Gore Tale on Drug Costs Sparks Questions

After a week dominated by RATS, the presidential campaign is going to the dogs as Gore aides acknowledge the vice president has been fudging a key detail in his standard stump speeches.

ABCNEWS.com Sept. 19 — The Gore campaign is tangled up in arithmetic as it tries to explain how the vice president says his mother-in-law pays more for arthritis medicine than it costs to treat his dog with the same drug.

Reaching for a personal example to illustrate the breathtaking costs of some

prescription drugs, Gore has often told seniors that his mother-in-law pays nearly three times as much for Lodine, the same arthritis medicine used for his ailing dog, Shiloh.

Family Values?

On at least three occasions over the last two months — at an assisted living center in Eugene, Ore., a community college in Cincinnati, and at a forum with seniors in Tallahassee, Fla. — Gore has told audiences that it costs $180 a month to buy the drug for his wife Tipper’s mother, yet just $37.80 to buy it for his dog.

But the Boston Globe reported Monday that Gore, the master of many policy details, fudged some facts with this story. Gore aides acknowledged that the prices the vice president claimed his family was paying for the drug came from a congressional study — not from his family’s own bills.

Gore aides say his mother-in-law, Margaret Ann Aitcheson, and his black labrador retriever are indeed both taking the prescription drug Lodine. And they claim the disparity between the two prescriptions is “pretty close” to the 3-1 ratio the vice president cited.

But George W. Bush’s rival presidential campaign called the Globe report further evidence of a “troubling pattern of embellishing and exaggerating his plans and personal experiences.”

Turning the Tables

“That’s very troubling for the people of America,” Bush spokeswoman Karen Hughes said. “I for one know I want to be able to trust the credibility of the next president of the United States. And someone who’s willing to make up numbers about their mother in law and their dog and their prescription medicine, I think that’s alarming.”