ASHINGTON - When Al Gore wants political mentoring, when Elizabeth Dole seeks inspiration, when George W. Bush craves a good laugh, when Gary Bauer requires a lesson in mental toughness, they all turn to their mothers.
And when John McCain needs a little scolding, he gets it from his mother.
A few years back, Roberta McCain read in a magazine that her son had shouted obscenities at the guards in the Hanoi prisoner-of-war camp where he was held from 1967 to 1973. She was furious, and she called him.
''Johnny,'' Mrs. McCain said, ''I'm coming over there and wash your mouth out with soap.''
''But Mom,'' McCain remembers protesting, ''these were very bad guys.''
''That's no excuse,'' replied Mrs. McCain,
who is 87. ''I never taught you to use such language under any circumstances.''
This is the season of Famous Fathers in presidential politics. Bush's father was president, and Gore's was a US senator. McCain's father and grandfather were Navy war heroes. Steve Forbes's father, the flamboyant Malcolm, built a magazine empire and a fortune.
But while the fathers were off tending to the nation's business, or building their own, mothers remarkably similar in their ambition, intelligence, spunk, discipline, and faith stayed home to raise the current crop of White House candidates. As much as or more than the fathers, the candidates say, their mothers built their characters, shaped their personalities, and imparted the values and some of the views they brought to politics.
''I've got my daddy's eyes and my mother's mouth,'' Bush likes to joke. ''Sadly,'' Bush's mother, Barbara Bush, told the Globe, ''that may be true.''
The Texas governor's wit and wisecracking, often with a needle-sharp edge, indisputably come from the woman Bush affectionately, and maybe a little fearfully, calls the Silver Fox, other family members say. ''He's got more of Barbara in him, and that's good. It makes him both more sparkly and less sensitive than his father,'' said William Bush, the former president's brother.
The prices of Gore's and Bradley's campaign promises. A26.
Walker - the W. in the Texas governor's name - was the maiden name of President Bush's mother, Dorothy. Indeed, memorable maternal surnames are not uncommon in the annals of presidents. According to Charles O. Jones, a political scientist, the six presidents he views as the most important in this century - Thomas Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Richard Milhous Nixon, and Ronald Wilson Reagan - all bore their mother's family name.
''It is a fascinating thing,'' said Jones, a retired professor at the University of Wisconsin. ''The mothers appear to be the ones who were nurturing and stimulating leadership in future presidents.''
That seems true of some of the mothers of today's candidates. Susie Bradley, who played on a state champion basketball team in high school, pushed her son, former New Jersey senator Bill Bradley, all the way to the NBA Hall of Fame. Mary Hanford tirelessly promoted her daughter Elizabeth for president - of the third-grade bird club, the Boyden High School student body, and the women's college at Duke University.
''Elizabeth's inspiration and motivation always came from wanting to please our parents, particularly Mother,'' said John Hanford, adding that his sister, a two-time Cabinet secretary and the wife of the former presidential candidate Bob Dole, talks to Mrs. Hanford by telephone every day.
The only mother playing an active, public role in this campaign is Mrs. Bush, who raised $100,000 for her son at a single Iowa fund-raiser last month. But this group is notable in other ways:
Five of the 10 candidates for the major-party nominations have living mothers. (By contrast, Bush is the only candidate whose father is living.) Mrs. Hanford, 98, is the oldest. Mrs. Bush, 74, is the youngest. In between are Betty Bauer, 76, and Pauline Gore and Mrs. McCain, both 87.
Several of the mothers had professions and ambitions before raising children. Gore's mother was a divorce lawyer. The mothers of Bradley and Alan Keyes were schoolteachers. Patrick J. Buchanan's mother was a visiting nurse. Forbes's mother managed the family's ranches in the West. Dole's mother chose marriage over a promising career as a musician, and Mrs. Bush dropped out of Smith College to get married.
Bradley, who describes himself as his mother's ''greatest project,'' was an only child, as was Bauer. Dole was the only daughter in her family; Gore was the only son. Buchanan - ''Paddy Joe,'' as Catherine, his mother, called him - was one of nine children. So was Utah Senator Orrin G. Hatch, whose mother, Helen, was a fiercely committed convert to the Mormon Church.
None of the candidates grew up in single-parent or broken homes. Hatch's parents were married for 69 years. The Gores had been together for 61 years when Albert Sr. died last December. Forbes, the only candidate with divorced parents, was 38 years old when his mother, Roberta, left his father.
Bauer, the former head of the conservative Family Research Council, says he learned family values from his mother, Betty, a feisty woman who held her marriage together, made ends meet, and protected her only son from the psychological abuse of an alcoholic father.
''She didn't let me get dragged down by a very dicey homelife,'' Bauer recalled, ''but instead said, `Gary, you can get a better life.'''
Especially since 1992, when Bill Clinton successfully honed his image as ''the man from Hope,'' presidential candidates have taken care to weave heartwarming childhood tales and tributes to role-model parents into their stump speeches. Describing their mothers as saintly and steady has become even more a staple since Hillary Rodham Clinton attributed her husband's scars to abuse from his mother and grandmother.
Two weeks ago, Gore moved his presidential campaign from Washington to Nashville. The gesture distanced him from the Clinton administraton and put him 50 miles from the home of Pauline Gore, his politically astute mother who prepared him since boyhood for public life.
Opening his new headquarters on her birthday, Gore praised his ailing mother for teaching him that ''women and men are certainly equal, if not more so.'' Mrs. Gore looked on proudly as Gore described how she tutored her blind sister through college and then lived in a YWCA for $2 a week while attending Vanderbilt Law School from 1933 to 1936. Mrs. Gore was the school's 10th woman graduate, though at the time no law firm in Tennessee would hire her.
''Pauline is the best politician in the family,'' said Ned McWherter, a former Tennessee governor who has known Mrs. Gore all his life and who has observed her as a strategist and campaigner for her husband and son. ''She has a good nose for picking out issues that concern people, and she passed that on to Albert, as well an almost compelling commitment to do public service.''
Gore launched his bouquet to his mother a few days after Dole toasted hers as ''the best teacher I ever had.'' Speaking at the dedication of the new Elizabeth Hanford Dole Elementary School in her hometown of Salisbury, N.C., Dole led her audience in applauding Mrs. Hanford, who was making a rare public appearance.
''I think she is giving me too much credit,'' Mrs. Hanford scoffed before greeting dozens of old friends with waves and kisses from her wheelchair. Perfectly coiffed and stylishly dressed in a violet suit and pearl earrings, Dole's mother said in her deep Southern drawl: ''All I taught her is that love and compassion for others goes a long way.''
The themes of self-improvement, achievement, and competition were strong in the Hanford, Bradley, Bush, and Hatch homes, all presided over by willful, energetic mothers who weren't averse to using a little thunder or guilt to get results.
''My mother insisted on protocol and performance in her only child,'' Bradley wrote in his memoir, ''Time Present, Time Past.'' His mother was a fervent Presbyterian, and Bradley remembers how guilty he would feel when she would say: ''`Go ahead and stay in bed and miss Sunday school. I don't care if you are irresponsible.'''
Mrs. Bradley was an avid competitor, a counterpoint to Bradley's father, the town banker who was too compassionate to foreclose on mortgage s.
''At basketball games, you would hear Mrs. Bradley's voice above the others, getting after Bill and the officials, too,'' said Dick Cook, a boyhood family friend in Crystal City, Mo. ''She wanted to expose him to all his options - piano, French horn, trumpet, swimming, boxing. Mr. Bradley cut it off when she tried to give him dancing lessons.''
Helen Hatch saw the spark of an overachiever in Orrin, the oldest boy after her first son was killed in World War II. The Hatches were poor, but Mrs. Hatch scraped together the money for his piano and violin lessons and for a season ticket to the Pittsburgh Symphony. Hatch says he was particularly close to his mother, who taught him to sew, write poetry, and love Jesus.
''My dad, a big, overgrown building tradesman, hardly ever spoke,'' Hatch said. ''My mother was constantly making sure I knew what she wanted me to become.''
She was also quite protective. During his first Senate run in Utah in 1976, opponents accused the Pittsburgh-born Hatch of being a carpetbagger. Mrs. Hatch wrote a letter to the state's largest newspaper that said, ''Don't blame my son. It was my fault.''
History is alive with presidential mothers who were colorful (Miss Lillian Carter), controlling (Sarah Delano Roosevelt), and strong (Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy).
Mary Washington, George's cantankerous, ever-complaining mother, was so jealous of her son's attention to the Revolutionary War that ''she never really warmed up'' to it, said James Rees, executive director of Historic Mount Vernon, Washington's estate. Still, Mrs. Washington's ''tough love'' ultimately benefited her son, Rees said. ''Some of her demands on Washington made him the ambitious, hard-working, trying-to-please person he was.''
Lyndon Johnson said he was closer to his proud, pushy mother, Rebekah, than to his politician father. Dwight D. Eisenhower attributed his moral compass and his playful grin to his mother, Ida. And Nixon, in a teary address to his staff the day he left the White House, called his father ''a great man,'' but his mother, Hannah, ''a saint.''
Buchanan, a Nixon speechwriter, might have said the same about his mother. An industrious, God-fearing woman in a household of seven sons brought up by a boisterous Scottish-Irish father to be street-fighting bullies, Catherine Buchanan was the ''diplomat among warriors,'' Buchanan wrote in his autobiography, ''Right from the Beginning.''
''People thought my dad was the dominant force, but I tell you, my brother's brains come from my mother,'' said James Buchanan, Patrick's brother and a dentist in Chevy Chase, Md. ''She didn't say much, but she didn't need to. She expected that as Catholics we would be moral, work hard, and not embarrass the family.''
Alan Keyes's education - Catholic and secular - was the domain of his mother, Gerthena, who was home when his father, an Army sergeant, was away. ''Alan has been an educator his entire adult career, and I think it's because his mother, a teacher, was such a positive influence,'' said Marlo Lewis, who became Keyes's friend at Harvard in the 1970s.
Steve Forbes, who lived in the shadow of a demanding and daring father, said he endured the pressures and expectations because of a loving, supportive mother. In a 1992 obituary in Forbes magazine, he wrote that Roberta Forbes wasn't glamorous or a celebrity, but her influence on him was ''profound.''
''Mom was the softie,'' Forbes said, ''the one we turned to for sympathy, understanding, comfort, or at least a more merciful sentence. She was ready with the hugs, quick to forgive a lousy report card, and never reproached our distinct lack of athletic ability. She never seemed disappointed in our shortcomings. She took us for what we were. I was grateful for that.''
Barbara Bush ''can't define'' her special relationship with George W. ''I have a bond with all five of our children,'' she said. But family members trace the closeness to the time when a young Mrs. Bush, deeply grieving over the death of her 4-year-old daughter to leukemia and left alone in West Texas by a traveling husband, turned to her firstborn for consolation and comic relief.
In her memoir, Mrs. Bush recollects hearing George W. tell a friend he was not able to come over and play because ''he couldn't leave his mother,'' who needed him. ''That started my cure,'' Mrs. Bush wrote. ''I realized I was too much of a burden for my little 7-year-old boy to carry.''
Mrs. McCain was also the enforcer, particularly since her husband, a submarine commander, was often at sea for months at a time. The most rambunctious of her three children was John, the oldest. He's still ''such a scamp,'' Mrs. McCain said in a television interview last summer.
One of his most vivid childhood memories, the Arizona senator recounts in ''Faith of My Fathers,'' his best-selling book, was of a cross-country drive with his mother. Tired of the back-seat bickering and exasperated with her son for being ''a real pain in the neck,'' Mrs. McCain threw a banana at John that hit his sister instead. Mocked by McCain for the miss, she then flung an aluminum Thermos at him, denting both the Thermos and his brow, and ''knocking me temporarily mute,'' McCain wrote.
The blow didn't damage McCain's deep affection for his mother, an irrepressible extrovert who rebelled against her parents and eloped with a young sailor named John McCain to Tijuana, Mexico, in 1933. The senator emulated his father's devotion to duty but felt estranged by his long absences and taciturn nature. He attributes his own youthful ''hell-raising'' to exaggerating Mrs. McCain's spirit and exuberance. ''I became my mother's son,'' McCain wrote.
At 87, Mrs. McCain's spirit is still intact, as is her love for the open road. She's somewhere in Europe now, motoring around with her identical twin sister Rowena, and not phoning home as often as her candidate son might like.
