got me a letter today. His name is Randy Ellis, he has a 15-year-old daughter named Kailey, who’s in Sarasota High School. Her science class was supposed to be for 24 students. She is the 36th student in that classroom, sent me a picture of her in the classroom. They can’t squeeze another desk in for her, so she has to stand during class.”
October 4, A.M. Tampa Bay, 970AM WFLA
TRUTH: Dan Kennedy, principal of Sarasota High School: “I think the facts that he was provided with were inaccurate ….

CLAIM: At Sept. 22 press conference, Gore says, “I’ve been a part of the discussions on the strategic reserve since the days when it was first established.”
TRUTH: President Ford established the Strategic Petroleum Reserves when he signed the Energy Policy and Conservation Act (EPCA) on December 22, 1975 — two years before Al Gore became a congressman.

CLAIM: Addressing a Teamsters meeting, Gore spoke of lullabies from his youth and sang, “Look for the union label.”
TRUTH: The song was written in 1975, when Gore was 27.

March 15, 2000; CNN
CLAIM: “What I did yesterday was to call on the Democratic National Committee—and they’ll comply with this—to not spend any of the so-called soft money on these issue ads unless and until the Republican Party does.”
TRUTH: “The Democratic National Committee announced a $25 million summer ad campaign, paid for with soft money. The Republicans, so far, have not bought ads with soft money for Bush.”

CLAIM: “Under Bush, Texas’ recidivism rate has increased by 25 percent.”
TRUTH: Nobody knows what has happened to the recidivism rate under Bush because those figures haven’t been published, due to extensive lag times in reporting. The most recent numbers are from 1994, according to the Texas Criminal Justice Policy Council.

CLAIM: Describing the Clinton administration plan outlined in the 1999 State of the Union address to have the federal government invest some of the budget surplus in the stock market: “We didn’t really propose it. We talked about the idea.”
TRUTH: Page 37 of the Clinton administration budget submitted to Congress in February: “The President also proposes to invest half of the transferred amounts in corporate equities.” From last year’s budget: “The administration proposes tapping the power of private financial markets to increase the resources to pay for future Social Security benefits.”

CLAIM: “It’s not fair to say, ‘Okay, after his sister died, he continued in the same relationship with the tobacco industry.’ I did not. I did not. I began to confront them forcefully. I don’t see the inconsistency there.”
TRUTH: The same month Gore’s sister died in 1984, he received a $1,000 speaking fee from U.S. Tobacco. The next year, he voted against cigarette and tobacco tax increases three times and favored a bill allowing major cigarette makers to purchase discounted tobacco. In the 1988 campaign, Gore bragged of his tobacco background: “I want you to know that with my own hands, all of my life, I put [tobacco] in the plant beds and transferred it. I’ve hoed it, I’ve dug in it, I’ve sprayed it, I’ve chopped it, I’ve shredded it, spiked it, put it in the barn, and stripped it and sold it”

CLAIM: “My family had grown tobacco. It was never actually grown on my farm, but it was on my father’s farm.”
TRUTH: Gore had already admitted growing tobacco on his own farm: “On my farm, we stopped growing tobacco some time after Nancy died” (Cox News Service, 4-26-99). Also, Gore received federal subsidies for growing tobacco on his farm (Wall Street Journal, 8-10-95).

CLAIM: Gore said he has “always, always, always” supported Roe v. Wade.
TRUTH: In 1977, Rep. Gore voted for the Hyde Amendment, which says that abortion “takes the life of an unborn child who is a living human being,” and that there is no constitutional right to abortion. He cast many other votes favorable to the pro-life cause and earned an 84 percent rating from the National Right to Life Committee.

CLAIM: “We had a huge event with 3,000 people at Ohio State University.”
TRUTH: “Officials at that rally said the room where it had taken place did not hold more than 1,200 people, and, given the area needed for the staging erected for the occasion, they estimated the crowd at 500,” reported the Times.

CLAIM: “We won in every single demographic category” in the New Hampshire primary.
TRUTH: Bill Bradley carried male voters and voters aged 18-29, according to exit polls.

CLAIM: “Why did you [Bill Bradley] vote against the disaster relief for Chris Peterson when he and thousands of other farmers here in Iowa needed it after those ’93 floods?”
TRUTH: Bradley voted for $4.8 billion in flood aid and opposed an amendment, also opposed by the Clinton White House until the last minute, to add $900 million in disaster compensation.

CLAIM: Gore has suggested that he contributed important lines to Hubert Humphrey’s acceptance speech at the 1968 Democratic convention. “Young Gore later often told the story . . . [A]s [he] sat in the convention hall and looked up at Humphrey in the spotlight, he thought he heard his own words coming back to him.”
TRUTH: When Gore’s supposed conduit to Humphrey denied the influence, Gore blamed his recollection on “Faulty memory. Faulty memory.”

CLAIM: “I live on a farm today. I have my heart in my own farm.”
TRUTH: Gore lives in the vice-presidential mansion at the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. After making this farm claim, Gore said: “Yes, I live in Washington, D.C., when I’m working there”!

CLAIM: “I helped to negotiate an agreement with the Internet service providers to put a parent-protection page up and give parents the ability to click on all the websites that their children have visited lately. That’ll put a lot of bargaining leverage in the hands of parents.”
TRUTH: Bartlett Cleland of the Internet Education Foundation, seven months earlier: “There was no Gore involvement. They hijacked this issue. He makes it sound like he led the project. I can’t imagine what he will invent tomorrow”

CLAIM: “I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. I had the first hearing on that issue.”
TRUTH: In October 1978, Gore did hold congressional hearings on Love Canal — which he apparently “found” two months after President Carter declared it a disaster area and the federal government offered to buy the homes.

CLAIM: “I was a home builder after I came back from Viet-nam. . . . I know a good bit about how to make money that way. . . . To build this country is a great thing.”
TRUTH: A Gore family corporation, Tanglewood Home­ builders, built nine houses between 1969 and 1973 on property once owned by Gore’s father. “I believe he [Al Gore Jr.] came by a time or two, but not too often,” Jewell Dillehay, the contractor for the development, told the Orange County Register on February 20, 1988.

CLAIM: “Unlike Senator Bradley, I was a co-sponsor of it.”
TRUTH: Gore and Russell Feingold never served together in the Senate. Gore later admitted to the Times that his comment “was a mistake . . . [W]hat I meant to say was that I supported that.”

CLAIM: “I was the author of that proposal [the Earned Income Tax Credit]. I wrote that, so I say [to Bill Bradley], Welcome aboard. That is something for which I have been the principal proponent for a long time.”
TRUTH: The original EITC law was enacted in 1975. Gore entered Congress in 1977.

CLAIM: “I carried an M-16. . . . I pulled my turn on the perimeter at night and walked through the elephant grass, and I was fired upon.” In 1988, Gore told the Washington Post: “I was shot at. . . . I spent most of my time in the field.”
TRUTH: Gore never faced direct enemy fire, although several times he may have arrived on the scene shortly after fighting was completed.

CLAIM: “I ask for your support, and your mandate if elected president, to send this treaty back to the Senate with your demand that they ratify it. I’ve worked on this for 20 years because, unless we get this one right, nothing else matters.”
TRUTH: Gore indeed “worked on” this matter for many years, but often in opposition to a test ban. During his presidential campaign in 1988, he criticized his Democratic primary opponents for “the very idea of having a complete ban on all flight-testing of missiles when we rely on deterrence for the survival of our civilization”

CLAIM: “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.”
TRUTH: The Internet is an outgrowth of a Pentagon program established in 1969. In the 1980s, Gore supported legislation considered favorable to the Internet’s development.

CLAIM: “The Republicans know theirs is the wrong agenda for African Americans. They don’t even want to count you in the census!”
TRUTH: Most Republicans opposed the Clinton administration’s plan to conduct the census by statistically sampling the population rather than actually trying to count everybody.

CLAIM: “I did not know that it was a fundraiser.”
TRUTH: A DNC memo prepared for Gore made plain that the event at Hsi Lai Temple in Hacienda Heights, Calif., was a fundraiser. A Secret Service document called it a fundraiser, Gore’s staff described the event as a fundraiser to reporters, and DNC chairman Don Fowler testified to the Senate that he knew “there was a fundraising aspect to this event.” Six weeks before attending the event, Gore met with temple master Hsing Yun at the White House with fundraisers Maria Hsia and John Huang. Later that day, Gore sent an e-mail saying that he couldn’t be in New York on April 28, 1996: “If we have already booked the fundraisers [in California], then we have to decline.”

CLAIM: “I reached out to individuals who are leaders on the [pro-life] side of this issue” to “make common cause” on reducing unwanted pregnancies. He went on to imply that Catholic pro-lifers’ opposition to birth control made it impossible for both sides join “together to make abortions rare.”
TRUTH: Despite many queries, no pro-life leader has ever said Gore approached him on this subject

CLAIM: Gore said his sister was “the very first volunteer for the Peace Corps.”
TRUTH: Nancy Gore Hunger was a paid employee at Peace Corps headquarters, 1961-64.

CLAIM: “I’m Al Gore. I grew up on a farm,” and “growing up in Carthage, Tennessee, I learned our bedrock values . . .”
TRUTH: Gore, the son of a senator, grew up primarily at the Fairfax Hotel in Washington, D.C., in a suite of rooms overlooking Embassy Row. He graduated from the ritzy St. Albans National Cathedral School, also in the capital.