The Racemonger: Gore at his worst.

Al Gore's mean streak is legendary-and it is never more in evidence than when the subject is race. He has called opponents of racial preferences (and this is just for starters) "hypocrites" and "modern apostles of apathy," who "call for the end of policies to promote equal opportunity." He claims that those who believe in color-blind justice "use their color blind the way duck hunters use their duck blind." Those who disagree with him on racial preferences and set-asides are not merely wrong-they are evil. Gore was not always such a hothead about race. In his 16 years in Congress, he did not champion affirmative action, even voting on three occasions to oppose the use of racial quotas in higher education. By his own admission, the civil-rights movement largely passed him by. In 1964-when some of us whom Gore now accuses of "trying to roll back equal opportunity" were marching-Gore's activities were limited to dinnertime quarrels with his dad, then a U.S. senator. Apparently the son's debating skills were no match against Gore Sr.'s desire to be reelected (in their southern state of Tennessee) that year. The senator not only voted against final passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but supported an 83-day Senate filibuster of the bill, which almost kept the legislation from being voted on at all.

Nonetheless, Gore Jr. now takes credit for persuading his father to support the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the 1968 fair-housing law. "My analysis is vulnerable to solipsism," Gore has said, as recounted by Washington Post reporters David Maraniss and Ellen Nakashima, "but I've actually at times thought that the renewed ferocity [that the elder Gore brought to later civil-rights debates] . . . may have been at least in a tiny part for me." Maybe. But the son, too, learned lessons from his father's civil-rights votes. Gore Sr. lost his 1970 reelection bid. "Later, when he reached Congress himself," Maraniss and Nakashima write, Gore Jr. "took pains not to repeat his father's mistake of getting too far in front of his constituents."

If Gore came late to an active role on civil-rights issues, he has made up for his early indifference in truculence. Following the Supreme Court's 1995 Adarand decision, a legal blow to racial preferences in federal contracting, and the passage of Proposition 209 in California, which banned racial preferences in education and government hiring and contracting, many observers believed that affirmative action was on the ropes. Even President Clinton acknowledged that this practice needed "mending"-though he never actually did any. But Gore took another approach. Rather than debate the merits of affirmative action, he took to demonizing those who oppose it.

I witnessed firsthand Gore's snarling. In December 1997, a few months after Clinton proposed a "national dialogue on race," the president invited a small group of conservatives to the White House to meet with him and the vice president for an informal discussion. While Clinton was respectful, even conciliatory, Gore was churlish throughout. Twice he told us, "I've disagreed with what I've heard here"-namely, arguments that government should treat everyone as an individual, neither discriminating nor preferring anyone because of skin color. But his only counter-argument was a straw man. "If you lived in a community that was 50 percent white, 50 percent black, . . . and the police force was 100 percent white," he asked, would the community be justified in "making affirmative-action efforts to open up a lot more positions on the police force for blacks?"

Of course, no such community exists in America today, as I politely told him. But this made no impression, and he launched into a tirade about racial prejudice. He spoke of a "vulnerability in human nature to prejudice" and argued that "evil lies coiled in the human soul." He further contended that "racial differences can serve as a trigger for unleashing hatred," citing the Japanese atrocities against the Chinese, the Hutu slaughter of Tutsis in Rwanda, and the conflict among ethnic and religious groups in the Balkans. Gore's implied message was as clear as it was appalling: Opposing racial preferences can lead to genocide.

Gore took up the same theme a month later, on Martin Luther King Day, speaking from the pulpit of the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. "What is racism?" Gore asked. "Is it merely a mistake in reasoning, an erroneous conclusion based on faulty logic, which, once corrected, can be banished from human society? Or is it something much deeper and more powerful, more threatening and more persistent?" For his answer, Gore invoked Biblical authority: "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us." He quoted a famous hymn: "Once to every man and nation / Comes the moment to decide / In the strife for truth and falsehood / For the good or evil side." Those who "pretend that . . . all we need [is] to establish a color-blind society," said Gore, have clearly chosen to be on the side of falsehood and evil. Lest his audience miss his point, Gore mocked, "We see through your color blind! Amazing grace also saved me! Was color-blind, but now I see!"

And it was not merely Al Gore but Jesus Christ himself, he suggested, who passes judgment on "people who willfully refuse to see the evidence before their eyes." Echoing Jesus, Gore preached: "Ye hypocrite, ye can discern the face of the sky and of the earth; how is it that you do not discern this time?"

But if, in Gore's Book of Judgment, those who oppose racial preferences will rot in hell, he is much more forgiving of demagogues and inciters such as Al Sharpton. When asked by journalist Jeff Greenfield during a Democratic-primary debate whether he would condemn Sharpton's message, Gore said he did "condemn the language that [Sharpton] used," but added that "in America we believe in redemption and the capacity of all of our people to transcend limitations . . ." Besides, he continued, "there is a racial divide in the way people in different races perceive certain events. I would not be so quick to completely dismiss what [Sharpton] has to say about some of these issues."

Would a President Gore bring the same religious fervor to his enforcement of racial and ethnic preferences that he has brought to debates on this issue? Or is he merely a poseur, hoping his fire-and-brimstone rhetoric will turn out a larger than usual black-Democrat vote on Election Day? Either way, Al Gore has attempted to widen, not narrow, the racial divide in America-which is about the worst thing there is to say about him.