ONCORD, N.H. - Struggling to seem new after seven years in the public eye, battling to seem fresh in his fourth effort at winning national office, Al Gore faces perhaps the most formidable challenge in presidential politics today.
The scent of the new - as alluring in candidates as in cars - is altogether missing in Gore, elected four times to the House, twice to the Senate, twice to the vice presidency. There's something old-shoe about Gore, and yet that leaves no one comfortable - not the vice president, nor his handlers, nor his audiences. Gore's worry is that at the end of the century Americans will assume the old shoe doesn't fit - and they will resist wearing it.
In the past, familiarity was an asset, which is why Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman grew ever more influential with age. That doesn't work anymore. It hasn't worked, in fact, for almost 40 years. John F. Kennedy won the White House in 1960 on the strength of promising a ''new generation'' of leadership. (It hardly mattered that his opponent, Richard M. Nixon, was part of that very same generation. He just didn't seem new.) Gary Hart nearly won the 1984 presidential nomination against a Democratic Party loyalist, Walter F. Mondale, on the strength of promising ''new ideas.'' (It hardly mattered that he didn't have many.)
New deal, old spiel
This is a century that, in the realm of art, literature, and music, began with the shock of the new. It is ending with the cult of the new. If, in our great prosperity, we still cared about pennies, then it would be the shiny penny, sent into circulation just the other day, that we would worship.
All of which helps explain the appeal of the two men who may stand in the way of Gore and the White House. Governor George W. Bush of Texas has the best of all worlds - an old name, a new face. Until recently, former senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey's public exposure in New Hampshire consisted entirely of bus trips to Hanover for basketball games three decades ago. (Princeton beat Dartmouth soundly all three years.) He's the new guy in the Democratic field.
Gore's greatest asset and his greatest liability are, as the Greek mythologists and Elizabethan playwrights insisted, one and the same: his familiarity. And that familiarity was on full display in the Christa McAuliffe Auditorium at Concord High School the other day.
Gore, surrounded by students and without sitting on the stool provided for him on the stage, showed the old stuff, the old style. The subject was school violence, and the vice president put on a classic Gore performance.
He set out the facts, with an accent on the counterintuitive (''School violence is going down, and schools are among the safest places in our society''). He deplored the ills of society (emphasis on violence in the media). He displayed his range and mastery (even tucking in a reference to a Concord High student who died in a schoolyard scuffle). He warned his audience of the complexity of the problem (''There is no simple, easy answer''). He weaved skillfully through the issue, taking care not to put too heavy a stress on government-imposed prescriptions (''Better parenting is the number one solution''). But he still made the obligatory bows to Democratic priorities (expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit and increases in the minimum wage).
The performance was flawless, fluent - but so familiar. And Gore knows - he cannot escape the fact - that the fight for the Democratic nomination may eventually be resolved on the anvil of familiarity. A few minutes later, in a tiny school conference room, the vice president engaged the question. It's not that a candidate has to be new, he said, but '' you have to be real.''
Living in the new world
This is perhaps the first time in a generation when reality is the reality that matters. Here's Gore's take on it:
''I think that people who know you in one role get to know you all over again in a new context. And I think people who are familiar with growth and learning in their own lives have no difficulty seeing it in others if it is manifest. America is always facing the future. Familiarity is another word for the past. Growth and learning - they're of the future.''
Growth, learning - and their handmaiden, change. Gore may not be new, but his circumstance is new. He once was the young phenom. He's now middle-aged. He once was an outsider, working as a news reporter looking in at a political world blocked from his view. He's now an insider, looking out. He once was an insurgent, asking the uncomfortable questions of his political elders. He's now the establishment.
There really is no New Gore, just as there never really was a New Nixon, not when a ''new'' model was unveiled in 1960, not when the trick was tried again in 1968. There's only the new world that Gore is living in, and the new way he is trying to accommodate himself to it. It's the story of the 2000 campaign.
