What It Took

(7 of 11)

The Choice. the Kiss. the Bump
Al Gore had a choice to make. He could pick Joe Lieberman, old friend, moderate Democrat and Orthodox Jew, to be his running mate. Or he could go with his consultants' top pick, a guy who had once put some of them on his payroll: John Edwards, 47, a trial lawyer and first-term Senator from North Carolina. North vs. South. Experience vs. youth. Episcopalian vs. Jew.

It was easy to see that the room on the 10th floor of the Loews Vanderbilt Plaza Hotel in Nashville was split in two. Some of Gore's most important advisers, including Devine and Shrum, strongly favored Edwards, who they believed would lend youth, star quality and fund-raising appeal to the ticket. But the consultants found themselves outmaneuvered by a compact man who often used few words to make his points. Tonight, however, with 10 days to go before the Democratic Convention, former Secretary of State Warren Christopher was anything but silent. He had already met privately that morning with Gore and Frank Hunger for nearly two hours. But it was 10:30 p.m. now, and even in front of the group that included Daley, Eskew, Brazile, Shrum, Devine, Fabiani and Tipper, Christopher was in no mood to be diplomatic.

You cannot pick a one-term Senator from North Carolina, he said to Gore. He is not ready to be President, and that is, in theory at least, what Vice Presidents are for. "This choice says everything about you--what's in your heart, what's in your soul, what's in your mind." It was one of those rare moments when the consultants who had been running the show for months discovered they didn't hold the strongest cards.

Gore didn't say much in that meeting, but he did say that religion worked in Lieberman's favor. Gore said he didn't see a lot of evidence of anti-Semitism in the country; what he saw was "fear of anti-Semitism." But that wasn't enough to disqualify anyone, especially Lieberman. As for Edwards, a multimillionaire who had won his campaign by spending $6 million, Gore said only, "I think for $6 million, a lot of people could be a good politician."

Gore had probably made up his mind earlier in the day but wanted to hear the arguments one more time. The session was so exhausting that some staff members drifted off into another room and drained the minibar. After midnight, Gore put out the word to a few key allies in organized labor, like John Sweeney of the AFL-CIO. Lieberman went to bed wistful and tired, telling a longtime aide, "It looks like it didn't go our way." Lieberman found out differently the next morning when Gore called to make a formal offer.

By the time Gore got to Los Angeles for his convention, he knew he couldn't win a race about personality but might win one about issues. So when he told his team that he wanted to get very specific in his speech, team members decided Gore needed to be Gore and leave the leavening to others. They agreed that Gore should avoid talking about himself and stick to personal stories about real Americans and substitute his lack of appeal for an appeal to the voters he wanted to fight for. Then they could bracket his speech with video testimonials from others about what a good guy he was.

Determined to write it himself, Gore kept his speech short, which meant it was only four times as long as necessary when he finished his first draft. Eskew, Shrum and speechwriter Eli Attie had been meeting with him in hotel rooms around the country for weeks to start hacking away at the forest, grove by grove. They nudged him on tone and urged him to lose the preachy, kindergarten teacher's condescension. They told him to "surf the applause," that is, talk over the roars of the crowd when they came. (Later an aide bragged, "It sounded weird in the room, but it worked on TV.") Karenna read it over, and daughter Kristen added some mirth. But it was Sarah, the Gores' quieter, more reclusive child, who turned out to be the real editor, urging her father to cut and tighten.

Gore got to the Staples Center 15 minutes early, a ball of nervous energy. He embraced his college roommate Tommy Lee Jones, and the two men took their own quiet turn around backstage together, winding up at the side portal from which Gore was meant to make his entrance. The Secret Service had hung a blue curtain blocking the crowd's view through that doorway, but there was a gap at the top, and Gore could just make out his wife on the Jumbotron. Tipper was talking about her father-in-law Al Sr., and his kindly face appeared on the giant screen one more time. Then came the pictures of the couple's four children, of his wife, the whole gauzy Christmas card. Eskew saw the emotion in Gore's eyes as he watched those pictures. "I could see he was overcome," Eskew says. And so when she called his name, Gore marched out into the crowd, fought his way to the stage, and then Al Gore did something hardly anyone in America had ever seen him do: commit a spontaneously emotional act. He grabbed his wife, kissed her carefully, and then something overcame him and he wrapped his arms around her even tighter and gave her the most fervent kiss any politician has ever planted on a wife in public--a big, face-sucking whopper that caught Tipper off guard, silenced the pundits for a good five seconds and sent the hall into a kind of superheated frenzy. The speech was good, but a week later, it was the kiss that people were still talking about, particularly men, who saw in Gore either something they had never expected or something in themselves, or both.