WASHINGTON
Bill Daley's last official jaunt as commerce secretary before getting tapped for a job he had declined a year ago - chairing Al Gore's presidential campaign - was to a town Gore will carry in November, a town run by a guy who was one of the initial big shots to support him.
Daley and Mayor Tom Menino of Boston were officially promoting programs to span the ''digital divide'' between kids with easy access to the tools of technology and those harder to reach.
But naturally, politics came up. Like Daley's brother, Rich (another early Gore supporter who runs Chicago), Menino is widely known around town and in national city circles to grumble that he can't always hear the relentlessly substantive vice president clearly.
In politics talk, that usually translates into ''message'' criticism, as in the Gore campaign lacks one or has a poor one.
As middle-class, working-family kinds of Democrats and not traditional liberals, Menino and Rich Daley are tight with a buck, successful against crime, and focused on economics. But they are also innovators, and it's no accident that Chicago and Boston are ground zero in the movement to give mayors control of the schools in return for responsibility for their reform.
They both see their worlds as potential sources not just of support for Gore's campaign but as major, big time sources of it if the message is clear and mobilizing. Right now, their view is that it isn't - that Gore's communication is as useless as yesterday's paper.
This viewpoint from people whose support of Gore was early and all out and remains so was in Bill Daley's head last week when the call came from Gore.
A year ago Daley didn't want to join what was known then with proper derision as Gore Inc., a big-spending collection of too many people with clean fingernails endlessly maneuvering for position. The Gore Inc. plane was full in first class; there was no one in coach.
Bill Daley, however, had no worries about a place for him in the campaign he is going to chair. He's been a consultant to it in his spare time all along; he has worked before with everyone who made Gore the first Democrat to win the nomination by winning every primary. In his first detailed exposure to the campaign over the weekend, Daley did not see any significant manifestations of the old Gore Inc., much less any important issue position he thought was off base.
Instead, the challenge is to clarify, simplify, and amplify.
When Bill Daley was kibitzing with the Gore campaign over the past year, advisers recall a fairly constant suggestion from this scion of a Chicago White Sox family: Hit singles. He is no fan of elaborate strategies, but for singles to score runs - they have to be in sequence.
In politics, that requires a campaign that flows every day from one basic premise that people can readily understand in their busy lives and relate instantly to the candidate. Unlike his brother, Bill Daley has gone from Chicago into the nerve centers of the new economy all over the world. But he's still basically a middle-class, working family Democrat who thinks the smart use of the money generated by the economic miracle of the last several years can broaden the base of prosperity and make it more secure.
In Gore's situation, the best case amounts to nothing more complicated than this: I'm going to fight on your side. It is then up to surrogates and maybe some TV commercials to make the case about George W. Bush: He's on their side.
Beyond that kind of simplicity, there's an encyclopedia of substance framed as either-or choices. You can, on the one hand, use these impending budget surpluses to expand basic health insurance through the states, offer universal preschool, have a basic prescription drug benefit within Medicare, give HMO customers a real bill of rights, win the next round against pollution, repair the country's public schools inside and out, and cut income taxes for poor and middle-income working families.
Or you can slash the top tax rates on the highest incomes. But you can't do both.
And in social insurance, you can invest in Medicare and Social Security, extending their life well into this century as we now know them; you can even create investment accounts for today's workers as a supplement to Social Security.
Or, by not investing in Medicare and by taking vast sums out of Social Security to create investment accounts as replacements, you can put all of the burden of eventual ''reform'' onto the basic benefits structure. But you can't do both.
At this very early point, Bush and Gore are almost mirror images. Bush introduces very well and makes an excellent impression, nonthreatening and inclusive. But his record in the primaries suggests he's not such a great second date, especially when questioned beyond the boundaries of his scripts.
Gore is an acquired taste, a trees as opposed to a forest guy a lot of the time. But the primaries improved him, especially his early image of being on the ropes.
Bill Daley is a believer in the steep hill concept of vice presidents running to succeed their presidents. The process of establishing identity after years as number two is painful and slow; the natural landscape always tilts at first in favor of making a change in party control of the White House. For now it looks like that tilt is more slight (as in 1960 with John Kennedy) than sharp (as in Mike Dukakis in 1988).
Daley won't micromanage. But he has the clout to clarify the choice to the point where people like his brother and Tom Menino can hear Gore clearly.
Thomas Oliphant is a Globe columnist.
