The Ballad of Gore 2000 Gets a New Verse in Nashville

In a way, this hilltop metropolis above the Cumberland River is as close as you can get to Hollywood in the Deep South. It’s a city where stars and aspiring stars breathe the same air as mere mortals. Some even call it “the Third Coast.”

So last week, when Vice President Al Gore uprooted his Washington-based presidential campaign and relocated here, there was the requisite high school marching band, the mandatory front-page headline. But no joyful singing, no dancing in the streets--at least no more than usual in a place some also call Music City.

If you’re accustomed to seeing Garth Brooks at your local supermarket, or Faith Hill at your doctor’s office, you don’t get too worked up about one more star appearing in the local firmament. In fact, many residents proudly predicted that the effect of Gore’s move would be felt more by Gore himself than by the city he likes to call home.

‘A Sort of Positive Energy Place’

“I think of Nashville as a sort of positive energy place, and I’m assuming Gore must’ve sensed that,” said Stewart Clifton, a former city councilman who managed the campaign of Bill Purcell, Nashville’s newly elected mayor.

The local theory goes something like this: Slipping in national polls, facing a stiff challenge from former Sen. Bill Bradley of New Jersey, Gore looked like a man in need of some home cooking. Pundits may have been right when they said Gore wanted to slash his Washington rent and reduce his bloated payroll, but he also needed a patch of familiar ground on which to regain his footing.

“Nashville is a place,” Gore said. “But it’s also an idea.”

The idea seemed to take hold quickly. After only a few minutes in the valley of the shadow of the Grand Ole Opry, the man looked different. He was smiling, and not in that old Tin-Man-Needs-Oil way. He was kicking the bricks in black cowboy boots--a bit too shiny for a real cowboy, but then, change often comes in small increments.

He sounded different, too. He sprinkled his speech with teeny Tennessee-isms, like “rip tootin’,” and “Let ‘er rip,” and traded back-slappy hellos with TV reporters he recalled from the old days. “The new Al Gore,” one cameraman whispered in astonishment, as Gore practically two-stepped across a parking lot with one of his aides.

Outside the new headquarters of Gore 2000--an ugly building on a torn-up street overlooking the city’s skyline, which has skyrocketed since Bob Dylan came here and recorded his album, “Nashville Skyline”--the vice president announced again and again that he had come home to reach out and touch Tennesseans.

‘He’s Our Homeboy’

And plenty of Tennesseans were tickled.

“He’s our homeboy,” said Lollie Ellis, a Nashville travel agent. “Not only is he a source of pride for Tennessee, but for the South in general. I think we’re still looked on as a bunch of hicks. Jerry Springer doesn’t help.”

Ellis said Nashvilleans are more star-struck than they seem. And even in a city of stars, the vice president still stands out: “People will probably be out at the airport filming his plane coming in. This is a big deal.”

“We think it’s a great move,” said Molly McClaran, a 29-year-old graduate student at Middle Tennessee State University. “He’s coming home. These are the people who care about him the most, and want him to win the most.”

Like many here, McClaran has been a hard-core Gore supporter since 1988, when he first ran for president. She remembers Al Gore Sr., too, the former senator from Tennessee, cradling her newborn daughter in his arms and pronouncing the child splendid. “He said he’d trade his best cow for her,” McClaran said. “Down here, that’s saying a lot.”

The elder Gore, who died last December, was on the vice president’s mind also this week. Asked what his father would think of the campaign’s sudden move south, Gore said. “I think he’d probably like this. He started his winning campaigns here. And I did.”

Republicans, meanwhile, were mocking all talk of Gore’s Tennessee roots.

“Gore didn’t grow up in Nashville, he wasn’t raised here,” said Chip Saltsman, chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party. “He grew up in Washington, he was raised in Washington. As we like to say, he ain’t from around here.”

To highlight the point, Republicans welcomed Gore home with a wicked little Web site, GoreFreeTennessee.com, which received more than 5,000 hits this week, Saltsman said. By logging on, Republicans can send Gore an e-card, telling him to go back home--to Washington.

Clearly, Tennessee is a Republican stronghold, with a Republican governor, two Republican senators and five Republican congressional representatives in a delegation of eight. But the state went for Clinton-Gore in 1992 and 1996, “a tribute to Gore as opposed to Clinton,” one local Democratic power broker said.

Even if Gore’s Tennessee roots are not deep, they are undeniably wide. Besides serving as a congressman and a senator from here, he worked as a reporter at The Tennessean newspaper, and studied law and religion at Vanderbilt University.

Then why did so many Vanderbilt students greet the vice president with a great big yawn?

“There’s something called the Vander-bubble,” explained Rya Hobert, a senior studying Shakespeare at a coffeehouse near campus. “We’re inside the bubble.”

Actually, Nashville is a city of many bubbles. Besides major universities, people get lost in its two new professional sports facilities, and in its bustling downtown.

Nashville’s biggest bubble, by far, is its all-pervasive music industry. In the way that everyone in Los Angeles is writing a screenplay, everyone in Nashville is writing a song. And many on Music Row simply didn’t bother to look up from their guitars to note the vice president’s triumphal return. Like the man sitting on the curb outside Curb Records, serenading the door in the hope that an executive would come out and hand him a contract.

“Gore?” the troubadour of the curb said when asked. “Wha?”

If a musician in Nashville formed a strong opinion about Gore this week, chances are he or she got stuck in the traffic jam created by the vice president’s formidable motorcade, the likes of which had not been seen in Nashville since Minnie Pearl’s funeral.

Not everyone was hostile, however, to the Gore parade. “I was driving by and saw the Maryland license plates,” said Angela de Lugo, a mother of three. “And I thought, ‘Yay, they’re here!’ ”

De Lugo and many other Nashvilleans hurried to the Gore headquarters, hoping to volunteer but the campaign wasn’t ready for them and would-be helpers were left to wander the parking lot with nothing to do.

Whenever the headquarters is up and running, Vivian Bertalan will be there. Bertalan left her home in San Francisco and drove here to meet him. Like Gore, she said, she wanted to connect.

“I wanted to tour the country,” she said. “Feel the people. Get the pulse.”

She reached out and gave a squeeze to her friend of five minutes, Jeanelle James, a native Nashvillean, whose pulse was indeed racing.

“We need a Tennessean in the White House,” James said hopefully, acknowledging under her breath that, yes, the last president impeached before the current president was a Tennessean.

But James said Andrew Johnson got a bum rap, and her heart goes out to all underdogs in search of sanctuary. “He’s like the fox,” she said of Gore. “He’s out there, the poor little scrapper. And 100 hound dogs are on his butt. And I am rooting for that little fox.”

What the Gore camp would like to know is, would she trade her best cow for him?