Gore Offers Up a Lesson in Upmanship

Talk about name-dropping, just listen to Al Gore:

“The other day I was talking to Otkir Sultonov. You know, the prime minister of Uzbekistan. And he asked me, ‘Did you send a birthday card to Hamed?’ That’s of course Hamed Karoui, the prime minister of Tunisia. I had just been talking about him with Ion Sturza, the prime minister of Moldova. We’re old friends. We actually met through a mutual friend, Lennart Meri, the president of Estonia, of course.”

That was the vice president’s tongue-in-cheek way of twitting George W. Bush, the governor of Texas. Bush had muffed a “pop quiz” posed last week by a reporter who sought the names of the leaders of Chechnya, Taiwan, India and Pakistan. The front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination could come up only with the last name of the president of Taiwan.

Gore launched into his riff at the top of an interview Tuesday on “Imus in the Morning,” carried on MSNBC and on radio. Host Don Imus, who regularly mocks the vice president on his show, did not even have time to pose his own foreign names proficiency quiz before the vice president was off and running, eager to offer his answers.

Gore, who every morning receives CIA briefings on global hot spots, said it was understandable that Bush might not know the names of the foreign leaders. But he found it more troubling that Bush had said that that Gen. Pervaiz Musharraf, who seized power in Pakistan in a coup, “is going to bring stability to the country and I think that’s good news for the subcontinent.”

Gore said, “I think that it is troubling that [Bush] doesn’t know that it’s important to stand up for democracy and that a military coup overthrowing democracy is not good news.”

In the interview last week, Bush had said: “The new Pakistani general, he’s just been elected--not elected, this guy took over office. It appears this guy is going to bring stability to the country and I think that’s good news for the subcontinent.”

In a later interview on Sunday, Bush explained his statement by saying, “I echoed the sentiments by the way of members of the Clinton administration. We’re optimistic that the current general, who had taken over Pakistan, was going to bring stability to the region.”

Bush’s poor performance in the pop quiz, for which he has drawn sympathy from voters who said they don’t know the answers either, has been the subject of late-night television comedy routines.

It also caught President Clinton’s eye on Friday. A reporter on Air Force One passed a note to Clinton teasingly posing a math problem pegged to a speech the president had just delivered and added: “PS, name the leader of Chechnya.”

Clinton wrote back his solution to the problem, and added this note: “I checked the calculation with the Chechnyan leader Aslan Maskhadov and he agrees.”