Campaign 2000: Please Don't Leave Me, Don't You Go

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Except for his name and party affiliation, Al Gore has now changed just about everything a struggling candidate can change: clothes, consultants, message, manner. But his campaign theme song--the cheesy tune that blares at every Gore 2000 event--still needs work. He started with Shania Twain's Rock This Country, but it only reminded people that the country isn't rocking for him. Since shelving Shania, Gore has used the soul anthem Love Train--a call to unity that rings hollow with Democrats still divided about the nomination. But there's hope. At the New Hampshire "town hall" forum with Gore and Bill Bradley last week, it was obvious what song captures Gore's new mood: the old Motown hit Ain't Too Proud to Beg.

Stalking the stage of Dartmouth College's Moore Theater, grinning fiercely and sweating like the hardest-working man in show business, Gore seemed stoked enough to belt the words himself: "I know you wanna leave me,/ but I refuse to let you go." He wanted to tell voters who have dumped him for Bradley that he'll do anything to win them back. Of course, since this was Al Gore talking, the words came out a bit differently: "I would like to have your support for me," and "Fighting for all the people--that's what I want to do," and finally, "I would like to work hard; if you elect me President, I will work hard." Which is just the Vice President's way of saying, "Please, baby, please, baby, please, baby, please."

"In the last six or eight weeks," he said, "I've had a learning experience." Make that a near-death experience--that vertiginous moment when a politician looks into the near future, sees himself writing his memoirs and responds with a frenzied attempt to connect. In the last days of the 1992 campaign, President Bush had that kind of revelation and jetted around the country, waving his arms and shouting himself hoarse. Gore's memento mori has come earlier in the cycle, so unlike Bush, he has time to come down from his adrenaline rush and make his case in a calmer fashion.

Last week the ache was unmistakable--and even touching--but the 300 media types watching in the press room at Dartmouth were, to use the appropriate technical term, totally grossed out by it. Whenever Gore came on too strong, the room erupted in a collective jeer, like a gang of 15-year-old Heathers cutting down some hapless nerd.

Poor Gore. For months the press has been hammering him for taking the nomination for granted and not showing emotion. Now it's hammering him for trying too hard and showing too much. Of course he was sometimes overbearing at Dartmouth--asking faux-Clintonian personal questions ("How old is your child, Corey?") and then, after the event, sitting on the lip of the stage for 90 minutes to expound--impressively, by the way--on policy until everyone was exhausted, and Tipper said, "Al, I'm going to have to go." But the interesting question isn't whether Gore's exhibitionism is a tactic (it is) but whether groveling works any better in politics than it does in love.