat­est defense scan­dals may have arisen from this mind­set among insiders.

But some­times the press can be a lit­tle too hard on politi­cians or at least may employ dou­ble stan­dards. Such is the case with a New York Times story by John Broder, about Al Gore. Gore may in fact end up a clean-energy bil­lion­aire, given all the money he’s mak­ing off the green tech­nol­ogy he advo­cated while in the White House. Oddly, how­ever, the Broder story fails to men­tion pub­lic offi­cials with past, present and future ties to the oil indus­try, Bush cab­i­net mem­bers included.

I’d rather that more sep­a­ra­tion exist between pub­lic and pri­vate business—Broder was right to raise ques­tions. But mean­while, how about a lit­tle con­sis­tency, via a few para­graphs about oil–related con­flicts of inter­ests? At least, as Gore has noted, he is putting his money where his mouth is.

Photo to right: Gore with Sir David King, a sci­en­tist who has advised the British government.

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