Gore Is Trying Hard to Craft a Softer Image on the Stump

Addressing nearly 1,000 Latino youths at a leadership conference here recently, Vice President Al Gore made the type of effort to connect with his audience that increasingly is part of his campaign style.

“Su voto es su voz!” he said in slightly halting Spanish, urging the students to express their voices with their votes.

And that was not his only venture into Espanol. Besides joking that he could dance the Macarena, salsa, cumbia and lambada, Gore greeted his listeners with a “buenos dias,” told the students that they have the “corazon,” or heart, to become community leaders, and repeated the refrain “Querer es poder,” meaning where there is a will there is a way.

The audience ate up every palabra.

Gore, who says that in the early days of his political career he got butterflies in his stomach while shaking hands with strangers, has loosened up by leaps and bounds this fall as he campaigns for his and President Clinton’s reelection. Whether its forays into foreign tongues or use of self-deprecating humor, Gore slowly is chipping away at his reputation for stiff formality and penchant for policy arcana.

Much work remains to be done, especially since Gore passed up the opportunity to display his lighter side during his nationally televised debate earlier this month with Republican rival Jack Kemp. Indeed, Gore’s performance during the encounter struck some critics as robotic, given his parroting of phrases Clinton had used days earlier in debating GOP presidential nominee Bob Dole.

Still, on the campaign trail these days, virtually no rally ends without Gore himself trotting out an expanding catalog of jokes. Such as:

* “How do you tell Al Gore from a roomful of Secret Service agents? He’s the stiff one.”

* “Al Gore is so stiff that the racks buy the suits off him.”

And when Gore talks about his expanding repertoire these days, he refers not to some of the areas he has specialized in during Clinton’s first term, such as aviation safety or streamlining the bureaucracy, but a wide variety of dances he allegedly has mastered.

At a senior center in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., for instance, Gore quipped that he has given new meaning to square dancing. In Johnson City, Tenn., it was country line-dancing. On Thursday, at an Irish American forum in New York City, he boasted of his Irish step-dancing skills.

Such whimsy is a far cry from the Al of old, who insists he got weak knees and clammy hands while trolling for votes.

Aboard Air Force Two one recent night, as he and his entourage left a campaign rally in Birmingham, Ala., the shirt-sleeved vice president delivered a comic reenactment of himself as a mumbling, bumbling political novice.

Gore’s humor also was on display in New York City last week at the Alfred E. Smith dinner, an annual gathering of local politicos.

Following Kemp to the podium, Gore rocked the crowd of 1,200 diners with a slide show that mockingly portrayed how he has “tried to break the vice presidential mold” by inserting himself into the center of the action.

The doctored picture showed Gore standing among members of the Supreme Court, looking on during a meeting between the president and Secretary of State Warren Christopher and floating in outer space in an astronaut suit.

Another had Gore suited up as a member of the New York Yankees. “They’ve asked me to serve as the honorary foul pole,” Gore joked.

“The vice president has really worked hard at it and he’s humanized himself,” says Florida’s Democratic Gov. Lawton Chiles, a longtime friend who served with Gore in the Senate.

“I guess I’m a lot more at ease on the stump,” Gore agrees.

Still, he also knows that stereotypes die hard.

“I guess I’ll always be seen as stiff and reserved,” he sighs.

Even his staff seems to agree with that. On a trip to South Dakota this week, aides printed up T-shirts with Gore’s face added to Mt. Rushmore. Below the photo were the words “Stiff and Stiffer”--referring to the stone faces and the boss.

Times staff writer Paul Richter contributed to this story.