Toward the end of his political career, Senator Albert Gore, Sr., wrote a couple of books, one on the eve of the 1970 Senate campaign and the other, which was longer and told a bit more “with the bark on,” as they say in Tennessee, a couple of years later. To read them now is to be taken back to a time in American politics when notes were struck that nobody strikes anymore.

Senator Gore grew up on a struggling farm in the hills of middle Tennessee. In the evenings, the family would sit around a kerosene lamp, and the father would talk about his hero—William Jennings Bryan, the Great Commoner. Senator Gore managed to cobble together an education for himself over many years, by working his way first through a local teachers’ college, then a night law school conducted at the Y.M.C.A. in Nashville. It was there that he met his wife, Pauline, who was working her way through Vanderbilt Law School by waiting on tables in a coffee shop in the evenings. Gore’s first full-time job, as a schoolteacher, paid seventy-five dollars a month.

The Depression hit the Gore family very hard. Senator Gore’s father, fearing for the stability of the local banks in Smith County, Tennessee, divided his savings among three of them. All three failed, and he lost everything. When the future Senator’s father went to sell his crops that year, he made eighty-nine dollars, and Gore remembered the scene of “grown men who were so desperate the tears streamed down their cheeks as they stood with me at the window to receive their meager checks for a full year’s work.” During that time, George H. W. Bush, the father of this year’s other Presidential candidate, was a student at Greenwich Country Day School, to which he was driven every morning by his family’s chauffeur.

Salvation arrived, in the form of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. F.D.R. brought electricity to rural Tennessee. F.D.R. proposed higher taxes on corporations and the rich. F.D.R. made a speech about the South in which he said, “When you come right down to it, there is little difference between the feudal system and the fascist system.” Gore was elected to the United States Congress, and later to the Senate, where he fought constantly against tax cuts, privatization, tight money, Wall Street, and the Federal Reserve Board. When, for example, he heard that John F. Kennedy, the newly elected President, was going to appoint a Wall Street man, C. Douglas Dillon, as Secretary of the Treasury, he retreated to his farm in Carthage, Tennessee, and wrote Kennedy a blistering letter, warning that “such an appointment would be a signal that you had given up the goals of a truly Democratic Administration.” Gore’s oldest granddaughter, Karenna Gore Schiff, remembers him once introducing her to a new farmhand who hesitated to shake her hand because his was dirty. Gore laughed and motioned for her to shake hands anyway, advising her to say, “That’s all right—I’m a Democrat.”

Gore lost his seat in 1970, to a rising young man of the Republican Party, Bill Brock. The race was widely seen as a last hurrah for old-fashioned Southern populism. In Tennessee, the Democratic Party, which had dominated state politics for all of living memory, and which, indeed, had practically been invented in Tennessee (Andrew Jackson lived within a hundred miles of where Senator Gore was born), seemed to have expired practically overnight. In 1966, the Republicans took one of Tennessee’s Senate seats. In 1970, they took the other, and the governorship, too. The old dream of Southern liberals, which animates Senator Gore’s writings, was that if they could ever kill off the Jim Crow system blacks and poor whites could make common, populist cause against the Bourbons and their moneyed allies in New York. Now Jim Crow was dead, and the opposite was happening: the white South was going Republican. Gore saw his last race as a primal struggle between good and evil; in his post-defeat book, he approvingly quotes David Halberstam, who wrote, in Harper’s, of Brock’s campaign slogan, “Bill Brock Believes”: “Believes is the code word for Nigger.”

From the Democratic point of view, the Party was the victim of its own success. By taxing and spending, it had managed to get some money into the hands of the flat-busted country farmers of the Depression South. Now they were doing better, beyond their dreams, really, and a lot of their children weren’t farmers anymore. They had gone to college, thanks to programs the Democrats had passed, and modern industry had come to the South, thanks to the Democrats’ ending segregation and building dams and power plants and highways (Albert Gore was the chief sponsor of the bill that created the interstate-highway system), and they had white-collar jobs and were living in new houses in the suburbs—and voting Republican.

Not long ago in Nashville, I went to see James Neal, the former Watergate prosecutor, who has been a friend of the Gore family since the nineteen-fifties and is now the lawyer for Al Gore, in the matter of his fund-raising in 1996. He told me that when he was growing up—the son of a middle-Tennessee farmer, in a house with no indoor plumbing—his father used to point out to him a man named Roark who lived in their part of the country, and say, “Look, son! There’s a Republican!” Neal was telling me this story in his office, on the twentieth floor of a plate-glass Nashville skyscraper. He was wearing bluejeans and scuffed boots and chewing on an unlit cigar that looked about a foot long. “He must have pointed that guy out to me twenty times,” Neal said. “It was like he was a man with two heads. Now I see these people out in Brentwood who drive a Lexus, who belong to my country club, and they curse the government. And I sit and listen to them! Drive a Lexus and condemn the party that got you there. That’s what it amounts to.”

If you drive the fifty miles from Nashville out to Carthage, the plain little town that is still the Gore family seat, you see that almost everything built in the last forty years is grander than almost everything built before then, and that the new construction—the malls and the subdivisions—is creeping out toward Carthage. Nissan and Saturn have built factories not too far away, something inconceivable in the stone-agrarian South of the Depression. In the 1996 Presidential election, the hapless Dole-Kemp ticket was just one point behind in Al Gore’s old congressional district.

This isn’t just a regional story, or one of particular interest because of who is running for President. Most of the dominant national politicians of the past decade are people whose formative experience as young politicians was in figuring out how to play the South’s abrupt and dramatic shift from Democratic to Republican. This is the story of George H. W. Bush’s political life, and of George W. Bush’s, and of Jeb Bush’s, and of Newt Gingrich’s and Dick Armey’s and Tom DeLay’s—they were in the rising group; and then in the falling group, the one that had to deal with the foundation’s being knocked out from under it, are Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Gore’s entire political life has been about trying to survive within a tradition that he was born into and watched die. In that situation, you either become very, very nimble or very, very careful. Al Gore himself once wrote, “I grew up in a determinedly political family, in which I learned at an early age to be very sensitive—too sensitive, perhaps—to what others were thinking, and to notice carefully—maybe too carefully—the similarities and differences between my way of thinking and that of the society around me.”

At least in his writings, Albert Gore, Sr., always insisted that the South could be the most liberal region of the country and that the post-civil-rights return to economic populism was still on the way. In one of his books, though, he did make a concession to changing times. He proposed passing the torch to a new type of populist:

This reconstruction of our country from within calls for guidance by men who live neither in the memories of the past nor in the emotions of the present; it calls for guidance by men who are pre-eminently thinkers, men who, let it be said very simply, are concerned with a future-oriented understanding of things—it calls for guidance, if you will, by the intellectuals who over the years have voiced many of the latent convictions and beliefs of the poor and downtrodden.

Al Gore was intimately involved in his father’s last campaign and therefore in the final bitterness of it. He travelled with the old man. When his father decided that he needed to buy television ads, Gore appeared in them, wearing a military uniform and being told, “Son, always love your country.” Although Gore’s service in Vietnam is usually held up as an example of his devotion to his father—he enlisted in part because it seemed required by the 1970 campaign—Halberstam’s article in Harper’s suggests that the father might actually have liked the idea of running a campaign alongside a son who refused to go to Vietnam. But when changing times took out the elder Gore the younger one had to play his ambitions quite differently. What the father wrote about the advent of an emotionless, intellectual, futurist strain of populist would have been the script—and, beneath Al Gore’s many protective layers, it remains the script, as I discovered when I was able to talk with him. He displayed a degree of thoughtfulness and study, and also of abstraction from the daily world, that is astonishing in a Presidential candidate in mid-campaign.

In the middle of June, Al Gore unveiled a new theme for his Presidential campaign in a speech at the New-York Historical Society, on the West Side of Manhattan. If you haven’t spent time in the vicinity of a sitting Vice-President of the United States— in White House lingo, a v-potus— it’s surprising how much apparatus is involved. Air Force Two sits on the runway at LaGuardia, city streets get closed off, police are everywhere outside and Secret Service everywhere inside. You have to arrive an hour ahead of time. Dogs have to sniff you before you can sit in the audience. This has the effect of raising the ante on Gore, wherever he goes—you feel that for all this trouble you should get a big payoff.

But on this particular day, after the audience had been assembled and had sat waiting for a good while in the auditorium, Gore merely ambled onstage from the wings, accompanied by Robert Rubin, the former co-chairman of Goldman, Sachs and former Secretary of the Treasury, who is now with Citigroup, and who also ambled. The Democratic Party had made peace with Wall Street. Gore’s new campaign theme was Prosperity and Progress. There was a logo behind the lectern with those words printed repeatedly across a map of the United States. Gore sat in a chair, motionless as a wax figure, while Rubin introduced him, stressing the role Gore had played in a project that his father had not considered very worthy during his officeholding days: eliminating the federal deficit.

I had been watching Gore speak all spring. He has held elective office continuously for twenty-four years, so he has an enormous amount of experience at this. Still, it obviously doesn’t come naturally to him. He is poised, he has a rich, booming voice, but he doesn’t often “inhabit the role,” in the acting sense; instead, every move seems calculated and practiced. I kept thinking of that early scene in “Terminator 2,” when Arnold Schwarzenegger, as a cyborg, walks into a biker bar, and a digital readout flashes across the inside of his eyelids, giving height, weight, and build of each person he sees. Similarly, you can see Gore read a situation, pause while the script flashes, formulate his response—and then react. He has an odd quality of taking in what he’s seeing with an almost digitalized exactitude (that’s why, in private, he’s supposed to be a gifted mimic), while appearing to be oblivious. Rubin, at one point in his introduction, glanced fondly over at Gore. Gore froze, got the readout (Introducer interacting with V-potUS. Must respond), smiled broadly, and then went back into the waxworks.

Gore has two basic modes when he gives speeches. One is meant to play as “high energy” and the other as statesmanlike. In high-energy mode, he speaks in a Southern accent and takes the stage at a trot. He pivots his body from side to side, bouncing a little on the balls of his feet, and gestures with both hands; all this makes it look as if his hands were controlled by one puppeteer and his body by another. In statesmanlike mode, he has no accent, he walks, and he stands behind a lectern making rolling gestures with one hand. On this day, he was in a kind of enhanced version of statesmanlike: he spoke more peppily than usual, and he used a teleprompter, but his face was like a block and his rhetoric was full of village-elder words like “discipline,” “conscience,” “decency,” “security,” “responsibility,” and “trust.” Then, at the end, he pumped it up a little. When he perorates, Gore slows down his delivery and lowers his voice to a stage whisper. “We will win this fight!” he said. “We will not rest! Hear me now!” When he finished, the song “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” came loudly over the speaker system and he walked out from behind the lectern and shook hands for a while. The speech he had delivered was to the word identical with the text his staff had handed out. It was impossible to leave the room with the feeling that you had been brought into the intimate presence of the real Al Gore.

Gore went off somewhere for the rest of the afternoon, and after dinner he flew to Scranton, Pennsylvania, the next leg of the Prosperity and Progress tour. The event on his schedule was one of the great boilerplate items in Presidential politics, a rally at an airport hangar. I arrived before Gore, in a plane the campaign had chartered for the travelling press. Some of us joined a good-sized crowd in the hangar, and others of us decided to skip the event and go out for dinner. A loudspeaker was playing the kind of up-tempo, glass-rattling anthems that you hear over the sound system at major-league baseball games. Most of the people there were white, middle-aged, and middle class, and they didn’t seem at all put out to be waiting around in a hangar for Gore to arrive. It’s not every day that you see the Vice-President of the United States up close.

One reason Gore had come here was that there was a very close local race for state representative, a special election that would put the Democrats one seat away from a majority in the Pennsylvania legislature, and that would affect redistricting. There was a podium set up, and the candidate for state representative got up and spoke. His name was Jim Wansacz, and he was twenty-eight years old—just about the same age as Al Gore when he made his first run for office. Wansacz’s father had held the same seat years earlier, and now the son was trying to get it back. He seemed impossibly young and raw, out of place in the suit he was wearing, like a boy at his First Communion. He got up and spoke, hoarsely, with a desperate energy, waving his arms, about how much he loved his mother and father—he didn’t seem to feel the need, and neither did the audience, for public-policy talk. As he got a little way into how wonderful his parents were, he started to cry. Then he changed the subject to Al Gore. “He came to our area!” Wansacz shouted. “He cares about the same issues we care about!”

It turned out that several of the politicians in the hangar that night were the scions of political families. Besides Jim Wansacz and Al Gore, there was an Eisenhower (a distant cousin of Dwight) who was running for state attorney general, and two sons of Bob Casey, the former governor of Pennsylvania (he died earlier this year), one of whom is Pennsylvania’s auditor general, the other of whom is running for the U.S. House of Representatives. It was possible to imagine, watching the scene, that the dreams of Albert Gore, Sr., had come true: the children of the miners and factory workers and farmers of his day had become teachers and firefighters, and they were still Democrats. And the children of the old populist politicians were New Democrats, but still fighting, delivering a new kind of public goods to their people, preschool and prescription drugs instead of electricity and running water and banks that wouldn’t fail.

Air Force Two landed, taxied, and parked so as to be perfectly framed in the doorway of the hangar, fifty yards away. Various people emerged from the plane, limousines materialized on the runway, the ballpark music came up, and then there was a long, long pause. Finally, Gore appeared in the doorway of the plane. He stopped, waved, walked down the stairway, and then ran at a dead sprint across the runway to the hangar. It may sound corny, but if you were there it was really exciting, the spotlighted VicePresident running toward you. The crowd cheered, and Gore mounted the podium. He seemed relaxed and happy, even though it must have been a brutally long day for him. In a deep Southern accent, he said that Tipper says hello and that they had just celebrated their thirtieth wedding anniversary. Had anybody else been married thirty years? That’s great. And we just became grandparents for the first time. Any other grandparents here?

Gore was speaking into a handheld microphone, without a script, lustily promising things—prescription-drug benefits, family leave, better-behaving H.M.O.s, better schools, help with college tuition. “Ah’m just gettin’ warmed up,” he said after a few minutes. “Ah think ah’m gon’ take mah coat off.” And on and on he went with the strong economy and the way he was gon’ put Medicare in a lockbox where Congress couldn’t mess with it. In the windup, he let his voice break a little and pranced across the stage, and then he plunged into the crowd to shake hands.

A limousine pulled near to drive Gore away. He handshook his way over to it, and somebody opened a door for him. Then something peculiar happened. Gore turned and looked back at the hangar and the podium, frozen for a long moment in silhouette against the spotlights. It was as if two invisible strings were pulling him in opposite directions, the limo and the hangar. Suddenly, with an air of wild release, he ran back to the podium, leaped up the stairs, spread his arms exultantly, and absorbed wave after gratifying wave of the unconditional love of the crowd. He dismounted and went back to the handshaking in a near-frenzy, circumnavigating the entire hangar, for twenty, thirty, forty minutes. Often when Gore appears in public, people start quietly slipping out of the room after a while. This time nobody was about to leave before he did.

Some of the reporters had a cynical interpretation of what we were seeing. The Gore campaign had hired a film crew to shoot this event for possible use in advertisements: never believe that Gore is capable of spontaneity. Even so, it was an electric moment, the only one I ever saw on the Gore campaign—the only one where Gore seemed like a real politician, instead of somebody trying very hard to play the part of a politician.

By the next morning, the electricity was gone. The local bishop had cancelled a Gore event on health care scheduled for the following day at a Catholic hospital, because Gore favors legal abortion. The lead story in the Scranton Times-Tribune was about how, at the airport hangar, Gore had mistakenly referred to Jim Wansacz by his father’s name, John. The Times, where Gore had stopped to meet with the senior editors and reporters on his way to the speech at the New-York Historical Society, as part of the kickoff of the Prosperity and Progress tour, printed excerpts of the conversation that made it clear he had come across poorly, having answered questions by delivering little speeches on tangentially related topics.

The Gore campaign had hastily lined up another hospital for the event, but there were protesters outside with signs saying “George W. Bush for President” and “Stop the Killing of Unborn Babies.” The triumphant visit to Scranton had become the controversial visit to Scranton. Inside, Gore conducted a town meeting, the kind of event his staff thinks he’s best at, with a group of doctors and nurses. His Southern accent was gone. Whenever he had to mention someone’s name, he bore down on it, clearly trying to avoid his mistake of the night before. He seemed to be straining to connect. Every time somebody asked a question, Gore would walk over and stand close, making intense eye contact and nodding slowly to show that he understood. Then, after the question had been asked, he would stroll to the middle of the stage and deliver his answer to the whole audience. It was a technique that probably made theoretical sense, but it seemed awfully forced when you were watching it.

One doctor asked Gore about malpractice, beginning with an amiable dig—vintage locker-room-of-the-hospital stuff—about Gore’s being a lawyer. You could see the readout on Gore’s eyelids: All doctors hate lawyers. Must reassure subject. V-POTUS not lawyer. V-POTUS journalist. “Actually, I did not wind up becoming a lawyer,” Gore said. “I wound up becoming a newspaper reporter.” Actually, Gore left being a full-time newspaper reporter to go to law school, and then left law school to run for Congress. This is the kind of exaggeration he falls into when he’s forcing his game, trying to ingratiate himself in a way that obviously isn’t real—the kind that, if anybody catches him at it, can be presented as one of his “lies.”

Before the event was scheduled to end, people stopped raising their hands. “I seem to have exhausted the questions and comments,” Gore said evenly. He went into a few closing remarks, the ballpark music came up, he shook a few hands, and then he ducked out.

The familiar idea that Gore is stiff in public but funny and relaxed in private is within range of the truth, yet it doesn’t capture the full strangeness of the situation. On rare occasions, he can be wonderful in public. I caught a glimpse of that in Scranton. Gore’s friends like to cite a few other examples. There was a tour of the Western states at the end of the 1992 Presidential campaign when every stop seemed to draw an adoring crowd, and you could feel the impending victory. There was his fiftieth-birthday party, at which k.d. lang, dressed in a tuxedo, vampily sang “Happy Birthday, Mr. Vice-President,” parodying Marilyn Monroe’s famous serenade to J.F.K., while Tipper Gore feigned jealousy and Gore feigned temptation (the joke being that lang is gay). There was the eloquent eulogy he delivered for his father, in 1998. Earlier this year, an old friend of his named Jerry Thompson, a columnist for the Nashville Tennessean, died during the runup to the New Hampshire primary, a crucial event for Gore. He cleared his schedule, flew to Nashville for two days, and delivered a great, heartfelt speech.

Gore can also be stiff and lifeless in private. “Every time you see him, it’s almost like you’re meeting him for the first time,” one old friend says. He is incapable of making small talk. And it gets even stranger. A political consultant who had been involved in several winning Senate campaigns in the 1998 elections went up to Capitol Hill to watch his clients being sworn in when the new congressional session opened. Gore, as presiding officer of the Senate, appears at these ceremonies. At the first swearing-in, the consultant thought, Ah, finally I’m getting to see the famous loose, funny Gore, the genuinely attractive and charming figure. At the next swearing-in, Gore was precisely the same, joke for joke, gesture for gesture, as if his central processing unit were performing a subroutine that he had loaded in earlier in the day. The same thing happened at the next swearing-in, and the next, and the next—not the minutest variation. So there isn’t as much difference between loose and funny and stiff and formal as it may appear.

Gore sometimes switches modes in midstream, too, in public and in private. He lacks any middle range. He’ll be speaking animatedly, and then, as if a great, grinding railyard switch is being thrown, he’ll abruptly shut down and become lifeless. What seems to trigger this is an internal risk sensor, which, once activated, causes him to become overwhelmingly cautious. An invitation to say something impolitic, to give an opinion on an issue where offending an interest group whose support he wants seems unavoidable, and he’s gone, into a territory of bland, well-tested sloganeering.

The phenomenon is self-reinforcing. Gore’s painfully high self-awareness, his impulse to think rather than feel his way through a situation, leads to an excessively controlled presentation. (Even when he is evidently at ease, he speaks very formally, as I found out when I met him.) People notice those qualities, and conclude that he’s condescending, or not paying attention, or even being actively hostile. They react by finding little ways to zing him—the reporters who travel with him, palpably seething over how controlled the environment is, do this a lot, finding new exaggerations and material for “campaign in trouble” stories—and Gore then retreats even further. Besides being a good public speaker, a high-level politician has to have a capacity for brief face-to-face interactions that leave the other person all aglow, convinced that there’s a real relationship there. Gore is able to do this, but often, inexplicably, he doesn’t. A common story you hear about Gore involves somebody’s meeting him, being charmed and impressed (nobody in politics has more earnestly good impulses), developing what feels like a friendship, and then having a painful encounter in which Gore has, without warning, become an automaton, a man who speaks in a sonorous official tone about the positions of the Clinton-Gore Administration, the way an adult would speak to a child, or who answers heartfelt correspondence with a form letter. Gore has a closer family life and fewer real friends than most Washington figures of his eminence; people who think of themselves as acquaintances, and think that Gore treats them as such, will sometimes be surprised to hear that he has described them to someone else as intimates.

Another thing the best politicians do is attract a cadre of true believers, who work for them in a spirit of nearly religious devotion. Gore has one person like this in his upper echelon of advisers—Leon Fuerth, his foreign-policy aide, who had early training as an engineer, is so precise, diligent, and guarded, speaking not just in perfect sentences but in perfect paragraphs, that he makes his boss look like Jim Carrey. Most of the others around Gore as he runs for President are professionals, people who have won their battle stars in the Democratic Party but have no special connection to him. Even his closest campaign adviser, Carter Eskew, who has known him since 1973 and was brought into the Presidential campaign only last spring in connection with a shakeup, made it clear when I talked to him that his personal relationship with Gore is on hold until November, and that for now he is hired help.

People who travel with a Presidential campaign often refer to it half jokingly as the “bubble,” meaning that it is an extraordinarily controlled, unnatural environment, and you never quite know where it’s taking you next, or what’s going on in the outside world, and you’re constantly being watched. It’s an apt analogy, which might be extended by saying that Al Gore is a “bubble boy,” like those immunodeficient kids who are a staple of People and made-for-TV movies. He has been an elected official in the federal government since he was twenty-eight years old. Even before he was a congressman, Gore was a young prince, widely seen by his family and close friends as a potential President.

Bill Kovach, the recently retired curator of the Nieman Foundation, at Harvard, who was originally a journalist in Tennessee, remembers meeting the sixteen-year-old Gore at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, in Atlantic City, and being drawn into a searching conversation by his older sister Nancy about how Al ought to play the question of serving in Vietnam, in light of his future political prospects. At Harvard, Gore wore neckties to class and called his teachers “sir” after everybody else had stopped doing so, made himself a protégé of one of the leading scholars of the American Presidency, Richard Neustadt, and wrote his undergraduate honors thesis (based mainly on interviews with upper-echelon figures in the Washington establishment) on the effect of television on the Presidency. Soon after Gore got to Congress, he began to look for national issues on which he could develop a reputation for stature. He was elected to the Senate, all of whose members have had the thought of being President flit across their minds, at the age of thirty-six. He first ran for President at the age of thirty-nine. The stakes have always been high, and because of the changing politics of the South, and of the nation, the risk has always been high, too. In the last thirty years, words that Albert Gore, Sr., took for granted as the staples of his political rhetoric, like “liberal” and “tax” and “government,” have come to have negative connotations. Al Gore has lived a life devoid of incentives to let down his guard.

What he has done, perhaps in response, is to develop an intellectual quality that is rare in a politician, a tendency to understand the world in terms of abstract systems. The usual currency of politics is people. You meet with people all day long, people work for you, you stand at the lectern and speak to people, and that leads you to understand the world at large in terms of people, too. Worth is measured in aggregate numbers of people helped. History itself seems to turn on questions of alliances and coalitions and parties and elections. Gore just doesn’t think this way. The readout always seems to be saying Hit escape to go up one level. So up and up and up he goes—and away and away and away—until he reaches a realm of cosmic understanding of the larger forces against which our petty affairs are played out. Gore is all transcendence and no immanence (and Bush is all immanence and no transcendence). “The world is a system, not a collection of individuals,” I heard him say in one of his speeches (not an applause line, you can be sure). Who else would say this in a Presidential campaign, or even think it?

At this empyrean level, where almost none of day-to-day politics is conducted, Gore is the most impressive politician alive. The lack of connection between the drive to moral improvement that seems to be Gore’s underlying motivation for being in politics and the careful positioning that has been a prerequisite to election as a Southern Democrat during his adult life disappears. He is free to be a crusader, who wants, quite literally, to rescue humanity (from its own mistakes, through the power of the disciplined mind). When Gore has to come down to the ground level of daily politics, he overcalculates, or he too obviously ingratiates, or he brutally attacks, or he sticks too closely to the script. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a real Al Gore behind the opaque exterior. There is. You find him by going up and away.

The earliest clear glimpse of Al Gore’s mind is his Harvard undergraduate thesis, “The Impact of Television on the Conduct of the Presidency, 1947-1969.” It’s good! Gore, though usually a dull speaker, is almost never a dull writer. When he’s sitting by himself at a desk, an organized intelligence goes to work. You don’t get anecdotes or elegant turns of phrase, but the thoughts are crisp, and they march smartly along, and when a date or a fact is called for he chases it down. Already, in the thesis, a recognizable Gore is present: it is a work of technological determinism, in which systems are more powerful than people, even Presidents of the United States. You can almost feel Gore empathetically entering the situation of the television-challenged Lyndon Johnson and trying to figure out how somebody else equally uncomfortable with the medium might handle it better: by limiting exposure and weighing every word.

In the thesis, Gore makes it clear which medium, print or television, he prefers: in print, “personality factors and visual rhetoric are effectively screened out and the reader is forced to make judgments on the basis of logic and reason.” So it shouldn’t be surprising that, after college and Vietnam, he chose to take a job at the Nashville Tennessean. Old friends of Gore’s describe this as the happiest time of his life, and the only time in his adulthood when he usually seemed at ease and readily made connections with other people (by Gore’s, not general human, standards). Journalists know that their field is, counterintuitively, a refuge for shy, self-conscious people. Also, journalism provided an outlet for Gore’s love of meticulous, systemic analysis and of moralism: he was an investigative reporter and an editorialist. (For a time while he was at the Tennessean, he had gone to Vanderbilt Divinity School.)

At the same time, Gore moved to the place where his family’s political base was. The Tennessean’s editor and publisher, John Seigenthaler, Sr., one of a long line of substitute fathers Gore has acquired during his life, was more than just a newspaperman. He had been an aide to Robert Kennedy and was well connected in the Democratic Party; being his protégé put you into a network that extended into politics.

Bill Kovach remembers getting a call from Albert Gore, Sr., a few years into Al Gore’s Tennessean period, when Kovach was living in Washington and working for the Times. Could he call Al and try to talk him into going to law school? The former Senator said he knew that Al loved his newspaper work, but it would be a shame for him to close off his options, to lose the chance to do something else later. Kovach made the call, and he and the Senator’s son had a long talk, with Kovach invoking the names of sainted figures in journalism who had legal training, such as Anthony Lewis, and Gore sounding polite but unenthusiastic. He went, of course, but he still worked for the Tennessean, and when the congressman from his home district announced his retirement—the news was conveyed by Seigenthaler, who added, “You know what I think”—he dropped out to run, knowing that in that part of Tennessee once you win a congressional seat it’s yours for life. He was elected in 1976, a year of redemption for the Gore family, because while Al was winning Bill Brock was losing the old Gore Senate seat to a Democrat, Jim Sasser.

As a congressman, Gore pursued a two-track strategy. First, he became an obsessively hardworking, risk-avoiding advocate for his constituents. He flew back to middle Tennessee nearly every weekend, and when he was there he would hold town meetings, often as many as five or six a day, to listen to his constituents’ complaints. If you asked for a favor, it would be entered in a notebook, which Gore would consult while driving between towns so that he would remember to ask you if that problem with your Social Security check which we discussed a few months back had been taken care of.

The other track involved making his name on issues that were not directly related to his district—unlike his father, who had developed a national reputation as a fierce and partisan advocate on the issues that mattered most to the constituents. Right away, Gore got a seat on the House Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee, and was active on the subcommittee on oversight and investigations. In the late seventies, investigating corporate misdeeds had a prestige that is difficult to recapture today. Gore turned the subcommittee into a venue for taking on business bad guys with a brittle, furious moral righteousness. Not yet thirty, he presided over public hearings at which he warned the chairman of Gulf Oil that he was “on thin ice.” He went after the contact-lens industry for overpricing, a chemical company for selling a carcinogenic flame retardant used in children’s pajamas, and uranium producers for price fixing.

As time went on, Gore shifted his attention, in the great-world compartment of his congressional career, from investigations to arms control. Encountering Leon Fuerth, he signed up for a yearlong, one-on-one tutorial, complete with weekly meetings and a syllabus, and relentlessly mastered what is probably the most arcane topic in government—the topic that may be the most important to the future of humanity but is one of the least important to voters. Becoming an expert on nuclear arms gave Gore a national, and even international, reputation. (Not an easy thing—can you name a junior congressman?) It also established him as the kind of centrist, pro-defense Democrat that the times seemed to demand, especially if you came from the South. And the arms-control debate was conducted in that very Gore realm—Hit escape to go up one level—where humans recede and technology and logic come to the fore.

In 1983, when Tennessee’s senior senator, Howard Baker, announced his impending retirement from the Senate, Gore, who had been monitoring Baker’s intentions since early in his House career, began planning his candidacy at once. He was elected easily, in 1984, and it seemed to be another seat he could hold for life, especially because he continued to visit home constantly and to avoid the kind of stands that had caused his father to lose. As he had in the House, Gore made himself into the kind of member who is more a prominent voice than a passer of bills, engendering in his colleagues more respect than love. In 1991, after he cast one of ten Democratic votes in favor of entering the Gulf War, the Democratic leader, George Mitchell, barely even spoke to him for a time.

In 1987, just two years into his first Senate term, Gore decided to run for President. He was, obviously, not the front-runner, but there was no front-runner that year. (The Democrats wound up nominating Michael Dukakis.) Running was a brassy, but not all that risky, move for Gore. It was the début year for Super Tuesday, the many-state Southern primary designed to put the center of the Party back in control of the nominating process. Even if Gore didn’t win, he would have positioned himself a few notches up in the Party hierarchy, and Super Tuesday gave him a real shot.

But Gore drew a remarkably harsh lesson (to the point of self-flagellation) from the only race he hasn’t won: that he had debased himself in Presidential politics and now he was a man in need of spiritual redemption. He later wrote, “I began to doubt my own political judgment, so I began to ask the pollsters and professional politicians what they thought I ought to talk about. As a result, for much of the campaign I discussed what everybody else discussed, which too often was a familiar list of what the insiders agree are ‘the issues.’ ” (This is an eerily precise description of what Gore has been doing—again—in his second Presidential race.) Now he needed to deepen himself.

Gore asked a group of his friends to set up a series of seminars for him, like the arms-control seminars with Leon Fuerth, only much more ambitious, with big-time thinkers, such as the economists Kenneth Arrow and Brian Arthur, flying to Washington to brief him. Up one level! By the end of it, Gore had a new, sweeping view of the world and its prospects. His main interest had noticeably shifted, from arms control to global warming, but the setup was familiar: mankind was in a morally dire situation of its own making, which could be solved through a combination of analytic mastery, spiritual guidance, and the use of technology in healthy ways instead of unhealthy ones.

He decided to write a book. In the summer of 1990, a proposal for a work by Gore about the environment made the rounds of publishers in New York, and John Sterling, the editor-in-chief of Houghton Mifflin, after a long talk with the impassioned Gore, made a deal to publish it. Gore turned in a first draft in July of 1991. Gore mythology has it that seeing his young son hit by an automobile after a baseball game in 1989 helped him decide not to run for President again in 1992. Although his son’s accident was a searing experience and Gore devoted himself completely to the child’s recovery, it’s also the case that at the time he turned in the first draft of the book he still hadn’t made up his mind about 1992. (By his own account he began writing the book in his son’s hospital room.) Sterling and Gore agreed that the book needed substantial revision, and they soon realized that he couldn’t possibly get it done and also run for President. Gore said he needed a little time to think about that. Then, in August, he called Sterling and said he had decided not to run, but he wanted the book to be published in January—before the diversions of Presidential politics. That schedule meant a brutal extra workload for everybody involved, especially Gore himself. But he met the deadline. He worked flat out for months, summoning up all of that furious, hungry, competitive diligence he has. And the book arrived in stores during the third week of January, 1992.

What transaction had just taken place, exactly? Had Gore given up a shot at the Presidency for the sake of the book, because the book was more important to him? Had he insisted on the killer rush because he wanted the book to function as an advertisement for his Vice-Presidential candidacy, or even as a means of late entry into the Presidential race if the other candidates faltered? Whatever was going on, the book that was meant to take him away from the calculations imposed by Presidential politics, that was meant to be renunciatory, brought him back in. Having attempted to free himself of his own “timidity of vision” and become an environmental crusader, Gore wound up in one of the most constrained jobs there is.

Though the book, “Earth in the Balance,” was much made fun of by Republicans, it is an impressive and brave work. Rather than confine itself to matters of government policy, it ranges widely over all manner of historical, psychological, and religious matters. It is melodramatic, apocalyptic, and passionate, the work of a guarded man who has made a conscious decision—forced himself—to bare his soul on the printed page. As he writes, “I have become very impatient with my own tendency to put a finger to the political winds and proceed cautiously.”

The soul that Gore bares in “Earth in the Balance” is a tormented one. The theme of self-criticism is nearly ever present, and Gore makes it clear that, aside from the facts of the case, he was drawn to the environmental crisis and the solving of it as a way of working out a crisis in his own life. As he puts it, “The search for truths about this ungodly crisis and the search for truths about myself have been the same search all along.” He argues that every bad quality in people, singularly or collectively, manifests itself specifically in desecration of the earth. Conversely, the saving of the earth is possible only if we embrace—if he embraces, in particular—a different, better set of qualities. In the moral hierarchy that Gore creates in “Earth in the Balance,” the lowest rung is occupied by cynicism, short-range thinking, and cheap manipulation of images and slogans, all of which he specifically attributes to politics. On the next rung there is logic and reason, but if, in the end, we are going to save the earth this, too, must be put aside in favor of a looser, freer, less controlling spirituality. Female qualities seem to be superior to male ones. In a long passage on dysfunctional families which has an autobiographical air, Gore posits a child who grows up “severely stressed by the demands of the dominant, all-powerful father.” A little later, he suggests that this child “begins controlling his inner experience—smothering spontaneity, masking emotion, diverting creativity into robotic routine.” Environmentalism somehow offers the promise of undoing all that damage and healing all that pain and making one genuine at last.

“Earth in the Balance” is not so much the work of an intellectual as the work of someone immensely impressed by intellectualism and intellectuals, who occupy the venerated position for him that baseball heroes do for Bush. Gore constantly seeks to demonstrate the breadth of material that he has mastered: the Bible, electrical engineering, mythology, psychology, history. In the footnotes, he mentions having constructed a master calendar correlating the great events of world history with major changes in weather and climate. Can there be anybody in public life who knows more than Gore does, or who so much wants us to see how much he knows? What is also striking about the book is how much it is taken up with a seemingly endless series of metaphors, alternatively highdramatic, technological, showily erudite, and religio-spiritual. Sandpiles, holography, human skin, machines, the midlife crisis, Kristallnacht, and slavery are all brought in by Gore as points of comparison to environmental phenomena. One of the basic distinctions in literary theory—a subject of intense interest to Gore—is between metaphor and metonymy. Metaphor is implied comparison—the literary equivalent of a cutaway shot in a movie. Metonymy is the expression of a whole by reducing it to a part—the equivalent of a closeup. “My new car is a real thoroughbred!” is metaphoric; “I’ve got a new set of wheels” is metonymic. Gore communicates by comparing, not reducing—he thinks in metaphors. (And Bush thinks in metonyms.) Even when his intention is to shed all restraint and become passionate and direct, his mind is always taking him away, to something else that seems to him similar to the subject at hand.

It is easy to forget, at this late and weary point in the Clinton Administration, and after so many years of Al Gore-is-stiff jokes and his endless attempts to defuse them (one year he had himself wheeled in to the Gridiron dinner on a handcart), how exciting his nomination as Vice-President was. His book was a big hit, he had an attractive and obviously close family, and he had national stature. He gave Clinton some much-needed ballast. But in hindsight the Vice-Presidency was a perilous role for Gore. It required him to suppress the full-throated passion to which he had pledged himself in “Earth in the Balance” and put him in close proximity to a man who, as a natural at the personal side of politics, might have been customdesigned to heighten his insecurities.

Clinton and Gore have treated each other rather well, though. Clinton gave Gore the things Vice-Presidents always want: a West Wing office, a one-on-one weekly lunch, and supervising authority over a few real issues (as opposed to funeral duty and the chairmanship of ceremonial commissions). Gore, conversely, played two roles, at least in the early years, both of which were quite useful to Clinton. Clinton has trouble taking a firm stand; Gore was the house moralist, the advocate for the option that would represent the unpopular, tough, but right thing to do. He was for imposing an energy tax, intervening early in Bosnia, allowing gays in the military, and balancing the budget. And he took on for the disorganized Clinton the management of big, complex, unglamorous tasks, the kind that involve great draughts of bureaucratic work without much political payoff. He managed the National Performance Review, better known as “Reinventing Government,” which involved going through the entire federal government agency by agency and through the budget line by line. He represented the White House in the negotiations over the important but (to the public, anyway) terminally dull telecommunications act, which Congress passed in 1996. He set up three major and several minor bilateral commissions with the No. 2s in foreign governments, which then established subcommittees to discuss the details of government. Nobody has ever taken on such a big workload as Vice-President.

To understand how Gore did at these tasks, it’s helpful to think again of the great grinding railyard switch being thrown. When offering his advice, he was preachy, but when he was in charge of something he was ministerial: diligent, careful, responsible, thorough, and politically clunky. The National Performance Review did save a lot of money, mainly by offering corporate-style early-retirement buyouts to civil servants, but Gore was notorious within the Administration for pushing to have an aggressively high savings figure attributed to it. In general, the parts of the review that required systematic understanding and hard work came to fruition and the parts that required political skill did not: the government’s computer-buying procedures were modernized, but the Treasury couldn’t be induced to turn the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms over to the F.B.I., where it belongs. Gore’s Russia commission, similarly, did scads of useful work but wound up embarrassing him politically. Just days after his opposite number, Viktor Chernomyrdin, came to the United States for a chummy joint press conference with Gore in Washington, followed by a trip à deux to Silicon Valley, Chernomyrdin was fired by Boris Yeltsin. Gore was great at thorough, and not so great at adept.

The over-all picture of Gore as a government executive which emerges from people who have worked with him is that he always knows the material, that he is efficient and hard-driving, to the point sometimes of being peremptory with staff members who are late with something or haven’t done it right, that his intentions are nothing but the best, but that he lacks “touch,” or “feel.” Clinton is legendary inside the government for improving on the prepared speech or talking points in the delivery; Gore is legendary for sticking rigidly to the script. In meetings, Clinton often guides the discussion to an inference that the staff didn’t see in advance; Gore marches through the agenda in precise, orderly fashion, speaking in the technical language of a public-policy graduate seminar. Clinton hates being alone; Gore likes being alone, sitting in his office in front of the computer screen, sipping herbal tea. The mystical part of Clinton’s soul finds its expression in actually doing the stuff you do in a government job, like making speeches and lobbying legislators and running meetings. The mystical part of Gore’s soul finds its expression in ascending to a plane far above the one where daily politics is practiced. He is never happier than when meeting with the type of person he admires most—not another politician but an intellectual, cultural, or spiritual figure who has thought about the world in a new way, such as Carl Sagan, the astronomer, or Deborah Tannen, the linguist, or the Grateful Dead and the Dalai Lama (both brought to the White House for visits by a proud and delighted Gore), or Stephen Hawking, the theoretical physicist, or Daniel Hillis, the father of parallel computing, or Ian Player, the South African environmentalist who saved the white rhinoceros.

As Gore’s White House years went on, he seemed to fall off the wagon he had proclaimed himself to be on by writing “Earth in the Balance.” The old, guarded, politically risk-averse version of himself was more often on display. People around him thought that the Democratic rout in 1994 rattled him, and that Clinton’s impeachment, coming, as it did, just on the verge of his own Presidential campaign, really rattled him. In both cases, he said in strategy meetings that the President was a kind of national father and that the country now was fatherless—which seemed to people listening to have more to do with the low moment’s whisking Gore back to the primal moment of the loss of his own father, on the altar of political courage, in 1970, than with the practicalities of the situation at hand.

In 1997, when an international summit meeting on global warming was held in Kyoto—the issue to which Gore pledged himself utterly in “Earth in the Balance”—he temporized, under a barrage from his political aides, who saw the summit as a loser for him, until the last possible minute. In the end, he went, and he spent the long plane flight forcing his staff through a complete revision of the bland speech that had been written for him. Global warming is the toughest possible issue for Gore. Part of the solution is to convert coal-fired plants, some of the worst of which are in the Midwest, to natural gas, and to reduce auto emissions—and Gore cannot be elected President without carrying the Midwest and retaining the support of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., whose treasurer is the former head of the mine workers’ union. In August of 1998, a delegation of heads of environmental groups called on Gore in the White House to urge him to do more on global warming. He lost his temper and shouted, “Name me one senator who’ll support me on this!” He told his visitors he had become convinced that we have to have a major catastrophe before the American public will be ready to do anything about global warming.

The Democratic nomination appeared at first to be as safely Gore’s as his House and Senate seats had been. When Bill Bradley’s challenge looked as if it were unexpectedly going to take off, Gore had an intense, worried reaction, firing a significant portion of the campaign high command he had painstakingly assembled and moving sharply away from the centrist position he had built up over his years in public life. In 1995, Gore held a series of three dinners at the Vice-Presidential mansion to discuss race (Bradley was among the guests). Gore was typically guarded, but one might have surmised that he was rethinking some of the traditional Democratic positions. He had asked prominent thinkers on the topic, including Tamar Jacoby, a writer and editor who is now one of the nation’s leading voices of opposition to affirmative action, to organize the dinners; after each one, Gore and Jacoby, along with Martin Peretz, the editor of The New Republic (and one of Gore’s surrogate fathers), Peretz’s wife, Anne, and Stanley Crouch, the fight-picking novelist-critic-musician—Peretz a wholehearted opponent of affirmative action, and Crouch a supporter with reservations—sat around sipping cognac when the other guests had left. Earlier this year, in a debate at the Apollo Theatre, in Harlem, Gore indignantly accused Bradley of harboring inner doubt about the one affirmative-action program that even people who love affirmative action are embarrassed about, a Federal Communications Commission tax break on sales of cable-television systems to (necessarily rich) minorities.

Leaving aside impeachment, which after all had almost no negative impact on Democratic candidates in the last national elections, it would be hard to think of a more ideal set of circumstances under which to run for President than the ones Gore finds himself in this year. The economy is better than it has ever been. We are at peace. The Democratic Party has shed its McGovernite baggage. Gore’s opponent has nowhere near his experience or his stamina or his impressive biography or his disciplined mind. But the people around Gore, and evidently the candidate himself, seem to believe that to present him to the voters as he really is—a serious man who at every juncture has pushed himself hard, who cares about doing right, who has developed passion and expertise, who has a sense of the world, who has devoted himself to public life—couldn’t possibly work. Instead, the play is to develop a position on each issue that is more popular than George W. Bush’s—a Social Security position, a prescription-drug position, a budget-surplus position—and to out-aggress Bush, work longer hours than he can work, go at him hard, rattle him, and force him into mistakes. The Gore people are hiding their guy, in other words, behind a wall of fine-grained political calculation. Most of what Gore says in public is in relation to Bush, rather than about himself. What would we see if he stopped doing that?

I interviewed Gore on Air Force Two one Saturday afternoon during a flight between a fund-raiser in San Francisco and a fund-raiser in Miami. The plane is set up, back to front, in this way: stewards and kitchen; press; security (more people than you’d expect); staff (fewer people than you’d expect); Vice-President’s cabin. The press sits in first-class splendor, hoping, almost always in vain, that Gore will wander back for an informal chat. Everybody warned me that if I asked Gore any question about whatever was the issue of the moment—on that day, whether Janet Reno would appoint a special counsel to investigate his fund-raising activities in 1996—he would answer with bland press-conference rhetoric. So I decided to go as far in the other direction as I possibly could.

Somewhere in the middle of the flight, Chris Lehane, Gore’s thin, determined press secretary, came and motioned me up to the front of the plane, and together we went into Gore’s cabin. It was small and meticulously neat. There was a desk with a big executive-style chair on each side, and, on the other side of the cabin, a small sofa with a coffee table bolted to the floor in front of it. All the tabletops were perfectly clear.

Gore had us sit together on the sofa, so that we had to pivot to face each other. He was wearing white khakis, a green semi-casual buttoned shirt, and black polished cowboy boots—the uniform of a Sunbelt dad at a Saturday barbecue. Up close, his features, which look thick and blocky to an audience, have an almost porcelain delicacy. He has unusually white teeth and unusually blue eyes. I noticed that his fingernails were bitten to the quick.

Before the three dinners on race that he hosted, he had held a series of three dinners on metaphor, with a leading scholar acting as interlocutor at each one. I asked him why he’s so interested in metaphor, mentioning both the dinners and the heavy use of metaphor in “Earth in the Balance.”

Gore brightened. “Oh, you’ve read my book?” he said. “Oh, thank you!” He seemed genuinely pleased, almost to the point of being flustered. “You want some coffee? Water?” I said no, thanks. “Well, thanks for reading my book. I appreciate that. And for you to read it is different from”—readout: Let’s maybe not go there—“I mean . . . well, anyway, thank you.”

He paused for a long time to gather his thoughts, and when he spoke it was in deliberate, print-ready prose, delivered with just the faintest hint of a Southern accent. “The word ‘metaphor’ is just a highfalutin description of a very common, ubiquitous process by which all of us try to increase our understanding of the world around us,” Gore said. “You move from the familiar to the unfamiliar. You use what you know as a tool for trying to better understand what you don’t know.” He paused again. “At the most basic level, right now, since we’ve just met, I’m using myself as a metaphor for you.”

How so? I asked.

“What I know about human nature is rooted first and foremost in my own life experience, and since I don’t know you very well I’m making assumptions about the way you approach life that inevitably begin from the experiences that I have had. And I daresay you’re doing the same thing with me. It’s not a complicated process, and even to call attention to it gives it more significance than it ought to have. But the point I’m trying to make is that often the word ‘metaphor’ is simply a shorthand description for a very common, run-of-the-mill intellectual tool that all of us use.

“I became interested in more complex metaphors and their explanatory power when I was writing ‘Earth in the Balance.’ In particular, in my effort to try to understand the origins of our modern world view, and its curious reliance on specialization and ever-narrower slices of the world around us into categories that are then themselves dissected, in an ongoing process of separation, into parts and subparts—a process that sometimes obliterates the connection to the whole and the appreciation for context and the deeper meanings that can’t really be found in the atomized parts of the whole—and in exploring the roots of that way of looking at the world, I found a lot of metaphors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that came directly from the scientific revolution into the world of politics and culture and sociology. And many of those metaphors are still with us.”

Such as?

“The clockwork universe. The idea that all the world is a machine of moving parts that will eventually be completely understood by means of looking carefully at all the different gears and cogs in the wheels and then . . . ” He trailed off; he seemed to be searching for an exact phrase, and as he did this he turned his head in profile, squeezed his eyes shut, and made a pointing gesture with his hand. Then, when the words came, he turned his head back to me and smiled engagingly. “When I compared the absolute number of new scientific insights that came in the first flush of the scientific revolution to the incredible flood of scientific insights that now pour out of every single discipline, every single day, it’s astonishing. There’s no comparison. And yet the migration of those explanatory metaphors, from the narrow niches of science into the broader public dialogue about how we live our lives and how we understand the human experience and how we can better solve the social problems that become more pressing with each passing decade—that migration is, has been, reduced to the barest trickle.”

I started to interrupt to ask another question. “May I make this one final point here?” Gore said. He turned to Chris Lehane. “Give me something to draw with.” Lehane didn’t have anything, so I tore a piece of paper out of my notebook and gave it to Gore. He put the paper on the coffee table and, leaning over it, made an inscrutable diagram.

Gore showed me the page, which had four pairs of short vertical lines drawn on it, with the space between the lines in each pair varying. “If this”—the first pair—“represented the number of real innovations and brand-new understandings of scientific and mechanical relationships in the world that came after the Cartesian revolution, and all the work done in mathematics and mechanics, this”—the second pair, drawn above it, and spaced a little closer together—“might represent the appearance of analogous explanations in the way society looked at itself. By contrast, this number”—he pointed to the third pair of lines, which were extremely far apart, out at the edges of the piece of paper—“in the current accelerated scientific and technological revolution, wouldn’t be represented on a piece of paper in the same scale.” Gore then indicated the fourth pair of lines, which were set so close together they were practically touching. “And yet the number of the new insights that make their way into our dialogue with one another about the way our world operates, socially, politically, culturally—well, leave alone culturally, because I think artists have done their own work in communicating nonverbally about some of the insights. But the numbers here would be smaller.

“You see the point?” Gore said. He turned to Lehane again. “Get me the copy of the New York Times for today, the full copy. I want the Arts section.” Back to me. “And so—well, anyway, I’m sorry. You go ahead.”

Gore had strayed quite a bit from the strict definition of a metaphor. Instead, he seemed to mean, by metaphor, a new, unrelated, and probably more creative way of thinking about something drawn from another domain. I asked him whether he was interested in metaphors because he was looking for solutions to problems or because he was trying to figure out how best to communicate with the public.

“Both!”

Lehane returned with the newspaper. Gore pointed to a picture of a dog with the head of a sheep. He gave me a long, deep, direct look and a serious nod. “O.K.?” I asked him what he meant. He paused again in profile.

“Our language hasn’t caught up with that artist,” he said, turning back to me. “We are breaking apart the traditional boundaries between species. The day after tomorrow, the human genome will be completed in its first rough draft. That is a landmark on the road toward yet another new Promethean technological power, this time to rearrange the way in which life takes its various forms. And this artist seems to me to be saying, at least on one level, ‘Here is something you’d better prepare yourself for.’ Now, obviously, in the real world that’s not going to happen”—meaning a dog with the head of a sheep. “At least I hope it’s not going to happen. But something like it is happening already. And the image in that work of art communicates right now, more profoundly than anyone in the world of politics or sociology has been able to communicate, about the kinds of decisions that we have to prepare ourselves to make.”

Gore gestured for another piece of paper, and when I gave one to him he bent over the coffee table again and began to draw another diagram. I was starting to wonder whether I ought to direct the conversation more or just keep listening.

The Vice-President worked diligently, like a good student at his desk. This second drawing was made up of a circle with twenty little dots floating inside it, connected by wavy lines. “Now, let me come back to your question.” He walked me through Thomas Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions, apologizing for the overused word “paradigm,” and explained that every so often an unusually creative scientist finds a new way to connect the dots of unexplained data.

I started to interrupt. “Hold on,” Gore said. He wasn’t finished. He leaned forward and lightly touched my arm, to signal me to give him another minute. “That process goes on all the time. What is it that speeds up that process? If you can see a new pattern in one part of the world, it may be a pattern that is widely replicated in other parts of the world. In fact, that is the normal way these things happen. And there is a scientific phenomenon that is called the self-sameness principle. It appears in fractal theory. If you look at a map of the coastline of New Jersey, and then magnify it a hundred times, and then magnify that a thousand times, the basic design of the ins and outs of the coastline will be the same at every level of magnification. And they call that the self-sameness principle. I don’t understand it. It’s way beyond my depth. But I do believe that there’s something about our world that—” He began another long pause. “I’m searching for the right word here—that manifests that self-sameness principle in a lot of different ways. And when we find a brand-new understanding of the world that comes out of a powerful new discovery in science, it often allows us to look at social and political matters and find ways to connect the dots that haven’t made sense before.”

I asked Gore where God fits into all this.

“Give me another piece of paper,” he said. He drew a series of small circles, and then a bigger circle over in a corner of the page. “If you”—another pause—“if you are in an animist society, encumbered with a belief system that—now, that’s a value judgment, but I will stand by it, I think that it’s a confining belief system—if you believe that every object, living or inanimate, which populates your world has its own animating spirit, then intellectually, if you observe some mystery that you can’t explain, you are going to be less than curious about the nature of that phenomenon, because you will most likely assume that that mystery is easily explainable in terms of the whims in the animating spirit of that object. If, on the other hand, you come to believe in a creator or a deity that is responsible for having set in motion or having created all of the universe, then”—he went back to the paper and drew a series of lines, connecting all the little circles to the bigger one—“you have a new power of curiosity, because you don’t assume that there is a whimsical animating spirit that explains what you’re observing. You’re not afraid of that spirit world. You are God-fearing in the sense that you may have some notion of what duties you owe to the creator responsible for both yourself and the rest of the world, but you can look at the world around you without the same fear and trepidation that an animist has. And that can empower you to look for logical explanations for what’s going on in your world.”

In 1996, Gore gave a speech to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in which he proposed “distributed intelligence” as the best metaphor for the current historical moment. I asked him how that metaphor applied to government. He smiled, clearly pleased that I had read the speech. His face was animated and eager, almost shining.

“Here’s how it works,” he said. “Prior to our Constitution, almost all forms of government relied on a single processor of information, be it a king or a khan or a tsar. The decisions were all concentrated at a single place, from which some of them might have to be delegated, but the responsibility was still placed in a single point.” Then he went into a detailed history of the development of parallel computer processing. It was an odd blend of Gore-as-teacher, lecturing me, wanting to confer his understanding, and Gore-as-student, wanting to demonstrate that he had mastered the material. He turned over the last sheet of paper I had given him and drew two circles, one with a single square in the center and arrows pointing in and out of it, the other with a dozen squares scattered in it.

“Now, take this phenomenon”—parallel processing—“as a metaphor and look at systems of government. Here’s the King of England in 1776.” He pointed to the circle that had a single square in the middle. “Whatever challenge the British Empire faced, the ultimate responsibility for making decisions was at the center. As the world became more complicated, the decisions that had to be made stacked up and the process became unwieldy. When our Constitution was written, the revolutionary insight at its core was that every single individual citizen ought to have the power to make meaningful decisions about the world immediately around him. The system we know as representative democracy would, in this analogy, be comparable to the software that makes it possible to have a simultaneous task order go out to all the citizens with suffrage—remembering that of course only white males were then so recognized—and in the regular election process the young nation endeavored to collect the results of all that information processing and assemble it at the center, in the Capitol building, with representatives bringing with them a rough approximation of what all the voters in their districts were thinking and feeling about the challenges that our nation had to confront.” He indicated the second circle, the one containing many squares. “Does that make sense?” He touched my arm lightly again.

I told him I had read his father’s books—on hearing this, he beamed again, and thanked me—and had been struck by how much the old man viewed the world through the lens of race and class. Was that a way of thinking that fit the South only in the past, or did it still make sense to him today?

Gore glanced at Chris Lehane. “We can find more time, if you need more time,” Gore said. “Not on this flight, but afterward.”

He thought for a minute, and then explained that race matters, in a way, less in the South today than in the rest of the country, because the civil-rights movement had put many Southerners, more than people in the rest of the country, through a real transformation. “They emerged from that experience far more enlightened about the true significance of race in our society, and far more able, as a result, to transcend it,” he said. “The basic formula is not that complicated. It’s a two-step process. You have to first establish absolute and genuine mutual respect for difference. And that respect for difference has to include both an appreciation for the unique suffering that has come about because of the difference, and the unique gifts and contributions that have come about because of the difference. And a basic appreciation for the unique perspective that is based on that difference. Then the second step is a transcendence of that difference to embrace all the elements that we have in common in the human spirit.”

My tape ran out—forty-five minutes had passed. I fumbled as I tried to turn it over, and Gore, after watching me for a while, told me how to accomplish the job properly. He had stopped speaking while the tape was not running, and as soon as I had it going again he resumed. “For those who have not been through that searing, transformative personal encounter with the civil-rights revolution a common mistake is to move directly to step two and bypass step one—in other words, to say, ‘Can’t we just get along?’ To say, ‘Let’s transcend this essentially meaningless, artificial distinction called race.’ And it’s a noble, if naïve, thought. Worse than that, it can be”—another long pause while he searched for the right word—“disrespectful of the person of another race you’re relating to, because it’s all too easy for someone in the majority, in a culture shaped by the majority, in a political system largely controlled by the majority, to blithely ignore, or not notice, the profound differences in opportunity and privilege that are pervasive in the experience of someone in the minority in that culture. And if you, as a member of the majority, say, ‘Let’s just transcend this distinction,’ without any apparent appreciation for what the distinction means in the life of the person you’re trying to communicate with, all of your seeming good faith will come off as”—another pause—“contextual hostility.”

I thought I could see what Gore was doing here. He was explaining, indirectly, subtly, and gently, why he had declined to accept the view of Northern friends of his, like Marty Peretz, that the country should drop affirmative action and pursue absolute color-blindness as an ideal. But he had also chosen—surely not by accident, since nothing Gore does is unconsidered—to answer only the race part of my question, not the class part. I asked him whether he agreed with his father’s view that if we could ever get past the race issue we could have a politics of economic class.

“That’s the last question,” Chris Lehane said.

Gore thought again, and out came another perfectly formed answer. “My father’s experience taught him that whenever economic hard times put pressure on those with low incomes and less valuable skills, the result was increased tension between whites and blacks. And therefore his determination to awaken, in whites and blacks alike, the common interest they had in changing policies and politics to empower themselves, and to change the economic royalism, as he would call it, of the Bourbons and their successors, drove him to a view of race that was”—pause—“perhaps too influenced by the enlightenment view.” He stopped himself. “Let me rephrase that. Perhaps too influenced by the common liberal view of the time that race was first and foremost—that racism, excuse me, was first and foremost a logical mistake, which, once corrected, would dissolve and disappear. I don’t believe that. At least, I believe that is true, but not the whole truth. It is a logical mistake, a way of thinking profoundly in error. But it is also a manifestation of a deeper vulnerability.” An aide came into the cabin and handed Gore a slip of paper with a few words written on it. He glanced at it and turned back to me. “Let me ask you to pause for just five minutes, O.K.?”

I left the cabin and stood outside in the aisle. Gore still hadn’t really answered the class part of the question. Here he was, a career government employee who refuses to invest in anything but U.S. Treasury instruments, spending a weekend away from home flying across the country from one fund-raiser to another fund-raiser while figuring out how to handle that week’s crisis, which was his possible prosecution for overaggressive fund-raising. And Bush had managed to position himself, pretty successfully, as the populist in the race and Gore as the élitist! It was hard to imagine that the unlikeliness of this being the life of his father’s son hadn’t occurred to him, but he did not share with me whatever thoughts he had on that subject.

While I was waiting, an image flashed in my mind: Gore in breeches and a powdered wig, composing something at his desk with a quill pen. Perhaps it was a plan for an experiment with new agricultural methods on his land, or correspondence with a like-minded officeholder in another state, or a letter to a packet merchant requesting scientific instruments from France or philosophical texts from England. It also occurred to me that, whatever happens in this election, Gore’s reaction will likely be just what it was after his previous Presidential race, in 1988. He’ll want to redeem himself from his painful excursion into hard-nosed politics, with its blend of overcautious thought and overaggressive behavior, by launching a moral crusade—either from inside the White House or from private life.

Gore opened the door to the cabin and motioned me back in. When we sat down and he saw that the tape was running again, he picked up exactly where he had left off: “I think it is a mistake in thinking, a profound error. But it’s also a manifestation of a deeper vulnerability in human nature, one that we are capable of transcending. But it is a persistent vulnerability.” There was another long, searching pause. “My way of understanding this has come in large measure from Reinhold Niebuhr’s work, and I’m not qualified to paraphrase it, but if I tried I would say it this way: Each of us has an inherent capacity for both good and evil. And if you prefer nonreligious language you could say that the lingering presence of nature red in tooth and claw that we carry with us from our evolutionary development gives us the capacity to strike out violently when we encounter a fearful difference—when we encounter a difference that inspires fear. Groups protect one another. Survival in the ancient past presumably depended on that ready impulse. But our spiritual nature—or, to describe it again in parallel terms, our evolutionary development—has also given us a much richer heritage with which we can overcome the impulse to evil, or violence, triggered by fear of difference.”

By now Chris Lehane was employing nice but insistent the-interview-is-over body language. I was struck, naturally, by the lack of connection between our conversation and the accusatory thrust-and-parry, or rousing catchphrase-making, or after-dinner remarkese, in which people, including Gore, run for President. It was as if the Gore of the past hour were stored in a separate container. “One more thing,” I said to Gore. “Everything we’ve been talking about is to some extent a counterpoint to how one conducts a Presidential campaign. How do you communicate what’s in your soul to the American people, through the static of a Presidential campaign?”

Gore stood up and smiled genially, but I thought also ironically. “Are you talking about before this New Yorker interview appears? I think this article will completely eliminate that problem.” ♦