GORE'S TURN TO SQUIRM

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Al Gore looked last week like a man desperate to change the subject, not to mention the scenery. The Vice President announced more than $1 billion in welfare-to-work grants to states, stuffed four appearances into a day's swing through New Hampshire, and paid a call on his next-door neighbor, the British embassy, to sign its condolence book for Princess Diana. He also managed a hike in Montana's Glacier National Park to highlight a talk about global warming--or was that just the heat he was feeling as the yearlong Democratic campaign-finance scandal moved squarely to him?

It was bad enough that a Senate committee last week reprised the most embarrassing moment of Gore's political career, bringing forward three shaven-headed Buddhist nuns, wrapped in nutmeg-colored robes and blanket immunity, to recount how they were badgered into laundering campaign money when the Vice President visited their temple. More ominous are new revelations about the dialing-for-dollars effort that Gore mounted from his White House office in 1995 and 1996, which may turn out to be the misstep that lands the entire mess in the hands of an independent counsel. This would be the fifth to find work investigating various transgressions alleged against top Clinton Administration officials. The Justice Department last week began a formal, 30-day preliminary look to determine whether an outside prosecutor is warranted, threatening to make the campaign-finance scandal another wide-ranging, Whitewater-like saga.

But the most personal and lasting damage to Gore may come from the shifting, legalistic and often contradictory versions of events that he has offered in his own defense. Having built a Dudley Do-Right reputation for rectitude and fastidiousness, Gore now finds himself pleading ignorance, naivete and inattentiveness. The picture is so unflattering and inconsistent that it is difficult to tell which hurts his presidential hopes more: the prospect that his story doesn't hold up--or that it does.

Gore has had 16 months to get his facts straight but is still grasping for an acceptable explanation for his stumble into the Hsi Lai Temple in Southern California. First he understood the temple event to be "community outreach," and later he corrected his recollection to say he recognized it as having some in-reach too--calling it "finance related." Gore aides last week clumsily amended the official version yet again, saying Gore understood it to involve "donor maintenance," presumably the care and feeding of fat cats. Yet the aides also produced internal memos showing that many on the Vice President's staff believed it to be a fund raiser.

The Buddhist episode might have amounted to little more than a temple in a teapot were it not for the latest questions being raised about Gore's fund-raising phone calls. Newly unearthed records show that what he described in March as "a few occasions" actually totaled 10 phone-athons during which he reached 46 contributors and tried dozens more. Gore insists he did nothing illegal--although he'll never do it again--and until last week the Justice Department agreed.