As part of the Clinton administration's reinventing government initiative, Vice President Al Gore has issued a new "plain language" requirement calling for government documents to be written so as to be "more responsive, accessible and understandable." The new standard will require a massive rewrite of the existing body of federal regulations, and may also require drawing up a detailed specification for "plain language." The government may also lose many talented workers ordinarily accustomed to following their tenure after a few years with lucrative consultancies to help private firms interpret the sort of arcane language they authored.

Gore is, of course, the same plain language advocate whose tortuous obfuscations of questions concerning his fundraising practices are legendary, and who once explained the administration's withdrawal of Lani Guinier's nomination to head the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division thus: "The theories—the ideas she expressed about the equality of results within legislative bodies and with—by outcome, by decisions made by legislative bodies, ideas related to proportional voting as a general remedy, not in particular cases where the circumstances make that a feasible idea...." But to be fair, Gore was probably still coming up to speed on the subject, since it seemed clear that nobody in the administration had read her work in the first place.

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