The repackaging Of Tipper

By Mary Leonard, Globe Staff, January 24, 1999

MANCHESTER, N.H. -- At the end of a day that she denied was, but surely felt like, the launch of the 2000 campaign, Tipper Gore called Washington to tell her husband she was having so much fun in New Hampshire that she was going to stay a few more days.

The vice president protested the schedule change and argued that it wasn't in the game plan. The exchange went on briefly until Al Gore realized that, as usual, the joke was on him. With a great belly laugh, Mrs. Gore reassured her husband she would be home to make dinner.

Home is where her heart is, but New Hampshire is where the first presidential primary will be. All joking aside, Tipper Gore, the wife of a soon-to-be presidential candidate, is suiting up for a starring role in a campaign for the White House that can use, as much as anything, an all-American family portrait.

The 50-year-old Gore is known mostly as the animated wife beside her wooden husband and the not-as-cerebral counterweight to his chronic wonkishness. But to voters fed up with X-rated politicians and suspicious of ambitious spouses, Tipper Gore is being polished and put forward as a loyal partner in a love-story marriage, a conscientious parent who puts children before career, and a quiet, compassionate champion of lost causes.

"We're looking for the first family to be like the Gores, a family that exemplifies what America is all about, a couple that genuinely exudes affection and has raised four beautiful kids," said Lou D'Allesandro, a Democratic state senator who greeted Gore at the Manchester, N.H., airport on her recent day trip to the state. "I hope they give Tipper as much exposure as possible."

If the whirlwind swing across New Hampshire for "Team Tipper" was any example, that is exactly what Gore strategists plan. Despite frigid temperatures and a blizzard that made for a hazardous motorcade, Mrs. Gore held a town meeting in Nashua on child nutrition, gave a speech in Lebanon on ending the stigma of mental illness, schmoozed in Concord with Democratic lawmakers, and added an unscheduled meet-and-greet with diners at the Merrimack Restaurant in Manchester, an obligatory stop for any serious candidate coming through the state.

Al Gore has been there at least three times in his career, but no politician had ever taken pictures of the restaurant staff until the impulsive Mrs. Gore, once a photojournalist and still never far from a point-and-shoot camera, paid her first visit. "Does she want my autograph, too?" a delighted waitress wondered.

It wasn't the day's only little act of kindness by Mrs. Gore, who seems to have a natural gift for making human connections, whether it was giving a child with stage fright a reassuring hug, buying carry-out chicken for her Secret Service agents, or insisting that New Hampshire Governor Jeanne Shaheen skip a reception to "go home to your children" -- which she did -- before the weather got any worse.

Even the erudite psychiatrists and professors at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center were unusually interested in the weekly departmental lecture delivered by Gore, who has degrees in psychology from Boston University and Vanderbilt, but has never practiced in the field.

"It looks like we've finally solved our attendance problem," quipped Dr. Peter Silberfarb, chairman of the school's psychiatry department, who called Gore "a real advocate for people with mental illnesses."

Gore, who even after two decades as a political spouse seems slightly insecure on the stump, said she enjoyed the day. "I just liked the spirit, I liked the people and being able to talk to them about things they cared about," she said in an interview. "And I certainly liked giving money to the state!"

The vice president's wife has a small persona, compared with the so-called Big Three: the president, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Al Gore. But a new chief of staff and the White House focus on the 2000 campaign are making sure that Mrs. Gore gets media-attracting assignments -- her humanitarian mission to hurricane-ravaged Central America in November was one -- and her share of political goodies to pass out.

In New Hampshire, for example, she announced that the state would receive almost $900,000 from Washington to help low-income people insulate their homes. At Dartmouth, she unveiled plans for a spring White House Conference on Mental Illness, which she will have a big role in designing and hosting. In the next week, Gore will meet the pope in St. Louis, address the US Conference of Mayors in Washington, and promote jazz in the schools and youth fitness at events in New York.

"We have raised her profile a little bit," said Audrey Haynes, the former director of the women's policy office in the White House and now Mrs. Gore's chief of staff. Haynes said that while Gore is speaking out more on issues such as abortion rights and pay equity, which are important to Democratic liberals, she wants to "stay focused on the issues she has been focused on for many years," including mental health, homelessness, and physical fitness.

Political observers say that the trick for Gore will be striking the right political balance for 2000: Having substance and causes without projecting any ambitions to be co-president, being smart without being threatening, and promoting the party's feminist agenda while being the poster-parent for family values.

No offense to the first lady, they say, but given the way Mrs. Clinton has at times polarized public opinion, it probably helps that Tipper Gore isn't a lawyer and doesn't have a career.

Gore says she counts Mrs. Clinton as a personal friend, a "terrific" person, and a first lady who has "done a remarkable job and carried out her role with grace and dignity." But every first lady is unique, Gore said.

"Any first lady is going to be different, and everyone who fulfills the role in the future, no matter who it is, hopefully will bring the essence of who they are and what they care about to the role," Gore said.

More than a decade ago, Gore was branded as a prude and worse for leading a campaign to protect children from lewd and violent lyrics in pop music. The group she founded, the Parents' Music Resource Center, prompted congressional hearings (then-Senator Gore of Tennessee was on the committee) and succeeded in getting the recording industry to voluntarily put warning labels on their products.

Today, nobody is singling out Tipper Gore, author of "Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society," as an enemy of the culture. Susan Bianchi-Sand, head of the National Council of Women's Organizations, a feminist umbrella group, said that, if anything, liberals "have probably come closer to where she is on the issues, rather than her moving toward us.

"In a sense, Mrs. Gore might be the consummate role model, a mother and family woman who is also a progressive thinker," Bianchi-Sand said. "She puts those two pieces of her life together pretty well."

Despite the police escort, the Secret Service detail, the chartered plane, an accommodating White House staff, and a very nice piece of public housing, Gore suggests that she is just a normal person who still prefers attending a high-school football game to a state dinner.

"I try to remind people that in this age of celebrity, we are pretty much ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances and doing the very best that we can," Gore said. "I think we deal with the same kind of issues that the majority of American families deal with, balancing work roles and family obligations, taking care of aging parents, as well as kids in school and young kids."

The issue she won't discuss is the impeachment and Senate trial of President Clinton. She said she has "never, not once" thought about what she would do if the Senate removed the president from office, propelling the Gores into the White House. "My plate is quite full" without considering that, she said.

Still, what the Gore strategists fear most is having the White House sex scandal hang over the vice president's campaign. The response is to spotlight both the Gores' enduring, high-school sweetheart romance (the vice president recently said he and Tipper might have been the inspiration for the book "Love Story," a suggestion author Erich Segal quashed) and their children: Karenna, 25; Kristin, 21; Sarah, 20; and Albert III, 16.

Mrs. Gore, who is known to have a wicked sense of humor, sometimes does poke fun at the image of being a perfect stand-by-your-man political wife. She apologized to a group of New Hampshire Democrats for skipping a visit last fall because she had injured her leg in a jogging accident. The vice president had come in her place.

"He said he would fill in for me," Mrs. Gore dead-panned. "He is a very supportive spouse."