Gore Camp Opens ‘New Phase’ With Move to Tenn.

Vice President Al Gore opened his new and, he hopes, improved national campaign headquarters Wednesday 663 miles from Washington and even further, by his reckoning, from the naysayers, spin doctors and other political poltergeists in the nation’s capital.

“This campaign is entering a new phase,” the vice president declared.

He announced that he has promoted his deputy campaign manager, Donna Brazile, a veteran political operative, to the post of campaign manager, making her the first African American woman to fill a top post in a major presidential campaign.

Gore moved from $60,000-a-month offices on Washington’s K Street, a cement canyon inhabited largely by lobbyists and lawyers, to a strip mall office--at one-third the rent--that once housed a health center on the outskirts of Nashville.

“This is the place to sign up to be part of a rip-tootin’ campaign,” he said to the not-quite-200 people who fell short of filling the headquarters’ parking lot.

But Democratic campaign veterans questioned whether the move itself can make a significant difference in Gore’s race against Bill Bradley for the Democratic presidential nomination, and his race for the presidency itself.

Does a move to the “heartland” mean the candidate will be closer to the voters?

“No, no, no,” said one chief of an earlier, and losing, Democratic presidential campaign. “The candidate’s not there. He’s on the road.”

Indeed, acknowledged one Gore campaign advisor, the idea that a campaign based in Nashville can get “back to the people” any more than one in Washington was simply “an explanation” for a move that he said makes sense for other reasons: “The campaign has a better opportunity to jell as a team. It becomes the center of your life. They were not operating as a team in Washington. It’s a bunch of little fiefdoms.”

The vice president would hear nothing of such doubters on Wednesday. He vowed to rejuvenate his campaign, taking it to the sort of town meetings he held as a member of Congress elected here in Nashville and as a senator from Tennessee.

“This is intended to take the campaign directly back to the grass-roots,” he said in one of a series of back-to-back interviews with Nashville television stations, standing in a blue knit sport shirt and khakis in the quickly deserted parking lot after the headquarters opening. “I’m throwing away the prepared text. My attitude is, ‘Let ‘er rip.’ ”

The move here was prompted by the campaign’s awakening to Bradley’s challenge and Gore’s concern that his headquarters, top-heavy with consultants, needed to leave what President Clinton has called the “Washington echo chamber.”

What better place, the vice president reasoned, than the city from which he launched his political career a quarter-century ago?

“This is a very powerful moment in this campaign, powerful because of what home means,” he said. “Home is not only a place but an idea. Home is where we start from, where we learn our values, where a neighborhood has sounds of a summer evening that remind us of what we are all about.”

In his lyricism, he evoked a more Elysian--and welcoming--image than that once conjured up by Robert Frost: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

The move to Tennessee eased what Gore advisors are now saying was crucial: shaking up the campaign staff. About 60% of the 185 full-time workers are being dismissed, but perhaps half of that group are fund-raisers whose chores are nearing completion.

Gore’s choice of Brazile raised some eyebrows in Washington, where she is known for an abrasive, take-charge manner. In 1988, she was forced to quit as deputy field director for Michael S. Dukakis’ presidential campaign after urging reporters to investigate an allegation of marital infidelity about then-Vice President George Bush.

As campaign manager, Brazile will handle operations, while consultant Carter Eskew will have principal responsibility for message, all under the supervision of campaign chairman and former Merced congressman Tony Coelho.