Campaign Portrait

By Strobe Talbott/Washington

As Albert Gore Jr. pondered whether to run for President this spring, he knew that it might be both too soon and too late. At 39, the freshman Senator from Tennessee would be trying to become the youngest person to win the nomination of either party since William Jennings Bryan in 1900. Yet to achieve that distinction, Gore would have to pass six other Democrats who were already running hard.

At a family caucus at his Tudor house in suburban Arlington, Va., his four children had their say. According to notes taken by Daughter Kristin, 10, they agreed on the No. 1 negative: "Dad wouldn't be here a lot." Karenna, 14, worried about his relative obscurity compared with the front runner at that time: "It would be hard to get more publicity than Gary Hart." Gore's wife Tipper was also torn. Co-founder of the Parents' Music Resource Center, an organization that opposes rock lyrics featuring sex, violence, drugs or alcohol, she was just starting a national tour to promote her book, Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society. "Especially with me already very busy and on the road," she recalls, "I knew it would be a sacrifice for the whole family if Al ran."

There was another generation to be heard from. The day before his self- imposed deadline for a decision, Gore went to his parents' apartment on Capitol Hill. Albert Sr., 79, is a white-maned, honey-toned orator and liberal populist who, as a Senator from Tennessee from 1953 until 1971, was widely venerated for having been a progressive on civil rights and an opponent of the Viet Nam War. He was touted as a possible vice-presidential candidate in 1956 and 1960. When his father made the case for running, young Gore played a combination of Hamlet and devil's advocate, dwelling on the negatives. His mother Pauline moderated. "Dammit," said her husband afterward, "I think he's talked himself out of it." But his son telephoned the next day: "Dad, it's go." Recalls Albert Sr.: "I knocked a hole in the roof with a Comanche yell." Pauline explains, "I think my son had to establish that it would be his campaign and that he'd be doing it in his own way." Jane Eskind, an admiring fellow Tennessee Democrat, observes, "Albert Sr. sees in Al Jr. the fulfillment of his own dreams."

To realize both his father's dream and his own, Al Gore is trying to set himself starkly apart from the rest of the Democratic contenders, much to their recent fury. With the decision of Dale Bumpers, Bill Clinton and Sam Nunn to remain on the sidelines, Gore became the only Southerner in the race, a fact he rarely fails to mention during his frequent forays through the region. When Gore is campaigning in Arkansas and Texas, his accent changes subtly as "my" becomes "mah" and "narrow" becomes "narrah." He also proclaims himself a "raging moderate," a distinction he has increasingly emphasized by challenging his opponents' dovish stands on defense and foreign policy.

Gore's strategy is a risky one. He may have to write off the Iowa caucuses. Not only was he late in entering, but he has done little catering to the liberal activists whose zeal dominates the delegate-selection process. He may fare better in New Hampshire, where the party is more diverse and the stalwarts tend to be more conservative than in Iowa. He counts on a big win March 8, Super Tuesday, when 20 states, mostly in the South, will hold primaries and caucuses to choose 35% of the delegates. In doing so, Gore is gambling that he will not get left in the dust as the winners in Iowa and New Hampshire gain momentum.

The other risk is more personal. Gore's thoughtful positions have an intellectual appeal to party moderates, and he has impressed Washington insiders with his articulate understanding of both the issues and the system. But he must still prove that he has the grit and the common touch needed to inspire a wider appeal. He often appears to be compensating for his fresh- faced youthfulness with a formality bordering on stiffness and a cocky & earnestness that sometimes seems like noblesse oblige. In his living room there is a framed cover of Memphis magazine with his photograph and the headline BORN TO RUN. A number of Gore's Senate colleagues have had trouble disguising their annoyance, perhaps tinged with jealousy. "That young know- it-all takes some gettin' used to," rasped South Carolina Democrat Ernest Hollings to another Senator. "He hasn't paid his dues."

Gore tries to strike a bond with ordinary voters by proclaiming himself the "only farmer in the race." He tells stories about raising Angus cattle since he was six on his father's 250-acre farm in Carthage, Tenn.; he showed one of his heifers and won a blue ribbon at the Iowa State Fair. But he quickly adds that anyone who shakes hands with him will notice the absence of calluses: "I haven't been spending much time on tractors of late."

Or ever. Gore was born in Washington and spent much of his childhood on Embassy Row in the Fairfax Hotel, where his parents had an apartment. He fondly remembers climbing onto the roof and hurling water balloons down on the cars on Massachusetts Avenue. He was an honor student and captain of the football team at the patrician St. Alban's School. He met Tipper (a childhood nickname; her real name is Mary Elizabeth) at his St. Alban's graduation party. John Davis, who taught Gore church history, remembers him as the straightest arrow in the quiver, someone whose only evident vice was an excess of virtue: "Everybody would think, 'This can't be real!' "

At Harvard in the late '60s, Gore demonstrated against the Viet Nam War and attended Eugene McCarthy rallies. After graduating, he considered resisting the draft. His parents were supportive. "If you want to go to Canada, I'll go with you," his mother said. The dilemma was all the more acute, for Gore did not want to hurt his father's 1970 re-election fight against Republican Bill Brock, currently Secretary of Labor. In the end, he enlisted as an Army reporter, and his father went down in defeat. "The combination of Viet Nam and his dad's losing really turned Al off politics," says his mother. Returning home in 1971, he became a reporter and editorial writer for the Nashville Tennessean. While working as a journalist, he enrolled at Vanderbilt, first as a theology student and then in law school.

In 1976 Gore surprised and delighted his father by suddenly announcing that he would run for Congress. The elder Gore was all set to "give my hillbilly speeches to elect my boy to Congress." But Al said, "Hold on, Dad. I want to win this one myself." Upon arriving in Washington, Gore exclaimed to a friend, Carter Eskew, "Hey, this is great! I'm still an investigative reporter. I just happen to be a member of Congress. You can get your phone calls returned, and you can actually have an influence."

He assigned himself to the medical beat, cracking down on influence peddling in the contact-lens industry, sponsoring legislation to regulate organ transplants, and pushing for tougher warnings on cigarette packs -- despite a constituency that included 10,000 tobacco farmers. In 1984 he won the Senate seat of retiring Republican Howard Baker.

In the midst of that campaign, Gore's older sister Nancy died of cancer. "She was a terribly important part of Al's life," says Tipper. "She was a mediator, adviser, powerful supporter and loving critic." Today that role falls largely to Gore's mother Pauline. "I've been working on him to relax and smile," she says.

Gore will have to overcome a lot of what Eskew, now a Washington media consultant, calls "yuppie envy," eloquently expressed by Arkansas Democratic Activist Archie Schaffer III, 39. "I'm not sure I'm ready," he says, "for anyone my age to be close to the button."

Yet the button is a large part of why Gore thinks he should be President. In 1980 Gore asked for a show of hands at a girls' student convention in Murfreesboro, Tenn., and found that most of the young people present expected a nuclear war in their lifetime. He went back to Washington and spent eight hours a week for a year mastering the arcana of nuclear deterrence and diplomacy.

Since then he has played a key role in brokering a number of agreements between Congress and the Reagan Administration on defense policy and arms control. Gore says he is running for President now, rather than waiting until he is a bit older, largely because "Mikhail Gorbachev may be ready for a breakthrough in the way we keep the nuclear peace. The next few years could be an opportunity we won't have again."

As he campaigns around the country, he carries a gun-metal-gray garment bag with his conservative blue suits, his jogging shoes and a serious book on an unfashionably important subject about which he is busy educating himself. Sipping soda and lime on a flight to yet another fund raiser, he muses about how, as President, he might go to Brazil to warn the world of the dangers of & deforestation or to Antarctica to point at the ozone hole or how he might push to include global environmental problems on the agenda of his first summit with Gorbachev. Yet in public at this point in his campaign, Gore downplays the mega-issues. Explains Eskew: "Al has got to be careful not to become the Senator Moonbeam of 1988."

His rivals these days are depicting him as Senator Thunderbolt. Gore has supported the U.S. naval presence in the Persian Gulf, the invasion of Grenada and the bombing of Libya. He opposes the proposal by most of his opponents for a ban on missile flight tests. He says his centrist views make him more "electable" than the other five Democrats in the race, particularly Michael Dukakis, who opposes almost any use of American force abroad as well as virtually all new nuclear weapon systems.

Last week at debates in Florida and Washington, Gore stepped up his strategy of accentuating his differences, provoking his opponents to leap on him after he implied they were engaged in the "politics of retreat, complacency and doubt." Richard Gephardt accused him of "pandering to the right wing of our party." Said Paul Simon: "I don't think it helps any of us to be knifing each other." Such criticism, said Gore's campaign manager Fred Martin, is a "sign of Al's success."

Gore's strategy of combining distinctiveness and plausibility is working. James Johnson, who ran Walter Mondale's 1984 race and who so far this year is on the sidelines, says, "Gore has passed a threshold of being a credible contender." Some prominent Republicans agree. Says Bill Brock: "While following Al Sr.'s liberalism on a lot of issues, Al Jr. is able to present himself as a mainstream Democrat. He'd be a good, tough candidate in the general election." The leaderships of the Hart campaigns in New Hampshire, Illinois, Florida and Washington State have come over to the Gore camp virtually en masse. In the seven debates to date, Gore's combination of self- assurance and command of substance has helped him overcome the misgivings about his age and inch upward in the polls. He is so pleased with his performance that he has added a new line to his stump speech: if elected, he vows to challenge Gorbachev to debate ideology and foreign policy.

But before taking on the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Gore has at least 14 more debates to go with his fellow Democrats, followed by what could be a donnybrook of a convention in Atlanta. Last week he was working his way through the South, heading from there to New Hampshire. Then on to Iowa, where he hopes to find the crowds warmed up by -- who else? -- his father. Albert Sr. has been vigorously campaigning there as a surrogate for his son. By this week he will have hit all 99 counties in the state, giving his hillbilly speeches to elect his boy to the White House.