Comeback kid Gore unveils cuddlier image (VOMITING TILL YOU DIE ALERT)

ITCHING for a rematch with George Bush in the 2004 presidential race, Al Gore last week reemerged from his Garbo-esque exile kicking off a 25-day, 12-city book tour to promote Joined at the Heart, which he wrote with his wife, Tipper.

"The Gore book tour is like the trailer for a movie," says his former press secretary Chris Lehane. "It is interesting and entertaining but could also be a preview of what is to come. In the parlance of marketing and branding, it is a soft launch."

Soft launch? Gore is being more aggressively marketed than the new Star Wars movie being out on video - Ivan

Over the last week, Gore, who will decide by December 1 whether to run for the Democratic nomination, has packaged himself as a liberal who has morphed into a stoic survivor. Slamming the Bush administration for its positions on Iraq, the economy and health, the new Gore cracks jokes when needled about his "stiff, cold, pedantic, emotionless" reputation. The improved Gore, who sits for an interview beside a flickering aromatherapy candle, is so engaging it is possible to believe he isn't the numb nut who two years ago couldn't make decisions on such simple issues as what colour jacket to wear and where to base his campaign.

At other times, such as when Gore goes into deadpan mode, making it impossible to know whether he is serious or goofing around, you suspect he's still the aggressive intellectual with the unfortunate knack of alienating America's coal miners and auto-workers.

A Time /CNN survey conducted last week reported that 61 per cent of Democrats said they would like to see Gore run for president in 2004. Barring a slip in the early 2004 tests in New Hampshire or Iowa, the bran-munching editors at Time opined that it appears likely the next Democratic nomination is Al Gore's to lose. In the unlikely event that the mood of the country somehow upends, with Bush impaling himself on the economy and the war, the notion that the beleaguered Democratic party elite will support Gore is far from firm. "Gore's testing the water," says Susan Estrich, Michael Dukakis's 1988 campaign manager, "and I think the water's very, very chilly."

The book-tour camouflage employed to protect Gore from the slings he would face as a declared candidate has enabled his handlers to cherry-pick the media outlets most likely to play up Gore's new image. The first television sit-down, for example, went to Barbara Walters who offered "an opportunity for Gore to come across as a father, author and teacher, as well as a political figure", said one adviser. Next stop was a non-threatening guffaw with funnyman David Letterman. Even so, the cracks in Gore's judiciously crafted mask at times are glaringly visible.

The fact that he doesn't consider a formal analysis to be a necessary part of deciding whether to run is particularly ill-serving in the eyes of a number of his former senior advisers who in 2000 were never sure where they stood with the candidate who appeared to trust nobody outside his family circle.

If Gore does decide to run, "he has to come out with a platform and a vision and stick to it regardless of what anybody says", maintains Donna Brazile, who managed the 2000 campaign.

Earlier this year, Gore made a point of saying, over rubber chicken in Memphis, that he was a changed man. If he had it to do over again, he wouldn't listen to polls or political consultants. He'd just pour out "my heart". Yet asked to emote on the psychological aftermath of the Florida recount the numbing trauma when he thought he'd won, and then discovered he'd lost the presidency the 54-year-old sidesteps. "Just imagine what my life has been like for the past two years," he says, affecting a morose tone. "They let other cars on the road with me now! It slows you down." He waxes about the loss of a secret service retinue, the fact he sometimes has to remove his shoes at airport security.

"I'm a visiting professor now or VP, for short," (Oh ha ha ha, that's so funny Al, I forgot to laugh - Ivan) Gore deadpanned for Letterman. The fact that he must have an opinion on being the man who won more votes than any Democratic presidential candidate, more votes than any Republican presidential candidate except Ronald Reagan in 1984, more votes than George W, and, despite all of this, did not win the presidency itself, pushes Gore to admit, "I'm not sure I'm able to find the words to describe what I was feeling. I believe that if everyone in Florida who tried to vote had had his or her vote counted properly, I would have won." Other than "Hi, I'm Al Gore, I used to be the next president of the United States," another of Gore's favourite lines appears to be: "You win some, you lose some, and then there's that little-known third category." He refuses to call the outcome of the 2000 election "losing". So does Tipper. "I mean, we didn't lose. When we had to concede, we had to abide by the rule of law," she says.

Keeping his political options open, Gore knitted together a series of projects: he wrote Joined at the Heart, a treatise on the modern family with Tipper, he teaches two related course on "family-centred community building" at Tennessee universities, he consults for a financial services firm and participates on the public-speaking circuit. Until now, he also kept his mouth shut.

"I could have handled the whole thing differently, and instead of making a concession speech, launched a four-year rear-guard guerrilla campaign to undermine the legitimacy of the Bush presidency, and to mobilise for a rematch," he says. "And there was no shortage of advice to do that. I just didn't feel like it was in the best interest of the United States, or that it was a responsible course of action."

In February, during a speech in Nashville, Gore declared his intent to rejoin the national debate. "For everything, there is a season," he said. For the last few months, he's driven around the country in a rented car, often blasting Johnny Cash music, stumping for candidates who wanted him, repaying debts and getting back into the groove of pressing the flesh.

"I have no idea what he went through," says Brazile, who, like many once-close staffers, has had scant contact with her former boss over the last 22 months. "He completely went inside. There was probably a handful of people he kept in touch with. He completely cut off people, as if we had a disease."

It's not unusual for a politician to disappear into a sulk after a big loss. But Gore's retreat from all things Washington was achingly bitter. "Everyone was unprepared for what happened," says Mike Feldman, who worked as Gore's travelling chief of staff. "They were prepared for defeat or victory, but not for this. The campaign had a very unnatural end." One donor says Gore was voluble in putting his own spin on the election, "which basically involved a fair amount of blame for other people and institutions, starting with the Supreme Court, and then Clinton".

The anger and resentment Gore felt for Bill Clinton famously spilled over in an acrimonious meeting between the two, when Gore unloaded his frustration at having to deal with the baggage of the Lewinsky affair, dithering over whether to distance himself or display loyalty. Clinton snapped back, livid about having been excluded from the campaign.

Hillary let her own thoughts be known. Gore lost the election, she told friends, because he couldn't and wouldn't separate his personal anguish over the Lewinsky debacle from his own self-interest.

That would indicate Gore had a conscience. Something we have no proof of. - Ivan

Gore rejects the widely-held criticism within his own party that he ruined what could have been a landslide because he refused to acknowledge Clinton's soiled legacy. But Gore needs Bill Clinton's support now maybe more than ever. Viewed by many of the party faithful as a symbol of defeat and the past, he isn't the obvious standard-bearer to counter the powerful voice of the White House.

And of course, he needs Hillary too. With Senator Clinton eyeing a return to the White House in 2008, her immediate priority is getting a Democrat elected to the White House in 2004. Perhaps a more insightful anecdote about a man who, in private these days, favours lingo like "strategic frame analysis" and "meta-narrative" is the afternoon he came alive in front of his students at the Columbia School of Journalism.

Having brought Alan Greenspan in to talk about coverage of the economy, Gore was being "wonky, very Gorian", going on about what an economic recovery might look like, sketching graphs, saying that in one version it might look like an L, and, in another, like a U.

Then he said something to the effect of: If it gets really chaotic, it would look like this, drawing a W. As difficult as it is to picture, Al Gore and Alan Greenspan then celebrated their naughty joke with a high-five.

Roger Simon:
Uncovering the warm and fuzzy Gore

RUMORS THAT Al Gore would appear on the "Victoria's Secret Fashion Show" wearing an earth-tone feather boa and a smile proved to be untrue. Fortunately.

But it is about the only TV show he has missed.

After making the judgment two years ago that the public was sick of hearing from him, he and his campaign gurus are now betting the public can't get enough of him.

So he is engaged in a huge media blitz that will culminate, I predict, with an announcement early next year that he is going to run for President again.

During this blitz, Gore and his gurus have but one goal: to make Al Gore likable.

It is no easy job.

Al Gore is a highly disciplined and serious man, a man who loves to study things and the systems of things, who loves to see where and how they fit in with the big picture, and with his constantly evolving and maturing world view.

He is systematic and substantive and loves nothing more than to assemble experts and talk to them at breakfasts, lunches, dinner, panels, study groups and symposia.

His eldest daughter, Karenna, who worked in his vice presidential and Presidential campaigns and is the Gore most likely to follow him into public life, once said that her father was an introvert who was most comfortable living inside himself. She meant it as a compliment.

His wife, Tipper, said, "He is shy. He's always been shy. He was reserved when he was a teenager."

People who get to know Gore are always amazed that he is funnier, more charming and more relaxed in private. And they inevitably end up wishing the public could see the private Gore.

Just as inevitably, his rotating group of aides always hits upon the not very original tactic of "letting Gore be Gore."

"All we need to do is to get him to act in public like he acts in private," aide after aide will say.

It is a profoundly bad idea.

Few people can act in public as they do in private. Privacy is a time to escape from our public selves. And Gore is not an outgoing, funny, relaxed man, though he can certainly be those things when he wants to.

Joe Klein put his finger on it best in a piece he wrote for the New Yorker in 1997. After an interview in which Gore started off as sometimes giggly, sometimes rowdy, sometimes joke-cracking and monumentally insincere, Klein noted that Gore "seemed to be searching for the right . . . attitude to strike, something that wasn't defensive or rectitudinous; something casual."

The interview finally got around to nuclear strategy, a subject that Gore said he had studied for eight to 10 hours a week for 13 months. And then, Klein noted, Gore "changed, suddenly" and was "engaged and enthusiastic." Gore went to a white plastic blackboard and began drawing in Magic Marker a "metaphoric diagram of the meaning of fear" and, using plastic cups, he demonstrated how putting fewer warheads on more missiles would bollix the Russians.

"He seemed more like the world's best Ph.D. student, attacking his orals," Klein wrote. "But there was no awkwardness about it: This was, palpably, the real Al Gore."

Which is the problem for Gore: The real Al Gore, the private Al Gore, cannot be sold to the public.

At first, he simply did not or would not grasp this. (Who wants to be told his essential self is unpalatable?)

"I am who I am," he told Diane Sawyer in June 1999. "And I'm old enough now to know that there are some things that are not — not going to change. There are a lot of things I just don't want to change. And I'm just going to be who I am. And that's — that's all I can do."

He would later change his mind about that. He would later have to.

He would learn what the public really wanted. The public wanted someone who understood them, connected with them and — this was often overlooked — needed them.

"When Bill Clinton wants to relax, he'll invite 20 friends in, play some hearts, talk about books," a Gore staffer once told me. "When Al wants to relax, he'll go off alone somewhere with his laptop. I think he has the potential to be a great leader, a visionary; he sees things before other people do. But I worry that he tends to make intellectual rather than emotional connections with people."

Making an emotional connection with strangers — in essence what political campaigning had become — is no easy thing, even though Bill Clinton made it look easy.

In the last Presidential race, Al Gore was a serious and committed man who tried very hard to learn how to be more charming and casual in public.

George W. Bush was a casual and charming man who had to learn how to be more serious and committed in public.

This time around, Gore is convinced he can complete the job he started in 2000: He is going to be warmer, fuzzier, funnier, more likable and . . . more authentic.

It is like the old political joke: "The public wants sincerity. Heck, I can fake that."

http://www.theunionleader.com/articles_show.html?article=16000

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