‘92 DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION : Gore Says U.S. Needs ‘Second Breath of Life’ : Running mate: Senator accepts vice presidential nomination in a speech that refers to a new generation and a key incident in his life.

With an intensely personal evocation of an America “waiting for us to give it a second breath of life,” Tennessee Sen. Al Gore accepted the Democratic nomination for vice president Thursday night and set off on a four-month journey to convince voters of his contention that a new generation of leaders can bind the nation’s wounds.

Gore, 44, joined the ticket by voice vote of the Democratic National Convention delegates eight days after he was offered the job by Democratic presidential nominee Bill Clinton. Four years after he unsuccessfully sought the presidency for himself and a year after he ruled out a return effort in 1992, he became a principal in the youngest major party ticket in history.

Taking the podium at Madison Square Garden between his own nomination and Clinton’s much-anticipated acceptance speech, Gore introduced himself to a nation to which he is still something of a mystery with an address weighted with autobiography.

Recounting the story of the critical injury of his son in 1989, Gore cast it as a turning point in his life and sought to extend it as a metaphor for the country’s troubles.

As his parents watched, Albert III, now 9, was struck by a car in Baltimore and tossed 30 feet into the air, skidding another 20 feet before he came to rest in a street gutter. Gore told how he reached the boy, who was not breathing, and held him and prayed.

“When you’ve seen your reflection in the empty stare of a boy waiting for a second breath of life, you realize we were not put here on Earth to look out for our needs alone. We’re part of something larger than ourselves,” Gore softly told the hushed arena.

“My friends, if you look up for a moment from the rush of your daily lives, you will hear the quiet voices of your country crying out for help. You will see your reflection in the weary eyes of those who are losing hope in America. And you will see that our democracy is lying there in the gutter, waiting for us to give it a second breath of life.”

As Gore spoke, his son, who recovered after a long hospitalization, smiled shyly from the seats he shared with his family. Also watching were young Albert’s mother, Tipper; three Gore daughters, Karenna, 20; Kristin, 18, and Sarah, 13, and the vice presidential nominee’s parents, former U.S. Sen. Albert Gore Sr. and his wife, Pauline.

Tipper Gore and Clinton’s wife, Hillary, earned the vice presidential nominee one of the loudest rounds of applause of the speech.

Signaling to them in their seats, Gore saluted them as “two women who have done more for the children of this country in the last 12 years than the last two men who have sat in the Oval Office have done in their entire lifetimes.”

As the speech ended, the Gore family jammed the stage, children waving tentatively and the nominee grabbing his wife for a quick dance to the piped-in music, a rendition of the Paul Simon song “You Can Call Me Al.”

The Tennessee senator has not been known as a supple speaker--he charitably and jokingly refers to himself as “stiff”--but on Thursday night he sounded alternately angry, yearning and upbeat, and he seemed to catch the fancy of the delegates. Afterward, Texas Gov. Ann Richards, one of the party’s finest orators, mouthed a few words to him onstage: “Best speech of your life.”

In content, Gore’s speech was light on specifics and heavy on the slashing criticism that a vice presidential nominee is expected to deliver, with the Tennessee senator defending Clinton and arguing that the Bush Administration has forsaken its right to a second term by ignoring the problems of everyday Americans.

“They have given us false choices, bad choices and no choice,” he said, and repeated a chorus he would utter eight times: “It is time for them to go.”

“They have ignored the suffering of those who are victims--of AIDS, of crime, of poverty, of hatred and harassment . . . . They have nourished and appeased tyrannies and endangered America’s deepest interests while betraying our cherished ideals . . . . They have mortgaged our children’s futures to avoid the decisions they lack the courage to make.”

“It is time for them to go,” the delegates shouted back at him.

As Clinton would later Thursday night, Gore made a hearty play for the support of voters entranced by the political flirtations of Texas businessman Ross Perot, whose announcement of non-candidacy earlier in the day hit the political powers here like a thunderclap.

“Stay involved,” he counseled Perot’s supporters. “You have already changed politics in this country for the better. Keep on fighting for change. The time has come for all Americans to be a part of the healing.”

Thematically, Gore’s speech struck the notes that Clinton has tried to drive home throughout his campaign--that the Democratic Party can serve as an agent for change and that the disparate elements of the American melting pot had better work together to achieve it.

“We must now accept the obligation of proving that freedom from prejudice is the heart and soul of community,” he said, and he echoed the words of Rodney G. King, the Los Angeles police beating victim, “that, yes, we can get along.”

The nomination closed a roller-coaster period for Gore, who accepted the vice presidential bid July 8 when he received a late-night telephone call from Clinton in the east conference room of the governor’s mansion in Little Rock, Ark.

Clinton said the next morning, in an announcement under a blazing sun on the mansion grounds, that he had chosen Gore because he was “a leader of great strength, integrity and stature.”

The Tennessean in some ways duplicates Clinton’s strengths--he is popular in the South, and his image is meant to reinforce the notion of generational change. More so than Clinton, Gore has sought to compare the 1992 ticket to the one led by John F. Kennedy in 1960--on Thursday night, he appropriated Kennedy’s slogan and asserted that the Democrats provided “a new generation of leadership.”

Gore also displayed his finesse at generational rhetoric with the first line of his speech, which made joking reference to Clinton’s nickname: “I’ve been dreaming of this moment since I was a kid growing up in Tennessee,” he said, “that one day, I’d have the chance to come here to Madison Square Garden and be the warm-up act for Elvis.”

Chief among the attributes that attracted Clinton to him was Gore’s championing of the environment, and that issue was prominently emphasized in the vice presidential nominee’s speech.

“The task of saving the Earth’s environment must and will become the central organizing principle of the post-Cold War world, “ declared Gore, who headed the U.S. Senate delegation to last month’s global environmental conference in Rio de Janeiro.

Although Gore has emphasized a country boy image, in truth he is a consummate Washington insider, a man who grew up in a Washington hotel under the political tutelage of his father, was elected to Congress before he was 30 and eight years later ascended to the Senate.

In Washington, Gore forged a record as a moderate Democrat; indeed, he once called himself a “raging moderate.” But by the conservative political standards of the South, Gore has been considered a liberal.

Unlike Clinton--who avoided the draft and equivocated about the Gulf War--Gore served in Vietnam and supported the use of American force against Iraq. He also earned a name in the Senate for his work on arms control.

Gore earned his slot in part because he was a tested campaigner, having run for President in 1988. He ran well in the Southern primaries. But his campaign foundered in New York, the same place where he was lifted onto the Democratic ticket Thursday night.

Times staff writer Glenn Bunting contributed to this story.