Al Gore, Regular Guy

By ERIC POOLEY

One big goal of the Democratic Convention was to prove that Al Gore has the experience to be President. Not executive experience, but the really important stuff--body surfing and mountain climbing, making igloos and cocoa and a dinosaur diorama with the kids, shooting pool and watching Star Trek with Tommy Lee Jones, chasing through the woods with coon dogs in the middle of the night, wrapping a turkey in aluminum foil and roasting it in the fireplace. At this convention, Gore's image was the thing being cooked inside the shiny wrapper. And the message? As his old friend Bob Delabar put it Thursday night during a podium discussion of All Things Al, Gore "always seemed to me to be a regular and easygoing fellow."

That's a stretch. The Vice President is many things, but easy-going is not one of them. He is extraordinarily intense. If Americans decide they want a regular guy in the White House, they'll elect George W. Bush, who is also tightly wound but does a much better job of hiding it. The parade of Gore relatives was exhausting and a little pointless (news flash: Gore's brother-in-law thinks he's great). But from time to time, the real Gore did come through. During All Things Al, some of the speakers were arrayed on one of those groovy multilevel platforms the 5th Dimension once used to sing Up, Up and Away on shows like the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. A former Gore aide named Michela Alioto described the Vice President's management style: "If you had an idea, you'd e-mail it to him, and he'd e-mail his response right back." Now, that's Al Gore. Barbara Mikulski, the earthy Senator from Maryland, described him as a young politician: "If you thought he was tough as a reporter, you shoulda seen him in Congress... He wanted those polluters to pay. And I'll tell you, he was really effective. He wanted to look out for American families."

Have I mentioned that Gore is a fighter for working families? The convention did, endlessly, because Gore wants to make a virtue out of his aggression. It worked, as the Regular Guy offensive generally did when it highlighted things about him that are already familiar. The biographical film narrated by Tipper Gore was effective because it showed Gore as a loving family man, and he is that. Best of all, it was a chance to show off photos of Al and Tipper as young marrieds in the 1970s--a scruffy hunk and his blond babe. As a 30-year-old woman sitting in the hall was heard to say, "Gore was hot--who knew?"

The best Gore film was barely seen at all. It was created by Spike Jonze, the 29-year-old director of Being John Malkovich, a surreal movie about people getting inside a celebrity's head. No wonder it's a Gore favorite. (Bush's most recent favorite is Forrest Gump.) After using a handheld camera to shoot the Gores at their Tennessee farm and a North Carolina beach house, Jonze came up with a deftly cut montage of Gore kicking back and having fun. He makes Tipper blush by showing off the nude self-portrait she painted when pregnant with Karenna. He offers the obligatory deadpan take on his own stiffness (Tipper going barefoot "completely messes up my image") and sings a song from 1969 in praise of her ("I don't have to speak, she defends me"). But mostly he just hangs out with the family. What's revealing about these moments is not that Gore is totally loose--he's not--but that he retains a need for control even at the most relaxed of times. "My dad is a fanatic," says Karenna, skewering his video-watching habits. "No one can leave the room at all. He pauses it...and when they come back he rewinds it a little bit and we're all like, 'Nooooo!'"

Midway through the film, Gore talks about his strained relationship with politics. "I'm a lot more comfortable with the idea of rolling up my sleeves and making the system work than I am with campaigning," he says. It's a theme he returned to in his acceptance speech. "I know my own imperfections," he said. "I know I won't always be the most exciting politician. But...I will work for you every day, and I will never let you down." This was more than a dig at Bill Clinton. It was as close as Gore could come to delivering on a pledge he'd made early in the speech: "I want you to know me for who I truly am."

The convention offered a thousand opinions about who Gore is. But his speech suggested a simple one: He's a man who knows that he and the system are flawed but who just might be smart and tough enough to get some things done. Gore came out of his shiny foil wrapper.