ice President Al Gore rolls his hole card in New Hampshire today. To no one's surprise, Governor Jeanne Shaheen will finally endorse him in Rochester.
Once upon a not-too-distant time, this would have been a major campaign event. Now, Shaheen is merely another body, albeit an important one, pushed into the breach to shore up Gore's presidential campaign in the Granite State.
It's taken about two months, but the veep's campaign has turned the battleship around. Around Labor Day, Gore's dreadnought was in danger of grounding on the Isles of Shoals. But a candidate makeover, an emphasis on one-on-one campaigning, and relentless attacks on Democratic rival/underdog Bill Bradley's ''big idea'' health care reform plan, have stabilized the front-runner's campaign.
Shaheen's long-anticipated endorsement has been something of a mixed blessing for Gore. She enraged the left wing of the Democratic Party in the Granite State with her refusal to break ''the pledge'' and back an income tax to fix the state's broken school funding mechanism. Many liberals bolted to Bradley in protest.
Parlous times demand drastic measures, and the Gore campaign has reinvented itself since September polls showed him dropping behind Bradley in crucial New Hampshire. The campaign's own poll had him 11 points behind Bradley among voters who said they would definitely cast ballots in the Feb. 1 Democratic primary.
The remodeling has worked. A Concord Monitor poll, conducted Nov. 29-30, showed Gore leading Bradley by two points.
The ''new Gore'' was evident Tuesday in a series of stops in the populous southern part of the state. The new Al's earth-tone wardrobe reverted to the old dark blue suit, but the candidate was loose, spontaneous, self-deprecating. Now, the emphasis is retail, retail, and more retail politics. No campaigning behind ropes and cordons. Gore now works the crowd like a man of the people, but with an edgy Secret Service squad at the perimeter.
At the Bedford Village Inn, he abandoned the lectern for the center of the room to address about 200 breakfasting business execs, many of them Republicans. They heard him extol the sustained economic growth of seven years of Clinton-Gore administrations (Yes, he does occasionally mention President Clinton). Here, he's a policy wonk with soul. Statistics and anecdotes tumble out one after another during Q & A. Gore explains the effect of the national debt on interest rates one moment, sprawl and traffic congestion on nearby Derry the next, and urges expanded access to credit for minorities after that.
Next, before about 500 students at Concord High School, the new Al is part Oprah, part admonishing parent, talking about school violence prevention, stricter gun control, and the impact of the media on American culture. At one point, he bounds up an aisle for effect, and says later he loves ''The Simpsons'' (though he needed audience prompts to recall the names of two Simpson children in the animated Fox television series.) The measured delivery to the suits of Bedford yields to a freewheeling teacher-preacher, almost shouting at times.
Then it was on to Manchester's West Side for a gathering of about 70 veterans at an American Legion post. This is your basic media event, a Gore button on every lapel, as Al, a non-combat Army enlistee in Vietnam, communes with his brother veterans. The perfectly enunciated ''going to'' of his Bedford remarks has become ''gonna'' for these vets. The soft drawl of Tennessee creeps into Gore's diction. Like grace notes, a ''you all'' here and there punctuates his speech.
Hammy? Sure. Shapeshifting? A tad. But overall, it works.
Now comes the true test for Gore in New Hampshire. With 59 days until the New Hampshire primary, it looks like ''the new Gore'' is emptying the magazine on Bradley, halting his momentum but without putting him away. The former New Jersey senator, meanwhile, is bouncing out of his rope-a-dope response to Gore's slashing attacks on his health care plan. A seven-page, point-by-point rebuttal argues forcefully that Gore's charges are a hatchet job of distortions, exaggerations, and fearmongering.
Moreover, surrogates like Senators Bob Kerrey of Nebraska and Paul Wellstone of Minnesota are vigorously defending Bradley and his plan while simultaneously reinforcing a core Bradley theme - Americans yearn for clean politics, but Gore is trashing Bradley because he can't win with his own uplifting message.
It's Bradley's big bet. If he's right, Gore will need much more than Shaheen and a new wardrobe to carry New Hampshire.
