Democratic Convention: The Women Who Made Al Gore

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Al learned his political instincts from his mother more than his father. Yes, it is true that his father was his ideal for bravery and commitment at a time when it was treacherous to be a liberal in the South. He was "hated for the right reasons," as the Vice President put it in his December 1998 eulogy. But Albert, a near absolutist in favor of civil rights and against the Vietnam War, was also an object lesson in the costs of being right at the wrong time. The night he lost in 1970 was one of the few times Al ever saw his father cry.

Pauline always stood with her husband. "She shared his conscience and was his strongest supporter," Gore has said. But she was not eager to see her son practice his father's brand of politics. "Al by nature is more of a pragmatist than his father. As am I," she told the Los Angeles Times. "I tried to persuade Albert not to butt at a stone wall just for the sheer joy of butting...If there's no chance of victory, there's no sense in bloodying yourself."

So the son styled himself a "raging moderate," and once he won his congressional seat, he focused on issues that engaged his intellect and brought him a lot of attention but little criticism. He didn't make many enemies by crusading for safer infant formula and fairer and more available organ transplants. When Al railed against the befouling of Love Canal in upstate New York, was anyone rooting for Hooker Chemical? On such emotional and ideological questions as abortion and gun control, his positions shifted away from conservatism as he moved from a rural House district to a more diverse statewide constituency and then to a national audience.

Whereas his father grew more and more distant from the voters of Tennessee in the later years of his career, Al became the first Senator in memory to carry every county of Tennessee because he didn't forget the lessons of the woman who waded the muddy roads of the Fourth Congressional District. As a Congressman and a Senator, he went home nearly every weekend, and he held hundreds of open meetings a year.

And it was from Pauline, who thrived in moot court at law school, that Al learned the secret of throwing an opponent off balance: hit him where he thinks he is strongest. Bush strategist Ralph Reed says that is the thing that is "most dangerous about Gore...he goes in where nobody else would go and attacks in a pretty bald-faced way." Al bested Ross Perot in chart-to-chart combat over trade, pounded Jack Kemp's supply-side dogma as a "risky tax scheme," disemboweled the health-care plan that Bill Bradley thought would be the centerpiece of his campaign. "Something that she has always emphasized, that I think my father definitely learned from her, is really to respect the best arguments of your adversary, not to underestimate your adversary," Karenna says. As Al was looking to break out of a crowded field in his audacious 1988 run for the Democratic nomination, Pauline scribbled a note with three words of motherly advice for one of his first appearances with the other candidates: "Smile. Relax. Attack."

THE EARLY YEARS

Time.com

Democratic Convention: The Women Who Made Al Gore

Pauline raised a tough, pragmatic politician, but it took a life-altering family crisis to make Al see how much he had to learn from Tipper