Ain't easy being green.

• Author: Allen, Jim
• Position: Letters - Al Gore Jr.

Stephanie Mencimer may be correct in her premise that Al Gore could be elected president in 2004 if he adopts an environmentalists platform ("Weather 'tis Nobler in the Mind," July/August), but she offers no reason to believe Gore would ever do so.

In thousands of hours of pounding pavement on behalf of a dozen Green candidates, including myself, I have never heard anyone coherently answer my perennial question: What has Gore done in public life to indicate that he has even read, let alone understood, Earth in the Balance?

On the contrary: He pledged, on behalf of his running mate in 1992, that the Clinton administration would block EPA licensing of the world's largest toxic waste incinerator, several hundred feet from the elementary school in East Liverpool, Ohio. That was one of the first promises President Clinton broke; the Democrats had accepted five-figure contributions from the incinerator's parent company. Now children in East Liverpool are contracting rare types of eyeball cancer.

It will take a lot of crass revisionism to obscure the fact that a vote for Gore is a vote for cancer; for inaction on the modest Kyoto Protocol; for dismissal of regional EPA heads who had the temerity to scrutinize pollution permits; for dutiful silence when Clinton broke his promise to veto the Gorton Amendment suspending environmental protection in our national forests; for a foreign policy fixated on underpriced oil; for socialization of private companies' radioactive waste (and the liability for it); and, above all, for the radical deregulation of trade in which G.H.W. Bush, Clinton, Dan Quayle, and Gore all colluded, empowering the World Trade Organization to prevent environmental protection altogether. Why should we now expect this guy to develop any credibility on environmental issues?

MIKE LIVINGSTON Takoma Park, Md. I shake my head whenever I see the media on the left deconstruct Al Gore's campaign. It seems as if they think that Gore was running in a vacuum. There was no consideration of the subtle positioning required of a Democrat in a resoundingly Republican media culture. Gore's reluctance to expose his environmental message to the media vultures was, as far as I was concerned, a matter of pragmatism. The mainstream media still had its claws out from the Clinton impeachment and was ready to dig into any liberal ideas. I felt that Gore was wise to protect his precious...