Speaking of his humble upbringing in Tennessee prior to creating the Internet, Vice President Al Gore had this to say to the Des Moines Register:

I'll tell you something else [my father] taught me. He taught me how to clean out hog waste with a shovel and a hose. He taught me how to clear land with a double-bladed ax. He taught me how to plow a steep hillside with a team of mules. He taught me how to take up hay all day long in the hot sun.

Yes, he sure can shovel it. The Weekly Standard notes that even the poorest farmers have been using bulldozers and chainsaws to clear land since before Gore was born, and that only the most foolish among them would plow a steep hillside, thus allowing precious topsoil to wash away.

A profile of Gore in the New Yorker from a few years back revealed a much different facet to this complex man:

Gore was a son of politics, a child of Washington, where his father served for thirty-two years as a congressman and a senator. The family residence was an apartment in the elegant Fairfax Hotel, which was owned by a Gore cousin; young Al walked across the street every morning to the Cosmos Club, where a bus picked him up for the ride to Washington's most elite prep school, St. Albans, on the grounds of the Washington Cathedral.

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