The press was crammed into a small drugstore where Vice President Al Gore was about to let loose on the high cost of prescription drugs. Lining the pharmacy walls, appropriately enough for a then-ailing campaign, were an array of medicines for colds, insomnia and other maladies.
A strong element of stagecraft permeated the event. Gore emerged and walked over to two senior citizens who had been rounded up for the occasion. Pauline Arms, 76, carried a plastic bag full of medicine to demonstrate her monthly drug needs.
As Arms recounted her suffering, Gore nodded and said stiffly, “Mmmph. Isn’t that something?” As they were talking, Arms dropped her cane. Gore picked it up, asked if she wanted a chair. She said no.
The moment last November was awkward and strained. A more comfortable politician might have found this an easy performance–advocating more affordable drugs for senior citizens–but for Gore it seemed an artificial, almost painful display, despite his vow to cast off his encumbrances and run a relaxed, “rip-tootin’ ” campaign.
The scene suggested the challenge facing Gore as he seeks to take the final step into the Oval Office: Can he persuade the public that a dynamic, impassioned individual lurks beneath the facade of a man often seen as wooden, artificial or all too eager to win the presidency?
After years of self-deprecating jokes about his dullness, Gore is now striving to show that he is in fact impassioned and down to earth. After years of declaring himself a proud player in the Clinton administration, he is now seeking to distance himself from the president.
As if trying to meet some grand but never-defined expectation, Gore has taken to making overblown statements he then is forced to amend. He appeared to take credit for creating the Internet, for discovering the environmental problems at Love Canal, and even for influencing Hubert Humphrey’s acceptance speech at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
Gore’s plight is highlighted by the eulogy he gave at his father’s funeral two years ago. According to the story, Gore’s father, then a congressman, was making a speech when a group of listeners shoved through the crowd holding up a fiddle and demanding that he play.
The elder Gore loved fiddling but had always considered it unsuited for a public figure. On that night, however, as his son told the tale, the senior Gore made peace with himself. “He seizes the fiddle and unleashes his music, and then the crowd goes wild!” Gore said. “Once he was reconciled to who he really was, there was no turning back.”
It is easy to wonder whether the younger Gore is groping for a way to seize the fiddle, to bring the house down, to make the crowd go wild.
A front-page birth
From his first breaths, Al Gore’s air was infused with politics.
The morning after he was born in Washington, D.C., Nashville residents learned of his arrival on the front page of their newspaper. The Nashville Tennessean reported that then-Rep. Albert Gore, already the father of 10-year-old Nancy, had produced a son.
The elder Gore had called for such placement if such an event were to occur. “If I have a boy baby,” Gore was quoted as saying, “I don’t want the news buried in the inside of the paper. I want it on Page 1 where it belongs.”
His parents never tried to separate or shield Al junior from politics. Policymakers discussed global affairs at the Gore dinner table. An afternoon with dad could mean tagging along to a committee meeting.
Gore learned to listen quietly and sit up straight, to act the miniature gentleman. “He was the nicest little ol’ sweet boy,” said Mattie Lucy Payne, the housekeeper who cared for Al from the age of 5. “He never did sass back.”
Some found his extreme obedience odd. “He was almost too good,” said Gore’s high school religion teacher, John Davis. “When you were talking to him, you always had the feeling that you were playing tennis against a backboard. He would hit back with the precise amount of force and at exactly the angle you used.”
When Al was 6, the Knoxville News-Sentinel ran an article only a proud parent could find newsworthy. It told how young Al managed to persuade his father to buy him a toy bow-and-arrow, then returned from the shopping trip and told Pauline Gore, “Why, mama, I outtalked a senator.”
His parents obviously were pleased and amused–enough to tell the newspaper.
“There may be another Gore on the way toward the political pinnacle,” the article says.
Some of Gore’s friends insist his political aspirations did not take hold until adulthood, but others disagree. A high school classmate once sketched a cartoon of Gore as a statuelike figure peering into the future. “He was like a politician even then, conscious of what he said,” said another classmate, Bruce Rathbun.
Fitting in two worlds
Gore’s childhood was split between two worlds. In the winters, while his father served in Congress, the boy lived in the family suite in the Fairfax Hotel on Washington’s Embassy Row. In the summer, Gore returned to Tennessee and did chores on his father’s cattle farm near Carthage, Tenn.
That might have been disorienting for some children, but Gore managed to fit into both places. What emerged was the Gore that people now see along the campaign trail: a nondescript accent and a manner that offends few and blends in almost anywhere.
Even then, Gore was oddly competitive. “He had to do more than anybody else,” said his friend Edd Blair. “If he were hauling hay, he would move more than anybody else. If he were doing a foot race on the farm, he would want to go faster than everyone. I don’t know why.”
As a member of the class of 1965 at St. Albans, the elite Washington school for boys, Gore was surrounded by well-dressed, carefully trained students. Though shy and reserved, Gore was captain of the football team.
Classmate Reed Hundt, later chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, faced off against Gore every Thursday at debate club. “He’s a machine for learning and processing and wanting to do more,” Hundt said.
At his high school prom, Gore met Mary Elizabeth Aitcheson, nicknamed Tipper. She was someone else’s date. “We just had a few moments of conversation, but we hit it off,” Tipper Gore said later. They immediately started dating in earnest.
After high school, Gore enrolled at Harvard University. His last two years came at a time of turmoil at campuses across America, as students staged protests and occupied buildings to protest the Vietnam War.
By all accounts, Gore walked a middle road. He opposed the war but was not a radical protester. He did not register as a conscientious objector, but neither did he drop out to enlist.
Among Gore’s friends at Harvard were actor Tommy Lee Jones and Erich Segal, who later wrote “Love Story.” That was to prompt another of Gore’s claims–that he was the model for Oliver, the main character in “Love Story,” Segal’s hugely successful 1970 tear-jerker, while Tipper was the model for Oliver’s lover.
One afternoon as graduation neared, Gore called his friend Steve Armistead, saying he wanted to talk about two things: He was planning to marry Tipper, and he did not know what to do about Vietnam.
“He was worried that if he didn’t go, somebody else–someone we know from right here–would have to go in his place,” Armistead said.
Although Gore did not mention it, another concern lurked. If he avoided Vietnam, it might damage his father’s re-election bid, only a year away. For the first time in memory, Sen. Gore, who was being portrayed as out-of-touch with Tennesseans, seemed in danger of losing.
Service in Vietnam
After much agonizing, Gore enlisted. When he arrived at Bien Hoa, 30 miles from Saigon, it was not to serve on the front lines, but to work as a military journalist.
Gore’s non-combat assignment has become a subject of debate. At least one military leader has been quoted as saying it probably took political maneuvering to secure his relatively safe job. But if such maneuvering occurred, there is no indication Gore knew of it.
He served only six months in-country, though it was typical to spend a year. Gore has voiced suspicions that President Richard Nixon kept him out of Vietnam until the election to avoid a sympathy vote for his father, but there is little evidence for this.
One of Gore’s duties, writing press releases, did not necessitate leaving the base, where beer flowed freely and a basketball league generated the biggest excitement. But Gore also ventured into the field, requiring him to wear a flak jacket and carry a gun.
Back home, Tipper Gore showed John Seigenthaler, then editor of the Nashville Tennessean and a well-connected Democrat, one of her husband’s reports from Vietnam.
When Gore returned, Seigenthaler hired him, making the senator’s son one of a string of children of famous figures to work at the newspaper, from Robert Kennedy’s to Judge John Sirica’s.
Gore started by writing obituaries. His writing was straight-ahead, never flowery.
During five years at the paper, Gore’s biggest stories were investigative projects. His articles prompted the arrests of two Nashville metro councilmen.
After receiving a tip that a council member was seeking a bribe for a zoning change, Gore approached his editors, who in turn contacted the local prosecutor. In what would probably be an impermissible collaboration today, an informant was wired and sent to Councilman Morris Haddox’s drugstore to record the bribe deal–as Gore and police listened outside.
Haddox was arrested a few weeks later, but he pleaded not guilty based on entrapment and was acquitted. Haddox now has three Gore 2000 signs posted in his drugstore window. “We’re all good Democrats,” he said. “I forgave him.”
Former Councilman Jack Clariday was less understanding. After a series of Gore articles, Clariday was convicted of accepting a bribe and received a 3-year suspended sentence.
“I forgive everybody. I ain’t forgot,” said Clariday, standing in a plot of turnips at his home in Mt. Juliet, Tenn. “He wasn’t fair. He was running for office the whole time. My wife wouldn’t vote for him if he were the last man on Earth.”
Fantasy timeline
While at the newspaper, Gore explored other paths. He took classes at Vanderbilt’s graduate school of religion, though he quit before getting a degree. He also studied law at Vanderbilt.
Gore’s fellow reporters, though, suspected he was headed into politics all along. One day a group of them dreamed up a timeline for Gore’s future–when he would seek the House, the Senate and the White House.
Gore, as it turns out, is way ahead of even this fantasy timeline. “We had him running for president in the year 2008,” said Frank Sutherland, who was a reporter with Gore and now edits the Tennessean. “So I guess we had it wrong.”
Gore was furious when he got wind of the conversation. “He said, `I am not thinking about a political career. I don’t want people to start thinking I am just using this as a stepping stone,’ ” Sutherland said.
Yet in 1976, when Seigenthaler told Gore that Rep. Joe L. Evins was retiring, Gore resigned from the paper the next day and dropped out of law school, Seigenthaler said.
A few days later, Gore announced his plans on the courthouse steps of Carthage’s main square. He was 27. His first child, Karenna, skipped around his feet.
He was so nervous he threw up before the speech, said John Warnecke, a friend.
Lessons in dad’s defeat
As Gore began campaigning, he may well have reflected on a night six years earlier. In 1970, despite Gore’s decision to enlist, his father lost his Senate seat, ending a 32-year congressional career.
After his father’s concession speech, the younger Gore walked to the parking lot with his friends. “He was almost in tears,” Blair recalled. “He was upset that it had really had hurt his father, how much it had hurt Mr. Albert.”
Gore also learned a lesson. Setting out on his own in 1976, he campaigned almost maniacally, ensuring no one could ever say he was out of touch. He squeaked through the Democratic primary. In the general election, the Republicans did not even field a candidate.
Gore arrived in Washington clean-cut and eager at 28. Perhaps less awed than others, Gore pushed ahead, looking for ways to make his name in a system that usually required years of seniority to gain clout.
There was one open spot on the powerful Appropriations Committee; Gore saw no reason it should not be his. He buttonholed senior Democrats and enlisted his father to make calls on his behalf.
While toiling to secure a place in Congress, Gore worked doggedly to avoid his father’s mistake of losing touch with the folks back home. Virtually all congressmen hold town meetings, but Gore operated at an entirely different level, hosting more sessions than any lawmaker in Tennessee history–roughly 1,300 over his eight-year House tenure.
“He usually traveled alone in an old Dodge, with a secret radar detector under the hood so he wouldn’t get tickets but could keep to his meeting schedule,” recalled former Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.). “He was without aides, going face-to-face with voters all the time, in some of the largest and some of the tiniest communities you could think of.”
Gore’s colleagues marveled and sometimes grumbled at the young congressman’s instinct for issues that got his boyish face on television. Denied the coveted spot on the Appropriations Committee, he ended up on the Commerce and Science Committees instead, and promptly found a way to turn them into an unprecedented platform.
No one could say his issues lacked intellectual heft. Ever the student, Gore specialized in complicated, quasi-scientific subjects, from nuclear arms to global warming.
To this day, Gore’s approach to issues has a macho quality, as though he can wrestle them to the ground with pure intellectual muscle. He tries to read more papers, talk to more experts, and spend more hours on a subject than his colleagues.
Sometimes Gore overdoes the intellectual approach. Consider this quote from Gore’s 1992 book “Earth in the Balance”:
“In a modern version of the Cartesian denouement of a philosophical divorce between human beings and the earth, Deep Ecologists idealize a condition in which there is no connection between the two, but they arrive at their conclusion by means of a story that is curiously opposite to that of Descartes.”
Throughout his life, Gore has been called humorless, stiff, wooden. When he gives speeches, his posture perfect, his back erect, he sometimes sounds like a father reading to his toddler.
He now finds himself fighting to shed that image, which he himself helped perpetuate. As vice president, he started speeches with a self-deprecating one-liner: “How can you tell Al Gore in a room full of Secret Service agents? He’s the stiff one.” Or “Al Gore is so boring, his Secret Service code name is `Al Gore.’ “
Some friends insist Gore is warm and hilarious in private. Jack Williams, who knew Gore 25 years ago and said they smoked marijuana together, described him as “a riot.”
“He got silly, funny,” Williams said. “He’d be–well, you’d want him at your party.”
Others say Gore is in fact a serious person through and through, and they like him that way. “People keep trying to change him and say, `Be yourself, be yourself,’ ” said Warnecke. “But that is him. And what’s wrong with that?”
A nose for news
What most impressed Gore’s congressional colleagues was his ability to attract coverage for potentially esoteric issues. Many believe Gore’s reporting background helped him to know how to frame a “sexy” story.
Gore’s hearings on organ donations, featuring a little girl who needed a liver, won weeks of coverage. He gained a wide audience for an investigation of unsafe infant formula. He held hearings featuring people who lived near hazardous waste sites.
A quintessential Gore crusade involved an alleged conspiracy to overprice contact-lens solution. “It’s a small thing, but tens of thousands of people in Tennessee wear contact lenses,” said former Gore aide Roy Neel.
Some considered Gore a media hound. Brent Blackwelder, president of Friends of the Earth, said Gore was better at staging attention-grabbing hearings than shepherding an actual bill through Congress. “Gore was out front with the PR but unwilling to do the work,” Blackwelder said.
Many of Gore’s colleagues found him aloof, intense, formal. The friendships that Gore did form mostly started in the House gym, where he regularly played basketball.
Even at sports, Gore is rigorous and focused; he spent hours perfecting trick shots, including one that caromed off the wall and through the basket. That physical doggedness has continued throughout his life; he ran his first marathon at age 50 and climbed Washington’s Mt. Rainier last August with his son in terrible weather.
At first, Gore did not seize one big issue and make it his own. But in 1980, he was speaking at a Girls’ State convention in Tennessee and casually asked delegates how many expected a nuclear war in their lifetime. He was surprised to see a thicket of hands.
He gave himself a yearlong tutorial on arms control, reading books, talking to experts, plowing through sheaves of paper. And he emerged in 1982 with an intriguing idea–the Midgetman missile.
Unlike the usual huge missiles then in fashion, the Midgetman would have just one warhead, or explosive device, making it inefficient for the Soviets to attack them. The idea was not entirely new, but Gore pushed it with a scholarly persuasiveness, and the idea caught fire.
How much Gore actually affected U.S. policy is open to question, though a missile like a Midgetman was ultimately created. But he made himself an expert on arms control almost overnight, showing his ability to master a complex topic and make it his own.
First presidential run
Even so, it took a certain boldness to run for president at age 39, as Gore did in 1988.
According to former campaign workers, Gore calculated that in a Democratic field known as “the seven dwarfs,” no candidate was overwhelming. As the most conservative Democrat and the only Southerner, Gore figured he had a lock on moderate voters.
His strategy was simple. Gore ignored Iowa and hoped to capture the bulk of the South on “Super Tuesday” March 8, propelling him to the nomination. But he did not foresee the impact of Jesse Jackson, who like Gore won five states on Super Tuesday, depriving Gore of momentum.
Increasingly desperate as the decisive New York primary approached, Gore’s brutally competitive side emerged. He became known as “Al the Knife.” During this campaign Gore unearthed Willie Horton, the Massachusetts inmate who committed rape while on furlough, an issue Republicans later used against Michael Dukakis, the eventual Democratic nominee.
Gore came in a distant third in New York, forcing him out of the race.
That race, flawed as it was, set the stage for Bill Clinton to choose Gore as his running mate because it made Gore a national figure. But before that happened, tragedy intervened, revealing another side of Gore.
On April 3, 1989, Gore and his son Albert were leaving a Baltimore Orioles baseball game when a car struck the 6-year-old, who was thrown 30 feet in the air as his horrified father looked on.
Gore spent weeks in the hospital at Albert’s bedside as the boy slowly recovered. As Gore tells it, his son’s accident was a life-changing event. “It shook me to my core and made me re-evaluate my priorities,” Gore said recently.
That life change has become part of Gore’s campaign biography. Yet his life, outwardly at least, has changed little: He stayed in politics and his schedule is demanding as ever, though Tipper Gore said he never misses his son’s football games.
The book he wrote as his son was recovering, “Earth in the Balance,” comes across as the anguished cry of a politician re-examining his life.
It harshly condemns Western civilization. “The ferocity of its assault on the Earth is breathtaking, and the horrific consequences are occurring so quickly as to defy our capacity to recognize them,” Gore wrote.
He added, “Our civilization must be considered in some basic way dysfunctional.”
The book was a best seller, but politically it left Gore open to the charge of being hostile to the American way of life. In a recent interview, Gore declined to back off. “I stand by every word in the book,” he said.
Public traumas
The book points up a little-remarked part of Gore. His supporters call it spiritual; to his adversaries, it is just odd.
This side of Gore came to light several months ago when Time magazine revealed that Gore had hired feminist Naomi Wolf, who reportedly advised him to discard his blue suits in favor of “earth tones” and advised him how to be more of an “alpha male” or dominant figure.
The somewhat hippielike quality also emerged early in Gore’s vice presidency, when he held private seminars with leading thinkers on such topics as “life as a metaphor.”
Gore underscores this image by making public displays of traumas that others might keep private. Gore spoke emotionally of his son’s near death, for example, at the 1992 Democratic Convention.
Four years later, he attacked the tobacco industry by speaking emotionally of his sister Nancy’s death from lung cancer. Yet during his 1988 presidential run, he had spoken proudly of working with tobacco on the family farm.
In 1998, he delivered a moving eulogy to his father–then posted it on his Web site.
By the summer of 1992, Clinton, then the governor of Arkansas, had wrapped up the Democratic nomination and was interviewing possible running mates.
Gore was an unlikely prospect. Clinton and Gore were similar–young, brainy, Southern moderates–and traditional politics dictated choosing someone different to broaden the ticket’s appeal. But Gore’s 1988 race had made him a national figure, and the two met one night at 11:30 p.m.
They hit it off beyond either’s expectation. “I think he found an intellectual soulmate,” said Mark Gearan, a then-Clinton aide who was in an adjacent room.
The relationship solidified following the announcement, as Clinton’s approval rating shot up 9 percent in some polls following the Gore selection.
Clinton clearly considered Gore a peer, and that proved crucial when the temperamental young governor entered the Oval Office.
“When Clinton became president all of our relationships with him changed,” said Dee Dee Myers, Clinton’s former press secretary. “He’d been a governor and he was an informal person. When he became president, his only peer was Gore. Gore could say things that no one else could.”
Influential VP
Gore’s influence in the Clinton administration was enormous; it is almost as though he held a different job from other vice presidents.
Clinton told his Cabinet members at their first meeting that whatever Gore said they should regard as coming from the president, and it has essentially worked that way. Clinton has consulted the vice president frequently, asking staffers when faced with a perplexing problem, “What does Al think?”
The friendship has not been one way. After a particularly difficult press conference in 1997, Gore headed back to his office. “As we were walking past the Oval Office, the president came out, put his arm around Gore and ushered him into the Oval Office to buck him up,” said Lorraine Voles, Gore’s former communications director. “They have a real relationship.”
Gore’s first tasks for Clinton were not flashy. When Clinton struggled to win approval for the North American Free Trade Agreement, Gore offered to debate its most vocal critic, Ross Perot, on CNN’s “Larry King Live.” Many White House staffers were opposed, believing the fast-talking Texan would demolish the wooden Gore.
But as is his custom, Gore prepared intensely. During the debate he launched a disciplined, sometimes personal attack on Perot and appeared in complete control of the facts. Support for NAFTA rose, and Congress narrowly approved the treaty.
If there were a task more thankless than NAFTA, it was “Reinventing Government,” Clinton’s grand promise to streamline the bureaucracy. It was central to Clinton’s image as a different kind of Democrat–but was also a potential quagmire. Clinton handed it to Gore.
The vice president dived in, producing within a year a report containing 384 recommendations. He even tried to add pizzazz to the subject, appearing on CBS’ “Late Show with David Letterman” and smashing an ashtray with a hammer, mocking the government’s ashtray safety standards.
Reviews of “Reinventing Government” are mixed, but it set the pattern for Gore’s role in the Clinton presidency: He took on huge, complex projects, allowing Clinton to focus on splashier issues.
For better or worse, Gore has apparently redefined the vice presidency, something he could do only because of his relationship with Clinton. The Constitution gives the vice president no power other than presiding over the Senate and breaking tie votes.
“He has taken the vice presidency to a new plateau, but he has also paid a price for it,” said Paul Light, an expert on the vice presidency, referring to Gore’s close association with Clinton.
After four years, Gore was something of a star in the Clinton administration. He was seen as dull, perhaps, but also solid and accomplished. Gore provided a straight-arrow counterweight to Clinton’s sloppiness, his tendency to waffle on issues and cut ethical corners.
Fundraising and Lewinsky
All that changed starting in the second term, as two all-engulfing scandals–one of Gore’s own making and one of the president’s–dramatically knocked Gore off his pedestal. It was the first time Gore had been accused of wrongdoing, and it seriously damaged him.
As the 1996 elections approached, Democrats felt enormous pressure to raise money, and Gore was determined to do his part. His competitiveness kicked in.
Twice Gore went too far, as he now admits. In April 1996, Gore attended a fundraiser at a California Buddhist temple. It was improper for a tax-exempt organization to hold such a partisan event; also, donations apparently were improperly channeled through the temple’s monks and nuns.
On several other occasions, Gore called donors from his White House office, despite a law prohibiting political fundraising in government buildings.
What disturbed some Gore allies was not merely that his fundraising was heavy-handed and may have gone too far, it was that–as in his 1988 presidential campaign–Gore seemed incapable of cutting his losses and graciously moving on.
Gore suggested the Buddhist temple event was not actually a fundraiser, saying it was a “community outreach” or “donor maintenance” event. He also said he had not been aware of the nature of the event.
As for the White House phone calls, Gore declared that “no controlling legal authority” forbade the phone calls. In his tortured 1997 news conference, he repeated that defense five times.
Just as the campaign finance uproar faded, the Clinton White House was hit with another scandal: The president was accused of having an affair with a White House intern and lying about it under oath.
Gore reacted to the Monica Lewinsky matter by defending Clinton at full volume, sometimes in oddly raucous appearances around the country.
In a January 1998 appearance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Gore seemed to startle even the president, who was there, with his vehemence as he shouted, “He is the president of the country! He is also my friend! And I want to ask you now, every single one of you, to join me in supporting him!”
A few months later, Clinton reversed his earlier denials and acknowledged the affair to a federal grand jury. It was now beyond dispute that Clinton had lied to Gore and endangered Gore’s presidential dreams. But the vice president remained loyal.
He called Clinton’s actions “indefensible,” but at the same time described the president in grandiose terms, telling a gathering of Democrats at the White House that Clinton would be remembered as “one of our greatest presidents.”
Asked recently what bothered him most about the Lewinsky episode, Gore laughed uproariously. “You want to make that multiple choice?” he said. “Is there a list? Or is this free-form association?” Then he turned serious, saying, “I don’t want to dwell on it.”
As for the potential impact on his candidacy of his closeness to Clinton, Gore also demurred. “My guess is that in the final analysis, people will make a comparative judgment as between the candidates,” he said.
A `messed-up’ campaign
Gore began the 2000 campaign as the odds-on favorite. His candidacy scared off a host of potential rivals, from Jackson to House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.).
Gore at first acted as if he meticulously checked the right boxes, the job would be his. He built a national organization, doled out favors, hired top consultants, summoned experienced advisers.
But former Sen. Bill Bradley’s unexpectedly strong showing, especially in New Hampshire, forced a change in strategy.
“I think I was sort of running for a promotion from vice president to president,” Gore said recently. “In response to questions or issues, without even realizing the extent to which I was doing it, I was taking a split second to do an internal vet of whether or not my answer was going to move the administration’s ball down the field.”
The way Gore tells it, he suddenly realized that was not working, and that he needed to start over, telling voters simply why they should vote for him. “It was at that point that I finally was able to see how messed up my campaign was,” Gore said.
Gore moved his campaign from Washington to Nashville in early October. He began campaigning much more energetically, sometimes frantically. At the same time, he shifted to a jarringly belligerent mode, especially toward Bradley, echoing a ruthless quality from earlier in his career.
And while some say he is doing better, Gore is still plagued by a perception of stiffness and artificiality.
Tipper Gore said Gore’s stiffness is only a matter of image, that he is far from wooden at home. He plays basketball and shoots pool with his daughters, she said. He plays harmonica along with other family members who play instruments. “When we have enough people to play the instruments, we just jam,” said Tipper, who plays the drums.
If Gore is to break through and connect with voters, it seems he must convey a clearer sense of who he is–he must seize the fiddle, as he described his father doing so long ago. He must shed, perhaps for the first time, the image of someone trying too hard to be perfect, determined to get an “A” at all costs.
All of Gore’s life has prepared him for where he is today, with the presidency within his grasp. But all that preparation may also be his greatest obstacle in taking advantage of it.
“As the son of a prominent politician, maybe he always felt he was being watched,” Myers said. “The private Gore, who is funny and seems like kind of a normal guy, is a long way from the guy who seems to be trying too hard and sanding off the edges.
“You can see him going through all the traps in his head–`Will I be OK with labor if I say this? Will I be OK with the environmentalists if I say this? Will I be OK with my mother if I say this?’ Unlocking (that behavior) I think is the key to understanding the public Al Gore, and probably also the private Al Gore.”
