ANCHESTER, N.H. -
If they opened the door wide, letting painfully cold air spill into the house, it was usually a good sign for Karenna Gore Schiff, the 26-year-old daughter of the vice president.
But if they distractedly listened to her plea for support through a crack, as did Joseph Daneault, it was clear her presence was not going to impress or sway them to vote for Gore.
''My concern is to keep our country safe,'' the retired operating room technician told her.
''He won't let you down,'' replied Schiff, the oldest of the four Gore children.
After she left the stoop, Daneault said he was ''astounded'' and annoyed to have her knock unannounced. ''I don't plan on voting for Gore. He's a follower of Clinton and for me that's enough.''
But Schiff managed to smile despite her frozen cheeks and continued to canvass a middle-class neighborhood here while the media shuffled through the snow to hear what one of the most influential voices in the Gore campaign had to say.
After all, it was her idea to move the campaign headquarters to Gore's home state of Tennessee, a symbolic way of distancing the vice president from Washington. It was her good friend, feminist author Naomi Wolf, who created a firestorm when word leaked that she told the vice president to wear earth tones and start acting like an aggressive ''alpha male.''
''I never quite knew what that was about,'' Schiff said yesterday, noting that the transformation has worked. ''The reason for that is he's shed these layers of the vice president.... He was always in a supporting role.'' Now, she says, Gore is a candidate who is genuine and relaxed, ''just like he is at our dinner table.''
Donna Brazile, Gore's campaign manager, has said Schiff ''is the only focus group I need.''
''I think she was just being nice to me,'' Schiff said when asked why Brazile finds her opinions so valuable.
Regardless, Schiff, in her final year of law school at Columbia University, is already being talked about for a White House job should her father be elected. The mother of a 6-month-old is using her spare time for campaigning, including heading up GoreNet, a network of devoted young people with a Web site of the same name.
And so there she was yesterday, armed with a clipboard of names the campaign had already identified as i ndependent or undecided voters, doing some old-fashioned politicking. Schiff got sniffed by dogs at the front door, and she left personal notes scrawled in green marker at those houses where no one was home.
She shook hands with a startled Rene Beaulieu in his driveway and asked whom he was voting for.
''I'm leaning toward Gore ... because of education,'' said Beaulieu, who works in the Manchester School Department.
Down the street, Schiff asked Loucile Baldoumas for her vote.
''I will. He seems like a family man. But I want to talk to him about Social Security sometime ... because I don't have a husband,'' Baldoumas said.
Schiff, who lives in a $2.5 million duplex on the East Side of Manhattan with her physician husband, said Social Security was the most important thing to her, as well.
