Indeed, Gore himself is regularly poked fun of on late-night TV. He can be just as earnest as his predecessor, Dan Quayle, and just as dull. But Gore has proved “shockingly adaptive” to the vice presidency, says an aide. He gets respect in a job that usually commands none.
When Al Gore was tapped as the vice presidential nominee, his advisers wondered how the upwardly mobile senator would ever sublimate his ego. Gore likes to be the smartest man in the room, not the second smartest. “God help us if we win,” a longtime aide remembers thinking after Clinton’s famous call. But if Gore likes to be the class showoff, he’s also a grind. Always “on message,” as they say in the political trade, Gore is relentlessly disciplined in whatever he does. He likes to take on big Save the World issues-first, as a congressman, nuclear-arms control, then, as a senator, protecting the environment. Unlike a lot of showboating politicians, Gore religiously does his homework. To learn the arcane science of nuclear-arms control, he took private tutorials for two hours every day from his foreign-policy aide, Leon Fuerth, Reinventing government could have been just another veep make-work project. Instead, Gore immersed himself in the detail of federal regulation, and came up with a substantive plan. “If he gets something in his mind, it sticks in there pretty good,” says Democratic consultant James Carville.
There is some wonk rivalry between Gore and Clinton. it has not been lost on Clinton aides who visit the National Performance Review office a block from the White House that the color portraits on the wall are all of Gore, not of Bill Clinton. But the president’s style is much more laid back. Clinton runs a meeting like a grad-school seminar, throwing out ideas and endlessly circling the subject. Gore is linear. He has a fondness for tabbed binders and detailed talking points. Gore and Clinton have lunch together every Thursday. It is one of the few sure things on the president’s calendar, because aides have learned that changing it offends Gore’s sense of order.
As a boss, Gore is highly organized. “He’s like a piece of artillery in a meeting, he’s so efficient,” says an aide. Gore ticks off what has to be accomplished and methodically runs through the list. This came as something of a surprise to Clinton aides, who had Gore pigeonholed as the New Agey author of “Earth in the Balance” and not a sharp administrator.
Sometimes a bit ponderously, Gore tries to make light of his secondary role. After camera crews rearranged the Oval Office for Clinton’s address on the economy, Gore was the one who put Harry Truman’s bust back on the right end table. “This is what vice presidents are for,” he joked. For Clinton’s birthday, he gave the president a cardboard cutout of himself so, he explained, the chief executive would never be without his vice president standing a half step behind him. Clinton responded by doing a wicked Gore imitation, mimicking the veep’s stiff walk and studied nod.
But Clinton listens to him. In prepping Clinton for press conferences, it often falls to Gore to tell the president he’s off base or that his tone is “too defensive.” Gore has been known to interrupt the president abruptly by declaring, “That’s not how you do it at all.” Gore sometimes has a tin ear for his own speeches, which can be preachy, but his political advice is usually shrewd. Although in public Gore comes off like Eddie Haskell, in private he can be cutting and witty. Punchy after pulling all-nighters to get ReGo up and running, Gore scoffed at the need to get White House approval on a matter that would lock Clinton into a sensitive policy position. “Are you sure the White House is OK on this?” asked a nervous aide. “I’m almost virtually 99 percent sure,” said Gore. Then he put his head down on his desk and laughed.
Publicly, Gore plays the good son to Clinton, who is only a year and a half older. A fierce advocate for his views in private, he is rarely outspoken in the press. On Bosnia, he made all the arguments for military intervention at his weekly lunches with the president. But when Clinton decided that the political risks were too great, Gore went along without so much as a quiet leak of dissent.
Gore may be obedient, but he is still ambitious. Before signing on to ReGo, he asked Clinton for assurances that his plan would get a full presidential-level publicity blast, and not wind up on the dust heap with most good government commissions. it is not likely that Gore will now quietly go off and attend funerals on Air Force Two. He would be happier debating Ross Perot on ways to clean up rot in government-preparing, in his focused way, for bigger debates down the road.
