OS ANGELES - Because Tipper Gore's got a sunny smile, an effervescent personality, and the perfect image of the mom next door, her influence is often underrated. She has a powerful voice in her husband's presidential campaign, but more than that, a persuasive way with people she hardly knows.
Just ask Representative Patrick J. Kennedy, the Rhode Island Democrat who invited Mrs. Gore into his district last winter to speak at a forum on mental health. Before the event in Woonsocket, R.I., was over, Kennedy shocked Mrs. Gore and his staff by disclosing that he had suffered depression since boyhood, sees a psychiatrist regularly, and takes medication for his illness.
''Another profile in courage!'' Mrs. Gore exulted, congratulating Kennedy for a candor that's rare in public life. While her ''courage'' reference was clearly to the Kennedys, the characterization might just as well have applied to her.
Tonight, when she introduces Al Gore as a faithful husband, great family man, and the party's presidential nominee to the Demcratic convention and a national television audience, Tipper Gore's considerable powers of persuasion will be on display. And so will a woman who has been transformed by a quiet but bold act.
A little over a year ago, as the vice president was gearing up for a White House run, Mrs. Gore revealed that she had been treated for depression. In 1989, the couple's son, Albert, was seriously injured when a car hit him as he walked out of a Baltimore Orioles baseball game. Mrs. Gore said she became ''overly stressed'' as she held the family together and helped her son through his long recovery.
Mrs. Gore's disclosure of depression, which was unknown to even her best friends, was deemed a political calculation: Tell the story before a tabloid newspaper gets ahold of it and splashes ''Tipper: `I Took Drugs''' across its cover. Mrs. Gore says as the president's mental-health adviser she is committed to removing the stigma around mental illnesses. But no matter what the motivation, the singular act has made her a heroine to many Americans who relate to the problem.
At a campaign stop in Gardner, Mass., last week, the crowd cheered when Mrs. Gore was introduced as a champion of mental health. Afterward, seated next to Hadassah Lieberman, who grew up in Gardner and is married to Gore running mate Joseph Lieberman, Mrs. Gore said the reaction used to surprise her, but it doesn't anymore. Every place she visits, people come up and hug her, kiss her, and thank her for breaking the silence on depression.
''Talking about mental illness is a very important thing for anyone to do, but to have Mrs. Gore do it - it's a real opportunity for people to admire her strength and have a role model,'' said Judy Stoehr, who works at North Central Human Services in Gardner helping people with mental illnesses find housing. Stoehr said she came to the Gardner rally not to celebrate Mrs. Lieberman's homecoming but to applaud what Mrs. Gore has done.
Ironically, the revelation of her vulnerability has strengthened Mrs. Gore. She is more confident, comfortable, and serious on the stump than she was a year ago. Friends have seen her grow from a supportive political spouse to a dogged and determined partner in Gore's presidential race. She has always been her husband's best friend; now she, her daughter Karenna Gore Schiff, and Frank Hunger, Gore's brother-in-law, have become the most influential faction within Gore's adviser-heavy campaign.
Mark Gearan, who managed the Gores in the 1992 campaign, saw Mrs. Gore's fingerprints all over the selection of Senator Lieberman, someone she admires as a family friend, a good father, and a vocal critic of Hollywood's exploitation of sex and violence.
''I know that scene - it was Tipper and Frank and Karenna - and at the end of the day that family nucleus, that triangle, prevailed,'' said Gearan, a former Peace Corps director and now president of Hobart and William Smith Colleges.
Questioned about her role in selecting Lieberman, Mrs. Gore's smile disappears. ''This was Al's decision,'' she said firmly, giving a scripted answer about the qualifications her husband required in a running mate. But - turning cheery again - Mrs. Gore acknowledged it was wonderful to share a campaign with people she adores.
''It's so nice to have a friend along - plain nice,'' Mrs. Gore said, casting an affectionate glance at Hadassah Lieberman. ''We're on the same wavelength. There are a lot of things we don't have to say; we just look at each other and know how we feel.''
Don't be fooled, friends say, by the perky package and nickname that came from a nursery rhyme. Tipper Gore, born Mary Elizabeth Aitcheson, is very smart, savvy, and full of the emotional intelligence and genuine warmth that her husband is hard-pressed to convey. Mental health isn't just her primary issue; it is the metaphor for her presence in Gore's life and presidential campaign.
''Tipper centers Al Gore. She gives him a dose of what he needs when he needs it,'' said Marla Romash, who worked for Gore in the White House. ''When he needs to laugh, she is the one who can make him do it. When somebody needs to say, `You messed up,' she is the one who can say it.''
Mrs. Gore, who turns 52 on Saturday, met Gore after the senior prom at the private St. Albans School in Washington and followed her Harvard-bound boyfriend to Boston. In 1970, she graduated from Boston University, married Gore, and moved to Tennessee. There she got a master's degree in psychology, but before she could pursue a career as either a child psychologist or a professional photographer (she is seldom without a camera), her husband got elected to Congress, and the Gores, both just 28, headed back to Washington.
While her husband moved up from the House to the Senate to two terms as vice president, Mrs. Gore's assignment was to raise the couple's four children and care for two sets of aging parents. Her commitment to parenting, nurturing, and maintaining some privacy and normalcy for herself and her children was profound. Mrs. Gore's parents were divorced when she was very young. She grew up a lonely, only child, in the Arlington, Va., home of her grandparents because her mother was hospitalized from time to time with severe depression.
No doubt her life experiences made Mrs. Gore an advocate for the sensitive subject of mental health. In fact, from her earliest days in Washington, Mrs. Gore is remembered as a high-energy activist who organized congressional wives to study social issues on the cutting edge - homelesness, mental health, learning disabilities, the impact of technology, and most controversially, record lyrics aimed at teenagers.
In 1984 she was a founder of the Parents Music Resource Center, which petitioned Congress and prodded the recording industry to put warning labels on albums with raunchy lyrics. The mission was successful - the industry agreed to post parental advisories on record labels - but Mrs. Gore backed away from the leadership after she got burned as a censor, a prude, and a liability to her husband's White House ambitions.
People close to her know she is none of those things. ''Anybody who plays the drums as an adult woman is a person who knows how to have a good time,'' says Rhoda Glickman, the wife of Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman, who has seen a red drum set in the hallway of the Gore home.
Chris Downey, Mrs. Gore's best friend, admits she provided the car the day Mrs. Gore was a rascal and tricked her Secret Service agents into believing she was taking a short spin around the block. Instead, she escaped to Starbucks for a private and leisurely latte.
Many of her good works go unreported, in part because Mrs. Gore is shy in the public eye and in part because she is too shrewd now to let her passions embarrass her husband. Few people know she entertains homeless people in the vice-presidential residence or that she once escorted a woman who called herself ''Mary Tudor'' out of Lafayette Park and to the White House gates to prove that President Clinton, whom Tudor believed was her husband, was not at home. Mrs. Gore arranged temporary housing for the woman.
''She walks the walk and talks the talk,'' said Alfonso Guida, executive director of the National Mental Health Awareness Campaign, a five-year, public-private partnership Mrs. Gore recently set up to combat misperceptions about mental illnesses.
In his convention address Monday night, President Clinton hailed Mrs. Gore for ''bringing the cause of mental health into the broad sunlight of our national life.'' Representative Kennedy is even more effusive. ''She is my hero!'' Kennedy said in an interview, recalling how Mrs. Gore ''warmed up the room and sent out vibes that made me feel this would be the time'' to disclose his depression.
Advocates are just as impressed with Mrs. Gore's commitment to and leadership on mental-health issues. Last year she hosted the first White House conference on mental health and got the US surgeon general to issue the first national report on the subject. She lobbied Congress to provide mental-health coverage in the new child-health insurance law and urged the president to issue an executive order guaranteeing federal employees insurance parity for mental illnesses.
Publicly, Mrs. Gore expresses nothing but praise for first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. But she has managed to be an unusually effective ''Second Lady of Vice,'' as she sometimes jokes about her position, and push a controversial agenda, while posing no political threat or appearing to harbor personal ambition.
For now, Mrs. Gore says she is focused only on the fall, when she expects to balance campaign appearances centered on health themes with babysitting her 1-year-old grandson, Wyatt. Tonight, her job is to give Americans a glimpse of the man she knows best.
''I basically want to introduce Al in a way no one else can,'' Mrs. Gore said. ''I can really talk about him in very personal terms, as a man completely devoted to his family and his faith and his work.
''My role,'' she said, ''is to help as much as I can.''
