Mementos of Two Campaigns

The Gore Campaign
How to Read Al's Mood
You get to know most presidential candidates as they do common things--fly commercial, eat the complimentary breakfast buffet, ride in the elevator--in pursuit of an uncommon goal. But Gore is the Vice President and thus was blocked by armed guards and accessible by invitation only. When you did get to him, he could be a conundrum. Once, as I interviewed him in a hotel about his eldest daughter Karenna, Gore started by offering me a soda. I'm glad I took it--it was the only refreshing thing in that dry, unrevealing, tense half-hour, which was odd since the questions were unbarbed and the subject well known to this doting father. But one learned over time that Gore was just moody. You could game him out--specific questions got good answers, general ones got you nowhere--but sometimes he didn't want to play at all. The jaw would lock, and the eyes would veil. And just when you dismissed him as no fun, he could surprise you, coming back on the plane to offer you a slice of birthday cake or winking in acknowledgment as he handed you a cup of coffee at a Cuban diner in Miami. Secret Service wouldn't let you reach out for him, but he could reach out for you, to joke about how the suit you're wearing looks remarkably like one on Hillary Clinton that the magazine had ridiculed that week. And if you peeked up at the front of Air Force Two, you might see the most serious man in the world hamming it up, calling a photographer forward to snap a picture of the Vice President pretending to have a weighty discussion with a poor, open-mouthed dozing staff member.

The Kids In The Hall
While Al Gore will sometimes surprise his staff with an occasional prank or imitation, his sense of humor is on the dry side. So it was quite useful that Gore's senior staff members on the campaign trail were always ready with a dose of exuberant wit. Whether surrounded by needling reporters or awakened in the middle of the night, Chris Lehane, Gore's bantamweight press secretary, winked his way through every bon mot. While other staff members gravely questioned Bush's experience, Lehane instead laughingly squealed, "He's as confounded as he is confused! He's as flummoxed as he is floundering! He's as puzzled as he is perplexed!" Then there was Greg Simon, the traveling policy adviser, who spent the final two months on the trail providing the press with a daily song. "Hello press pool my old friend./The long campaign week's at an end," he sang at the end of Gore's work-around-the-clock Labor Day trek, to the tune of Simon and Garfunkel's Sounds of Silence. "We've been assaulted by a wet tarmac./We ate our way through a cheese-steak attack ..." A welcome relief from the weighty world of lockboxes.

-- Tamala M. Edwards

The Bush Campaign
Did He Really Say That?
When you've heard the same speech a hundred times, it's difficult to focus on what a candidate is saying. George Bush solved that problem by making each speech a fascinating opportunity for new language pileups. Some greatest hits: "I know how hard it is to put food on your family"; "I understand small-business growth. I was one"; "The most important job is not to be Governor, or first lady in my case." But the fun wasn't just limited to subject-verb mangling. More exciting still was his style. Occasionally he walked the stage hunched like a gunfighter, arms poised to pull his pistols. To punctuate a point, he'd sometimes squat and bow his arms as if he were trying to lift a water cooler. Or he'd poke the air like a man torturing an elevator button. And, boy, could he paint a wicked rhetorical picture. A particular favorite popped up at an energy-policy speech in Saginaw, Mich. Like most of his speeches important enough for a TelePrompTer, his emphasis track was unhooked from the actual text. Suddenly, a throwaway line got too much fancy sauce, making him sound as if he were declaring armistice at the end of a science-fiction movie: "The human being and the fish can coexist peacefully."

The Baseball Blackout
During the World Series, baseball buff George Bush never wandered to the back of his press plane for a little postgame chatter. Reason: reporters had barred him, and his "off the record" sessions, from their part of the plane. It was their response to the campaign's decision to cancel press conferences for the last seven weeks of the campaign. For most pols, a blackout would be reason to haul out the peanuts and Cracker Jack, but for the slap-and-tickle candidate, this was punishment. Bush likes to gambol and gibe, because that's what baseball is too. Which is why his off-the-record chats tell you more about Bush in minutes than hours of reporting could ever uncover: what he thinks about the debates, the stolen debate tape and the electoral landscape. He mocks Al Gore. He pinches female reporters' cheeks and talks about his children, his parents and his Texas ranch. But the richness of these talks highlights just how managed the message is.

-- John F. Dickerson