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Then there is the century-old mansion--yes, a white house--at the end of a gaslighted driveway in a quiet, moneyed section of Nashville. The Gores are still moving in, and the place suggests they are moving on as well. The foyer holds the baby grand piano on which Tipper took her childhood lessons, and they have finally hung the oil portraits painted when their children were little--an empty-nester prerogative now that the kids are no longer around to object. There are few mementos of Al's eight years working in that other White House--and none in sight from the brutal campaign that left Gore in what he and Tipper call "that little-known third category" of winning the popular vote but losing the race.
On the stump, Gore is calm and likable, far more the person his friends have always said they see in private. The tortured jokes about being stiff have been retired, replaced by entertaining riffs about the indignities of his sudden, involuntary re-entry into private life. He calls himself "the man who used to be the next President of the United States" and laments that instead of flying Air Force Two, he now has to take his shoes off to get on an airplane. Marvels Bill Curry, an ex--Clinton White House aide defeated in his bid for Connecticut Governor: "Having Gore in to campaign for me was like having Jay Leno. He washed away people's misgivings, and that was a lot to accomplish. Is he somebody who can sell himself? He was when I saw him."
This is the man, remember, who in 2000 got more votes than any other Democratic candidate in history. His core supporters are folks who still nurse the wounds of Florida, those who cheered in September when he stood nearly alone among the party's leaders in challenging Bush on Iraq. Gore wrote that speech in his room at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, organizing his thoughts, as is his custom, by papering the walls with supersize Post-it notes. A day later, at a political rally in Santa Fe, N.M., he gave voice to many of the party faithful, who chanted, "Say no to war!" Restaurant owner Herb Cohen was there with a hand-lettered sign that read WE SUPPORT YOU, al. As for the rest of the party's leaders? "No guts," Cohen said.
But the speech in San Francisco--in which Gore warned that a campaign to oust Saddam Hussein could "seriously damage our ability to win the war against terrorism"--was roundly trashed by the party hierarchy and some of Gore's former aides. It was, they said privately, an opportunistic lurch to the left, putting Gore on the wrong side of history, the wrong side of politics and the wrong side of his own record as one of the few Democrats to vote in favor of the first President Bush's war against Saddam. "I had close friends who were really angry about that speech," Gore says. "That's the peril of taking an unvarnished approach to issues. And whether I run again or not, that's what I intend to do. Those who like it, great. Those who don't--I'm sorry, but I don't care." In fighting terrorism, Gore says he would have gone to war in Afghanistan, as Bush did, but says the President's rejection of international peacekeepers in the aftermath is "coming back to haunt us."