Gore Straddles North, South in Background, Message

“I grew up in two worlds and both worlds are very much a part of me still,” Tennessee Sen. Albert Gore Jr. said the other day as his campaign jet headed for yet another airport press conference in the South.

Whether he can mesh those two worlds may determine whether he is a serious contender for the Democratic presidential nomination.

He is trying to convince Southerners that he is, as he puts it, the candidate to move “the Democratic Party toward common sense,” while not raising the hackles of the Democrats’ more liberal factions, who give money and who will play a major role as the race moves beyond next week’s Super Tuesday primaries.

The challenge was strikingly illuminated in just a few hours last Thursday.

Crucial to Candidacy

He attended a rally here and heard himself described, in a local supporter’s twang, as a son of the South and as a Democrat who is strong on defense. The South is absolutely crucial to Gore’s candidacy, which did not ignite in earlier contests in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Then Gore flew to New York City, where wealthy liberals paid $1,000 apiece to gather around him in a 5th Avenue apartment and ask about his commitment to peace and to fighting for minorities and the less fortunate.

In background and message, Gore straddles the rural South and sophisticated North. He spent much of his childhood on his family’s cattle farm in Carthage, Tenn. He also is the son of a U.S. senator, a graduate of a Washington prep school and of Harvard.

As he campaigns in the South as the only white Southerner in the race, Gore tells groups of conservative Democrats: “I’m the same kind of Democrat you are. I think like you do. It’s time the national Democratic Party started thinking like you and me.”

Story of Slave Lockup

He also speaks in the South of his commitment to civil rights but in New York on Thursday he was more passionate, speaking movingly about his sense of rage when he discovered as a child a slave lockup beneath a mansion near his parents’ home.

He said he wanted young people to some day read in history books that 1988 was the year the country moved away from a decade of people living on the streets and of children fearing nuclear war.

“I want them to be amazed that with a growing agenda of human problems, we (the United States and Soviet Union) were spending a trillion dollars a year on new ways to kill people,” he said, drawing warm applause in the New York apartment.

Gore’s trouble is that his straddle may create confusion in voters’ minds.

Supported Grenada Invasion

For example, Gore has supported the invasion of Grenada, the bombing of Libya and the placement of American flags on Kuwaiti oil tankers, all positions that place him to the right in the Democratic field.

But he also once supported the nuclear freeze and is rated very highly by the liberal Americans for Democratic Action.

His liberal underpinnings sometimes undermine his appeal to Southern white Democrats who have voted for Reagan in the last two elections.

“When Ronald Reagan has to make a decision,” Gore told a Louisville, Ky., crowd recently, “he asks: ‘What will my friends in the corporate board rooms think of this?’ We need a President who asks what Democrats have always asked: ‘How does this affect the roughneck in the oil fields; how does it affect the woman behind the word processor?’ ”

Gore also blasts one of his rivals, Rep. Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, for supporting the Reagan tax cut in 1981, charging that it hurt working men and women by helping create a huge trade deficit, thus eliminating American jobs.

“I don’t think Al should attack President Reagan and Reaganomics down here,” said Gore supporter John Kirtley of Central City, Ky., who has voted for Reagan. “Mondale and Ferraro tried that and got their heads bashed in. He ought to talk about the corruption in the Reagan Administration.”

Sees Shift Against Reagan

But Gore insists: “I think the mood in the country is shifting very strongly against President Reagan.”

In any case, it is too late now to refine his message even if he wanted to. It is part of a new strategy that he hopes will help him connect with blue-collar Democrats as effectively as Gephardt has.

Once Gore talked a lot about being tough on defense as he campaigned in the South. Now, in his TV ads and in his “sound bite” for local television crews, Gore says: “We need a President who will put the White House back on the side of working men and women.”