Gore Uses Marathon Tour to Touch Base in Key States : Politics: Staffers are quietly optimistic about outcome of race during a 21-hour, 8-stop campaign swing.

As his campaign plane bounced Monday from one airport rally to another, a reporter tossed a trick question at Democratic vice presidential nominee Al Gore: In these last hours, where could he possibly find anyone who has not yet reached a decision?

Gore considered the question for a few seconds before responding with a properly political answer, neither confirming nor denying the implicit assumption that the presidential race was over.

“We’re going to look for them,” he said flatly.

Kicking off a 21-hour, hopscotching election-eve tour on Monday morning in Raleigh, N.C., the Tennessee senator planned to touch down at Columbus, Ga; Knoxville, Tenn.; Columbus, Ohio; Milwaukee; Waterloo, Iowa; Kansas City and Nashville.

When all is said and done, the “Gore Family No-Doz Tour,” as it was dubbed by staffers who passed out T-shirts marking their last campaign ride, will have accomplished the strategic goal of hitting many of the campaign’s battleground states east of the Mississippi River.

“We’re now in the final hours of this campaign, and you know very well--you could have hardly missed it--that North Carolina is as close to the key state as you’re going to find in the country,” Gore said during the Raleigh rally.

Gore invited the audience to envision the ultimate victory celebration. “Imagine what you would feel like on Jan. 20 (Inauguration Day), if we were all marching arm in arm down Pennsylvania Avenue with President Bill Clinton,” Gore said.

Joining the Tennessee senator on this campaign swing were his wife, Tipper, their four children, an expanded pool of reporters and camera crews and a new contingent of staffers. Some of the staffers were traveling with the candidate for the first time, having been glued to their desks for the last four months back at campaign headquarters in Little Rock, Ark.

Nearly everyone in this enlarged entourage seemed to sense--though few were willing to say--that this last hurrah was in effect a prelude to a larger celebration that they hoped would come.

Longtime family friend and author David Halberstam, who was along for the ride, felt freer to express an opinion. As Gore talked about change and the failures of “trickle-down economics” before a small crowd at the Columbus, Ga., airport, Halberstam sniffed the air and offered an opinion.

“It smells like they’re going to win,” he said, adding that his pre-election prediction issued more from his displeasure with President Bush than from the gray and drizzling skies.

Halberstam said he joined Gore for the day for nostalgic reasons. He recalled during Al Gore Sr.’s 1958 Senate campaign, a 10-year-old Al Jr. told his father he would rather play on the farm than make the campaign rounds.

“Now his children are on the road with him,” Halberstam mused.

As for the paltry crowd at the Georgia stop, campaign aides noted that any crowd who showed up in the middle of a workday was a good crowd.

Nevertheless, Gore offered an appealing campaign pitch to those in attendance.

“Georgia is as close to a key state in this election as you will find,” he said with the identical conviction displayed hours earlier in North Carolina. “You have the opportunity here in the Peach State to turn out the lights on trickle-down economics and shut the door on ‘read my lips’ government.”

Next stop, at the McGee Tyson Airport in Knoxville, Tenn., was much more like a traditional pep rally, complete with a high school marching band and wildly cheering partisans. Knowing that he was preaching to the converted, Gore avoided cluttering his stump speech with policy details.

“Now is not the time to go through our platform and our agenda,” he told the crowd of 1,500 people.

Instead, he struck a neighborly stance with his Tennessee constituents, urging them to take a friend with them to the polls and vote in mandate-producing numbers.

“When you boil everything down to the fundamentals here at the end of this long campaign, the basic choice is the one we knew we faced several months ago.” he said.

With nightfall, Gore’s peripatetic troupe employed Hollywood-style dramatics to introduce the candidate to the Milwaukee audience. On cue from an advance staffer, a sound engineer blasted Bruce Hornsby and the Range’s “Look Out Every Window” as the enormous hangar doors rose to reveal Al and Tipper Gore.

The sight of them washed in spotlights and waving from the stairs of their red, white and blue Express One plane sent the 2,000 onlookers into a frenzy of sign-waving and full-throated “one more day” cheers.

“I see this sign up here: ‘Wisconsin is voting for change,’ ” Gore said, pointing to a banner draping a back wall of the hangar. “You know it takes courage to change. It sometimes seems too deceptively easy to stay in the same old rut that we have been in. Make no mistake about it, trickle-down economics is a rut. But we’ve got to have courage to break out of it and reach for a brighter future.”

But did any of this produce any new votes?

Not likely, if Marie Hofer, a Knoxville writer and researcher, is typical of those who came out to see and hear Gore. Although she set aside her lunch to go to the airport for Gore’s rally, she confessed: “I’d already made up my mind before I came.

“I’ve been working for the campaign for the last month,” she added. “And, I could give you 100 reasons why I’m voting for him. Most of the people here have decided, too, I believe. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have taken a day off from work, would they?”