Profiles In Caution

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In 1970 Albert Gore Jr. watched Albert Gore Sr. lose the Senate seat that he had held for 18 years. The father he adored had taken brave and unpopular stands against Southern fealty to segregation and then against the Viet Nam War, and he had lost his seat because of those stands. "His father's defeat was very traumatic to him," says his mother Pauline. It reaffirmed in the son an innate cautiousness and taught him the virtues of moderation, compromise, consensus.

In his own eight years in the House and three in the Senate, Al Jr. has rarely embarked on a controversial crusade. He is a man of cool and thoughtful calibration. His passions are more intellectual than ideological: he is more comfortable dealing with the abstractions and technicalities of arms control or the greenhouse effect than he is leading ideological battles. Whereas the father often demonstrated a kind of moderate rage on moral issues, the son describes himself as a "raging moderate." The oxymoron is appropriate, because Al Gore is a mixture of opposite, sometimes contradictory elements.

Gore is a combination of St. Alban's polish and down-home charm, Harvard intellectualism and backwoods shrewdness. He is almost as at home wearing pointy cowboy boots as clunky wing tips, drinking Corona beer in a rowdy bar as sipping Chablis in a Georgetown salon. But not quite. Now, in an effort to reposition himself, Gore the cerebral technocrat is coming on like a fiery champion of "working men and women." His problem is making the transformation credible. On the stump, he attempts to heighten emotions simply by raising the volume of his voice. Though he has fought for such causes as consumers' rights, he seems to have put on his hand-me-down populism like the work shirts he donned for his new TV ads. Far more than even Richard Gephardt, Gore is an insider among the media and power elite, the teacher's pet of the Georgetown set.

The contradictions extend to his personality. In public, the buttoned-down Gore is solemn and earnest. A joke among the press corps is, How do you tell Al Gore from his Secret Service protection? Answer: He's the stiff one. In private, he is funny and irreverent, a good mimic and storyteller. In the right setting he will debate not only the virtues of the Midgetman missile, but whether the Beatles were a better group than the Rolling Stones (yes, he says).

As a second-string guard on the Harvard basketball team, Gore made up for a lack of physical skills through hustle and hard work. Nowadays when he turns his active, creative mind to a topic, he exhibits the same dogged discipline.