Youngest Presidential Contender : Gore Seeks a Hard Edge to Go With Credentials

It was the first official fund-raiser of Tennessee Sen. Albert Gore Jr.’s presidential campaign, and it was, of course, a love feast. The good will and praise were as thick as the stack of $1,000 checks.

Among Tennessee Democrats, the 39-year-old first-term senator is a veritable model of what’s right with the world. He is the handsome, intelligent and articulate son of a former Tennessee senator. He is a Vietnam veteran, and a one-time divinity student. He is a political moderate with a solid record of legislative accomplishment, and a devoted family man with an attractive wife and four young children.

“We’re just as pleased as punch that he is running for President,” said Jimmy Lou Rye, a Chattanooga banker who helped contribute to the $150,000 that Gore collected at the downtown affair. “When the rest of the country gets to know him as well as we do, we just know they’re going to fall in love with him too.”

That may prove to be a tall order. Gore, the youngest of the Democrats seeking the presidency, is in many ways credentialed for a serious infatuation with voters. But he has yet to impart a vision and a sense of battle-hardened experience that most often results in a national election victory.

“He’s almost too packaged,” said William Schneider, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a political analyst for The Times. “This guy is all resume--the ultimate Establishment resume--and I don’t feel I know anything about him.”

Gore is setting out to rectify that situation.

He works a crowd with the thoroughness of a seasoned politician--which, of course, he is, having served four terms in the House before being elected to the Senate in 1984 by the biggest vote in Tennessee history. He is a past master of what he calls the “shake and howdy.”

His standard campaign speech plays on many of the same generational themes as did former Colorado Sen. Gary Hart’s now-defunct campaign. Gore, who would be the youngest President in U.S. history if elected next year, contends that America is in need of a new vision and a “fresh start” after the Administration of Ronald Reagan, the oldest President in U.S. history.

Postwar Generation

“Fifty-eight percent of the voters in November of 1988 will be under the age of 40,” he repeatedly stresses. “I’m the only member of that postwar generation who is in this race. I think it is time for the torch to pass to our generation and for us to take a leadership position in this country.”

The “passing the torch” metaphor is familiar. John F. Kennedy featured it in his inaugural address. And Gore believes that just as American voters turned to “youth, vigor and intellectual capacity” in electing the young Kennedy to succeed the aging Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1960, so they will turn to a candidate with those qualities to replace Reagan in 1988.

Gore’s chief campaign issues are nuclear arms control, environmental protection, reducing the federal budget deficit, health care and education.

“This guy is good,” said Loch Johnson, a University of Georgia political scientist. “He knows his facts and he presents them coolly and accurately. And he’s really good with people. He’s certainly someone to keep your eye on.”

‘Too Packaged’

At the same time, Gore’s youth and his relative inexperience may work against him. And some critics also contend that he is too dependent on the largess of wealthy Democratic fund-raisers, making him susceptible to the charge of being the hand-picked tool of the party’s “fat cats.”

Gore’s campaign strategy depends a great deal on his base in the South, where more than a dozen states will hold primaries on the same Super Tuesday in early March. But he is also more liberal than many white Southern Democrats, who have increasingly voted Republican in recent presidential elections. Gore’s voting record is rated 80% positive by the AFL-CIO’s Committee for Political Education and 65% by Americans for Democratic Action, but only 40% by the American Conservative Union.

Gore’s wife, Mary Elizabeth--more commonly known by her nickname, “Tipper”--may prove to be a handicap with some of the under-40 voters Gore is banking heavily on attracting. She has been a national champion of the drive for warning labels on rock records with sexually explicit lyrics. “I don’t know if I could trust a man who sleeps with a woman like that,” said David Weil, a songwriter and guitarist with an Atlanta rockabilly group known as The Paralyzers.

For now, however, Gore appears to have things going his way.

‘Sat Up and Listened’

“When I saw him on TV last week, I really sat up and listened,” said Nancy Jacobsen, a free-lance writer in Atlanta, where Gore made a round of campaign appearances the day after his Chattanooga fund-raiser. “I had been completely neutral in the presidential race up to then. But Al Gore lifted me up like nobody else has.”

In the southwest Georgia city of Columbus, where Gore spoke at a breakfast meeting of state and county Democratic Party officials, black state Rep. Calvin Smyre, Gov. Joe Frank Harris’ floor leader in the House, said: “Among black voters, I’d say he’s head and shoulders above the rest of the Democratic candidates--except for Jesse Jackson.”

In New Hampshire earlier this month, Gore was among several Democratic presidential contenders--including Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, Rep. Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri and Gov. Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts--who spoke at a Democratic fund-raising lunch.

‘With Us for Good’

“He was graceful and appealing, and right away, the people liked him,” wrote the tough-minded New York Daily News columnist, Jimmy Breslin. “I don’t know who he is, as I say, I never met him and I don’t know what he stands for, although the father had a fine reputation. But . . . I knew that Albert Gore Jr. was with us for good. I don’t know where he goes this year, but for sure he’s gonna be there some year.”

Where Gore wants to go, of course, is to the White House.

“I have a strong conviction that I can make a difference for this country at a time of unprecedented challenge,” he said in an interview. “I think there are opportunities for this country to create a brighter future--to get the arms race under control on terms that will enhance our national security, to revitalize our economy, to resolve problems of access to and affordability of health care, and to create the world’s best elementary and secondary educational system.”

Gore said one of his first acts as President would be to convene a domestic summit conference on federal fiscal policy. He said that he would not rule out a tax increase as part of a solution to the budget deficit but that he would propose one only if anticipated growth in revenues proved inadequate.

Unflinching Integrity

Gore is the scion of one of Tennessee’s most prominent political families. His father, Albert Gore Sr., spent 32 years on Capitol Hill--14 years in the House followed by 18 years in the Senate--and earned a reputation for principled liberalism and unflinching integrity.

In 1956, for example, he was among the handful of Southern congressmen who refused to sign the so-called Southern Manifesto, a declaration that attacked the U.S. Supreme Court and its decision in the Brown vs. Board of Education school desegregation decision.

“He’s always been my hero,” said the junior Gore, who was born in Washington on March 31, 1948, and was educated at the exclusive St. Albans preparatory school there before going to Harvard University and earning a cum laude bachelor’s degree in government.

In 1970, however, Albert Sr., running for reelection against Rep. Bill Brock, was widely denounced as being too liberal and out of touch with voters. The overriding issue against him was his staunch opposition to the Vietnam War.

Drafted Into Army

Meanwhile, young Albert, fresh out of Harvard, had been drafted into the Army. But although he shared his father’s bitter antipathy to the war, he decided to go to Vietnam anyway.

“I felt I had a duty to serve,” he said. “It was that simple. Also, by serving in the war, I felt that I might, in a very small way, increase my father’s reelection chances and help keep his eloquent voice in opposition to the war in the Senate.”

In the end, though, the senator was defeated by Brock, now secretary of labor in the Reagan Administration. The senior Gore is now retired from politics.

“That was a very bitter defeat for my father and a source of great pain for everyone in our family,” Gore recalled. “But I’m even more proud of his opposition to the war now than I was then. He was prescient, he was courageous and he was right.”

Became Police Reporter

After his tour of duty in Vietnam, where he served as a military journalist with an Army engineering brigade headquartered near Saigon, Gore joined the Nashville Tennessean, climbing the ladder from obituary writer to police reporter to editorial writer.

“He was a reporter’s reporter,” Deputy Managing Editor Frank Ritter said of Gore recently. “If he was late with his copy, frequently it was because he hated to stop digging and asking questions. He had those characteristics of curiosity and aggressiveness that you can’t teach.”

His resume says that during the period he was at the Tennessean, 1971 to 1976, he also was a home builder and land developer. In 1973 he also became a farmer in Carthage, about 60 miles east of Nashville, where he continues to run livestock and grow tobacco.

These occupations were more or less sidelines, according to a Gore aide, although Gore frequently boasts of his farming background when the politics call for it. He did so in South Dakota recently, but afterward, as Gore tells the story, a former Democratic candidate for governor came up to him and said: “I’m glad you’ve had the experience. But I’m a farmer too, and I noticed when we shook hands that neither one of us had been on the tractor lately.”

Gore also attended Vanderbilt University’s divinity school from 1971-72 but did not get a degree. In 1974, he enrolled in the university’s law college--a decision prompted in part by his outrage over the acquittal of a Nashville councilman whom Gore, working with local police in a sting operation, had claimed to have caught red-handed taking a $300 bribe.

Two years later, he dropped out of law school to run for Congress when Tennessee Rep. Joe L. Evins of Smithfield unexpectedly decided to retire.

Capitalized on Skills

In the House, Gore quickly made a name for himself, capitalizing on his skills as an investigative reporter to lead congressional probes into a variety of issues, ranging from hazardous-waste dumping to uranium price-fixing.

In addition, he wrote measures setting standards for infant formula, establishing a national computerized network for organ donations and requiring stronger warning labels on cigarette packs.

He also became an expert on arms control. In 1982, he wrote a plan to replace multiple-warhead missiles with single-warhead missiles that was subsequently endorsed by former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, among other prominent figures.

In 1984, he ran for the Senate seat vacated by former Senate Majority Leader Howard H. Baker Jr., now President Reagan’s chief of staff, and won with 61% of the vote against GOP state legislator Victor Ashe.

Criticized on Issues

In Washington, Gore has been criticized for concentrating on motherhood and apple pie subjects, such as organ transplants and biomedical ethics.

“Gore’s style of moderation is to go for issues that are ‘difficult’ in the sense of being obscure or complicated, but not contentious,” Michael Kinsley wrote in a recent opinion piece appearing in the Washington Post. “Making friends is easy in politics. Al Gore needs to prove himself by making some serious enemies.”

Gore’s response: “When people talk about the motherhood and apple pie issues, Exhibit A is often organ transplants. But four years ago, when I got involved in that issue, nobody else wanted to touch it with a 10-foot pole. It wasn’t motherhood and apple pie. It was considered a political mine field.

“Now, after I’ve slogged it out in the trenches with medical and scientific experts to develop a set of principles that could cut through the controversy, it resembles a motherhood and apple pie issue. But it didn’t in the beginning.”

There is no doubt, however, about Gore’s determination. “He is working hard, politicking the people he needs to politic to do well in the South’s crucial primary next March,” said Hastings Wyman Jr., publisher of the Southern Political Report, a Washington-based newsletter.

He is working just as vigorously in Iowa and New Hampshire, the states with the earliest 1988 contests. It is there, Gore says, that he needs to differentiate himself from the other candidates and have a good showing to be in position for the anticipated Southern jackpot on Super Tuesday.

“There are so many candidates in the race somebody said it’s beginning to look like a Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes,” he said. “When I got off the plane in Iowa, I went to the baggage claim area and saw a sign on the wall that said: ‘Advance men, check your claim tags. Many candidates look alike.’ ”