ASADENA, Calif. - Vice President Al Gore is feeling it now, letting loose with the rhythm of a preacher. ''Babies addicted to crack cocaine,'' he cries out. ''It's not supposed to be this way!''
The crowd of 300 at the Jackie Robinson Center in the shadow of the San Gabriel Mountains responds with a wave of murmurs and ''Amens!'' Gore, fairly growling out the cadence now in the midday sun, continues: Schools are crumbling, children don't have health insurance. ''It's not supposed to be this way!''
''Amen!'' comes the chorus.
Gore jumps into the crowd, shaking hundreds of hands, soaking up the affection of the audience, even insisting that three young boys sing the national anthem for him. As the rally ends, he surrounds himself with children - as if seeking their protection - while he conducts a series of television interviews.
Then the local reporters ask the zinger: Mr. Vice President, if it's not supposed to be this way, what have you been doing for the last seven years?
Gore barely flinches at the question, but his answer has as many winding trails as the nearby mountains. He wants to build on the foundation of the Clinton administration's successes. He wants to set his own path, finding ways to help those left behind economically during the last seven years. He implies that his Democratic opponent, former senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey, is too moderate. Finally, he sums up his campaign in six words: ''I want to fight for you!''
Later, in interviews conducted aboard Air Force Two and in his limousine, Gore reiterates his declaration of independence.
''I made the internal decision that running for president is a lot more important than being the best vice president I can possibly be,'' he says.
Gore is a man who, literally and figuratively, is trying to get comfortable in his new suit of earth-tone clothes. Having shed the Clinton mantle, Gore is trying the trickiest of political tasks, trying to re-introduce himself to the nation that may already have made up its mind about him. Bradley, by contrast, is viewed as a man quite comfortable with himself.
Gore has been largely background noise in the national conversation during the Clinton era, the butt of countless jokes on the late-night television shows, a man who for years good-naturedly fed the impression that he was stiff and robotic. But he knows he can't run on those laugh lines, or on the Clinton record, or even on the prosperity of the Clinton-Gore years.
So Gore at every turn is portraying himself as a recharged candidate who has pulled the plug on his ties with President Clinton. And no wonder: He is battling Bradley to win the nomination in a primary fight he never anticipated, and he trails GOP front-runner George W. Bush by more than 15 points in some national polls. He is channeling the separate-from-Clinton advice dished out by his campaign consultants, including feminist author Naomi Wolf.
He is striving to melt away his stiffness with a newly relaxed style and a wardrobe of khakis and open-neck, earth-tone shirts. Tanned and toned, he could step out of the pages of GQ, right down to the Palm Pilot he wears on his belt and a gut-busting ''ab'' machine he uses in his Air Force Two cabin.
As Gore's jet begins its descent, Gore surveys the countryside outside the window as if it were his own, insisting in an interview that he is not concerned about problems in his campaign that led to a recent reorganization.
''If this campaign were a book,'' Gore says, ''we'd just be completing the introduction. Chapter 1 is beginning right now.''
It is a glorious Sunday morning in Southern California as Gore's motorcade rolls northward along one of the nation's most stunning roadways, a stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway that runs through Malibu, the ocean teeming with surfers on the left and the Santa Monica Mountains plunging to the coast on the right.
At a gate marked ''Private,'' the motorcade turns toward the mountains and enters one of the most remarkable compounds in California. It is the home of Grammy-winning music producer David Foster, whose successes include singer Celine Dion. Ringed by towering peaks, swept with ocean breezes, the Foster home clings to a hillside like a miniature Mediterranean town. There is no need to ascend the hill by foot. A funicular, a cable-mounted train similar to the Cog Railway that goes up New Hampshire's Mount Washington, whisks visitors up the incline and to Foster's front door.
If the campaign is a book, as Gore says, then this chapter might be called: Find the Money.
Gore never expected to be spending so much time at this late date seeking contributions. The original Gore plan was to collect more than $30 million this year, putting a huge financial gap between himself and Bradley. But Bradley has defied the plan by collecting nearly as much money as Gore and spending it more carefully, leaving both candidates with about $10 million in cash on hand as of Sept. 30. Gore has cut his campaign staff and their salaries and begun planning for government-paid ''official'' trips early next year to curtail costs.
So, in a four-day trip to the West Coast, Gore spends significant time raising funds, from an opulent home on a Pasadena mountainside, to the 51st floor of a San Francisco office tower, to a hilltop country club overlooking Seattle.
Here, in this parcel of paradise in Malibu, the glitterati of Hollywood have taken their seats in white wooden chairs spread around a lawn the size of a football field to witness the vice president receiving an award for his environmental achievements. Among them: actors Harry Hamlin, Angie Dickinson, Tom Arnold, and Daniel Stern; the president's brother, Roger Clinton; singer Barry Manilow; and boxer Sugar Ray Leonard. The priest of the local Chumash Indian tribe delivers his blessing.
After a musical performance and a quiche lunch, California Governor Gray Davis delivers an introduction that does not gloss over Gore's political troubles.
''I'm his national charisma adviser,'' says Davis, who is famously bland. The governor, perhaps unaware that Gore finally has stopped joking about his stiffness, goes on to say he could give the vice president plenty of advice on how to overcome being a dull, boring candidate behind in the polls.
Foster, the Canadian-born host of the affair, says he is so impressed with Gore that he plans to become a US citizen so he can vote for the vice president. In all, it was a day of good vibrations in Malibu, and it brought another $250,000 into Gore's coffers.
But it could hardly compare with what Bradley was doing on the same day. While Gore's event was attended by 250 donors and about a dozen reporters, Bradley was in Madison Square Garden, reliving his days as a New York Knick before a huge media entourage and 7,000 people, who contributed $1.5 million.
Later, in an interview, Gore seems unaware that Bradley has done so well. ''7,000?'' Gore asks, when told of the number of people at the Bradley event. ''Where's that?''
The questions come at nearly every campaign stop.
''Mr. Vice President, when was the last time you talked to President Clinton?''
''Oh, three or four days ago,'' responds Gore, who once boasted of his daily conversations. He can't recall what they talked about. He says he has not had lunch with the president in weeks.
When a voter vaguely asks about the ''mess'' in Washington, Gore interprets the question as a reference to Clinton's sexual relationship with former White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky.
''I understand the disappointment that you feel. I've felt it myself,'' Gore says, as he frequently does in response to questions about the scandal.
Asked about a White House deal on world trade that has upset advocates of abortion rights, Gore says he doesn't know what ''they'' have been doing, as if he had nothing to do with White House actions.
Distancing himself from Clinton is a most uncomfortable act for this man who has boasted that he is among the most involved vice presidents in history and who says Clinton will be remembered as one of the greatest presidents. Asked in an interview to name four or five things he will do differently than Clinton, Gore is reluctant to answer directly. Instead, he mentions that he has put out his own plans on health care, education, and other issues.
Still, Gore's pitch seems effective in his favorite setting, the town hall meeting. After Gore has spent two hours answering questions from undecided voters at one such event in Nashua, N.H., many citizens say afterward that they like what they hear and see. Gore is sympathetic, kneeling on one knee when a particularly thoughtful question is posed by a child. Nothing seems to stump him; everything seems to intrigue him.
Invariably, those who have seen Gore in person say he is little like the caricature they had expected. ''He's not like they say on the David Letterman show,'' one voter says after the Nashua meeting. ''Or Jay Leno,'' says another.
The year was 1988, and the 39-year-old upstart from Tennessee declared that he was ready to be president. Gore proclaimed himself a ''screaming moderate.'' During his first eight years in Congress, he had vowed to fight federal funding for abortions and often was portrayed as being antiabortion.
For his entire Senate career, the liberal Americans for Democratic Action gave him a modest 66 percent rating. By comparison, the ADA said Bradley voted ''correctly'' 85 percent of the time during his 18 years in the Senate.
While Gore may no longer be a screaming moderate, and he now is unmistakably in favor of abortion rights, Bradley has thrived by running to Gore's left - where many of the votes are in the early, activist-heavy primaries. It is remarkably similar to the strategy that former governor Michael S. Dukakis used against Gore in winning the 1988 Democratic nomination.
By the time Gore participated in primary debates in 1988, he was desperate. It was Gore, not then-Vice President George Bush, who first brought up the issue of Dukakis's program of weekend furloughs for a convicted murderer. It was an accusation that, months later, would resurface in the bluntly effective ''revolving prison door'' Bush campaign ads.
Gore eventually ceded Iowa and New Hampshire to Dukakis. The Tennessee senator expected to win by sweeping the South, but he lost Texas and Florida, and soon afterward dropped out of the race. As he left, more than a few critics said he had failed to articulate what a Gore presidency would accomplish.
This time around, Gore has devoted huge resources in Iowa and New Hampshire, and has begun a concerted effort to win the liberal vote. The vice president has switched from rarely mentioning Bradley to making daily charges against him. Gore, who in 1992 said he would be Clinton's ''attack dog,'' now is adopting that role for himself.
In Pasadena, Gore makes his most serious charge yet against Bradley, by saying the former New Jersey senator's health insurance plan ''has a disproportionate impact on African-Americans and Latinos.'' Gore, noting that Bradley's plan would replace Medicaid with a health care voucher system, charged that the proposal would cap certain benefits and especially hurt minorities because they depend more on Medicaid than others.
Gore's attack is part of an effort to turn the tables on Bradley and convince activists that Gore has a greater natural claim to the liberal base.
But this strategy has upset some party moderates, who believe it could be disastrous in the general election. The moderate Democratic Leadership Council, which Gore helped found, said in a memo last week that Gore's emphasis on attracting liberal voters will lead to a repeat of the Dukakis loss of 1988. The memo said Gore's strategy ignores ''young voters, wired workers, upwardly mobile suburbanites, and political independents.''
One day last August, Gore arrived secretly in Seattle with his son, Albert III, 17, who nearly died in an auto accident as a 6-year-old. Gore wanted to fulfill a lifelong ambition to climb 14,411-foot Mount Rainier, an arduous climb that requires a full complement of technical gear, including crampons, ropes, helmets, ice axes, and belays. Gore climbed incognito, wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses, chatting briefly with climbers who didn't realize who he was.
The climb was far more difficult than reported. Gore was tied to his son and other partners by a rope as ice, hail, and snow pelted the mountain, which was buffeted by high winds and 20-degree temperatures.
There were two climbing teams. The larger advance team, composed of Secret Service agents, park rangers, and a military aide, felt conditions were too dangerous and turned around at Disappointment Cleaver, well below the summit.
It seemed as if the climb would end. But Gore, now left with a much smaller group, told his climbing partner, Seattle lawyer James Frush, that he wanted to continue.
''I don't want to do anything stupid, but I'd like to get to the top,'' Gore told Frush.
So Gore, carrying 65 pounds of gear on his back, struggled onward with the small team. After crawling into a crevasse for shelter, the group made it to the peak. A jubilant Gore slapped his son on the back and then radioed his family that he was OK.
''I don't want to overemphasize the danger, but I didn't have any spare brain capacity other than to get up and down the mountain,'' Gore says now.
Frush, the president of the American Alpine Climb and a Gore campaign volunteer, said the journey was not only dangerous, but also transforming for the vice president.
''Climbing is a crucible,'' Frush said. ''It gives you a perspective on your life and your goals. It either makes people or it breaks them. If more people could see that side of him, this would not even be a close race.''
When Gore reached the bottom, word had spread about his climb, and a group of hikers began chanting, ''Gore for president, Gore for president!'' The vice president lifted his ice ax into the air. ''This,'' Gore said, ''is the hardest way I ever saw to get a vote.''
