Gore's Other Hand On Monday when militant environmentalists made a raid on the Knoxville headquarters of Vice President Al Gore, who aspires to be president, they cited among other offenses -- real, imagined, or exaggerated -- what they saw as Gore's hypocrisy on the issue of price-gouging at the oil pump. Gore was ill-equipped to be lecturing oil companies on the subject, the protesters said, in that both he and his family have benefitted from a long-term relationship with Occidental Petroleum, the monolith owned by the late Armand Hammer, a longtime friend of the Gore family. Gore's response has been that he owns no stock in the company but that his mother does, and that her stock is held in a blind trust. We do not wish to impugn the integrity of the vice president, but it does sometimes seem to us that he possesses all the waffling instincts of his political benefactor, President Clinton, without the high degree of charm that can redeem such patent equivocations. The oil-ownership issue recalls the troubling issue of Gore's longtime relationship with big tobacco companies -- to whom, as we learned, he sold beaucoup of the demon weed from the family's Carthage farm at a huge profit. This lucrative practice went on long after the death of his sister, whose death from lung cancer Gore made the emotional core of his 1996 vice-presidential acceptance address. We do not doubt Gore's good instincts, nor the soundness of many of his positions, but we also do not doubt that his left hand sometimes operates without the apparent knowledge of his right. The New York Times, perhaps unfairly, suggested the other day that in attacking the drug industry for its price-gouging, the vice president was merely positioning himself, rather than stating a true conviction. The fact is that sometimes the press tends to exaggerate Gore's exaggerations. A little more candor and a little less disingenuousness from the vice president would do him considerable good as the current presidential campaign develops. Conflicts Abounding The vice president is not alone in arousing public skepticism. The increasing incidence of conflicts of interests in public service has made disbelievers of us all. Locally, there is the example of mega-developer Rusty Hyneman, whose large campaign contributions just happened to coincide with the council majority's decision to repeal a zoning ordinance in Cordova. Particularly galling was the vote of Councilman Rickey Peete, whose home purchase Hyneman had enabled. Another instance is the murky involvement of State Senator John Ford in the day-care industry -- the same John Ford who did his best to gut day-care reform. As spelled out in this issue of the Flyer, there is the acceptance by businesswoman Franketta Guinn of a $125,000 grant from TVA, one which Guinn's ascension to the chairmanship of MLGW would seem to make untenable. There was the manifest interference with normal procedures practiced by the Barton Malow construction firm and its backers on the School Board. There are numerous other such breaches, to say the least. On the high side, they are increasingly drawing fire from the public (and, in the case of Peete and Ford, from investigatory agencies). Now that public consciousness of the conflict-of-interest problem has been aroused, it behooves the various public bodies involved to put their houses in order -- while they still have a chance to do so voluntarily.