Al's O.K., You're O.K.

By Elizabeth Taylor with Gore

As his motorcade sped through leafy Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, in late September, Al Gore leaned against his orthopedic back pillow, drank bottled water and reflected on the human spirit and his newfound sense of self. How is it that the wooden-tongued policy wonk of 1988 has emerged as an introspective spokesman for the inner child, an icon of the new manhood? Says Gore simply: "I found the connection between my head and my heart."

In that special transaction between candidates and voters, Gore's currency is the language of self-discovery. The myth of the log cabin has been replaced by another image of adversity -- the dysfunctional family. Few politicians represent that shift better than Al Gore, who through his own psychic battles has found not only his voice but a vocabulary that borrows heavily from therapyspeak. But, says Gore, "if the language I use or the ideas that I discuss are a little bit out in front of what the conventional political wisdom says, I don't care." It's not that Gore is rubbing crystals or espousing a national 12-step program. His stump speech is standard fare; he follows the "Q. and M." -- question and message of the day -- in countless public appearances. But the Tennessean can subtly slip into words like "dysfunction" and "inner child" as adroitly as his supporters buckle on their Birkenstocks. He makes eye contact when someone talks about "letting go." In conversation, Gore offers Zen-like nuggets like, "Sometimes you can only find something by losing it."

Most Americans got their first glimpse of the "new" Al Gore during the Democratic National Convention last July, when the vice-presidential candidate recounted his six-year-old son's brush with death and his family's journey of emotional healing. Some sneered at Gore's revelations about family counseling as mawkish exploitation of private tragedy for political gain. But many voters, aware of the transforming experience of a personal tragedy, are less cynical; they understand that politicians can be simultaneously strategic and sincere. "I thought, 'This white-bread family admitted to counseling?' " recalls Susan Longley of Liberty, Maine, who had been lukewarm to Gore before his speech. "And since then I've developed a magnetic pull to Gore, because he speaks the language of people who tend their hearts." Family counseling is not part of Gore's campaign pitch, but like many of his generation, he is clearly fascinated by the family as an institution. He talks enthusiastically about Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller, whose 1981 classic Prisoners of Childhood, renamed The Drama of the Gifted Child, argues that children deprived of unconditional love from their parents grow up with emotional hunger and injure their own offspring by repeating the pattern. He says he has also been influenced by his Harvard professor Erik Erikson, who pioneered work in the discovery of personal identity.

Though it deals with the environment rather than psychology, Gore's own book, Earth in the Balance, is infused with self-help concepts. Gore speaks of a "dysfunctional civilization" and uses terms like "pathology of addiction" and "denial" to discuss humanity's relationship to the earth. "Just as the members of a dysfunctional family emotionally anesthetize themselves against the pain they would otherwise feel," he writes, "our dysfunctional civilization has developed a numbness that prevents us from feeling the pain of our alienation from our world."

Not your basic campaign stump speech. But when Vice President Dan Quayle derides Gore's notions as "pretty bizarre stuff," he may not be aware that millions of people attend support groups every week in the U.S. "A lot of political professionals don't begin to suspect the extent to which millions of Americans have begun to think about these things -- the richness of their inner lives," Gore says.

That may be. But the willingness to expose those inner lives from the podium is something new in U.S. politics. In 1972 Thomas Eagleton was shamed off the Democratic presidential ticket after revelations that he had undergone shock therapy. This year, in contrast, the Democrats are getting maximum electoral mileage out of their personal problems -- perhaps hoping that people will bring their inner children into the voting booths with them.