Clinton may lead the country into the millennium, but it is Gore who truly embodies the new century’s possibilities and anxieties. For all of Clinton’s airy rhetoric about the future, his politics belong largely to Bob Dole’s world. The Man from Hope and The Man From Russell will always feel more at home shaking hands along a rope line than going online. Gore, the natural Democratic front runner for 2000, straddles the two worlds, and not always gracefully. There are two Gores: the fierce political competitor and the distant techno-thinker. If Clinton can feel the voters’ pain, Gore too often wants to explain it to them. He’s got to reconcile his public ambition with his colder, logical side – and he knows that watching Clinton may be the best way to do it.
This week, of course, the official line is that Gore is thinking of nothing except Clinton’s re-election. But he’s made six trips to Iowa and five to New Hampshire in the last 20 months. And the vice president’s schedule in Chicago has the feel of a dress rehearsal. While Clinton whistle-stops his way through the Midwest, Gore will be front and center at the convention. He’ll massage the base at delegation breakfasts and receptions.
Gore’s inside game doesn’t need work. After the 1992 election, he and Clinton drafted a written agreement that guaranteed Gore a major role in policymaking and appointments; particularly early on, the new president depended on the veteran senator to explain Washington to him. Gore is often the one to press Clinton to make a final decision. He pushed Clinton to take the environment seriously. Over the objections of tobacco-sensitive political advisers, he won the president’s commitment to pursue the ban on cigarette sales to teenagers. Parts of Gore’s record are less glowing. His ““reinventing government’’ project has yielded only middling results, and he’s backed snakebit nominees like Henry Foster for surgeon general and Bobby Ray Inman for Defense.
Gore stays in the loop by staying available. He doesn’t finalize his daily schedule until he sees Clinton’s, so that he can sit in on last-minute meetings where messages are honed. On the morning after the Olympics bombing, when some aides were nervous about having the president affirm that the Games should go on, Gore pushed for an unequivocal statement. Meanwhile, Gore has a network of loyalists throughout the executive branch–a virtual shadow government–who keep him informed.
But this is all operational politics–something the cerebral Gore understands well. What’s less developed is the vice president’s capacity to show he’s not hopelessly wooden. He can be hilarious: at a prep session before a press conference a couple of years ago, Clinton was advised that he might be asked about the sleazy tabloid stories like Tonya Harding, the Menendez brothers and John Bobbitt. ““No matter what you do,’’ Gore deadpanned, ““be sure to use the the word “penis’ as much as possible.’’ More important, Gore says his years with Clinton have made him a more empathetic, less analytical politician. ““I’ve learned the value of paying much more careful attention to the ways people feel,’’ Gore told NEWSWEEK.
He’ll need more of that if he wants to win the top job. In the age of Oprah-style political theater Clinton has mastered, Gore is the white man who can’t jump – a stiff. At a public-housing project in Jackson, Tenn., last month, he tried out a faux-Jesse Jackson riff on a predominantly black crowd. ““You’re mobilizing, energizing, sensitizing. . .’’ There was hardly a ripple. But Gore is 48, and time is on his side. He has four years, or maybe more, to turn the two Als into one plausible president.
