The Washington Post

Gore Warms Up to Clinton (Iowa)

Ceci Connolly

SECTION: A SECTION; Pg. A04; CAMPAIGN 2000

LENGTH: 806 words

DATELINE: CLINTON, Iowa, Aug. 20

 
For one brief moment, in the dead-of-night darkness, in a town with a name he's trying to forget, all seemed right in the world for Al Gore. It was nearly midnight, and his traveling band had been floating all day down the Mississippi River, disembarking at Norman Rockwell-style towns just long enough to pose for a photo and grab an ice cream cone.
Then the Gore entourage descended on Clinton, Iowa, population 30,000. He was late and perhaps a little loopy from the beer he'd consumed at his wife Tipper's birthday party. (At one lock along the river, he'd joked: "I need your help; the boat's sinking.")
As he strode on stage, he apologized to the throng. "You know, you can't speed up those paddle-wheelers much," he said, by way of explanation.
It was almost, ironically, Clintonesque. The straining voice, the beaming spouse and The Gaze, a sort of otherworldly stare that said, "I'm in the zone."
"I may not be the most exciting politician," he conceded, "but I will work hard for you every single day and I will never let you down."
For more than a year, it has seemed the vice president can't get--or make--a break. He doesn't get credit for the good economy; he is blamed for President Clinton's foibles. On the campaign trail, he has appeared equally uncomfortable watching fireworks in the Hamptons with New York's moneyed elite and singing "Yankee Doodle" with a group of sick children at a Cleveland hospital.
Worst of all, the polls, those surveys he says he doesn't pay attention to but consumes voraciously, say people just don't like him. But as Saturday night rolled into Sunday morning, it seemed the people of Clinton loved him.
"Let it be said 100 years from now that in the year 2000 in Clinton, Iowa, people met close to midnight on a Saturday night and made up their minds that we're gonna make this country what it's supposed to be," he said.
Told that many had waited four hours, Gore rewarded the crowd with an unchar-acteristically peppy speech, a dance with his wife and a handshake for just about every person there.
"I'm running for president because I wanna fight for you," he said. "I wanna fight for your families."
Twenty-five minutes in all, the speech was Gore's standard road fare. But the run-on sentences had suddenly been clipped, and the lecturing tone had given way to a lusty growl.
"It's about you. It's about Clinton. It's about Iowa. It's about the United States." And, for good measure: "It's about you!"
Gone were the southern manners and prep school diction, replaced with defi-ance.
"The drug companies don't want to see Medicare be involved with helping sen-iors pay for prescription medicine," he said. "I don't care what the drug compa-nies say, I'm for a prescription drug benefit for seniors under Medicare. I'll fight for it and I'll make it happen; my opponent won't."
He cut to the crux of people's discomfort with people like him. "You use the word politician out there and you see what goes across people's minds," he said with a snarl. "Well, I won't even go into it."
But standing on stage in his blue jeans, denim shirt and black cowboy boots, he offered himself as a different kind of vote-seeker. "What I'm telling you here is not something that's been written for me by some pollster or some con-sultant."
As if to say, I'm not one of those inside-the-Beltway types, Gore reminded the audience of the long winter nights he spent here: "I've talked to people in their living rooms. I've talked to them in diners. I've talked to them before here in Clinton, Iowa. I know what the score is."
To some it had the feel of an instant metamorphosis, but the energy boost has been building for weeks. In rapid succession, the arrival of Sen. Joseph I. Lie-berman on the ticket and the symbolic departure of Clinton enabled Gore to shed the shackles of Number 2. And with about 20 million people watching his accep-tance speech at the Los Angeles convention last week, Gore can now claim a bit of celebrity status in his own right.
"We wanted our grandchildren to meet the man who might become the next presi-dent," said Sue Hare, a teacher's assistant who came to see Gore in La Crosse, Wis.
This post-convention campaign swing, a combination boat and bus trip through America's heartland, is intended to replicate the excitement of Clinton's 1992 bus trip. Even though Gore is easily drawing his largest crowds ever, they have yet to match the enormous outpouring of eight years ago. And where Clinton would linger for more than an hour, what seemed like a Gore hand-shaking marathon came in under half an hour.
But for the people lined down North Second Street, it was a rich 30 minutes. One man reached out for Gore, urging him to give the people more of what they saw in Clinton.
"I'm just getting warmed up," Gore replied.