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But Gore is coming to the biggest political contest of all in an era that loves talk-show confessionals--a time when even the British royals are expected to loosen up or lose their jobs. Gore, in fact, has a lot of Prince Charles in him, a vestige of the style of upper Cumberland, Tenn., "that emphasizes formalism in public presentation," he told TIME last week. "I think I absorbed that, but I'm slowly learning how to transcend it." Until that happens, Gore's famous stiffness and failure to grasp the trick of compelling self-presentation are no small problem. His own boss is the best possible example of the advantages that go to politicians who can mass market the human touch. And Gore's success in positioning himself as a centrist may actually have made his shortcomings as a personality more important. For if the next presidential race does not turn on ideology, it may come down to the question of which candidate makes voters feel more comfortable.
And Gore is a curious specimen. To understand why, it helps to know about the scissors. Whenever a memo, article or academic paper sparks the Vice President's formidable mind, he pulls out his scissors and begins snipping. He whittles a page down to a paragraph, the paragraph down to a sentence and that sentence down to the one key phrase that contains, for Gore, the essence of the whole idea. Then he arranges the fragment on his desk among the other scraps of paper--seeds of thought, if you will--already lying there. "You just pray nobody sneezes," says Carol Browner, who rose from Gore's staff to become head of the Environmental Protection Agency. After the idea has ripened on his desk, he will hand a bewildered aide a piece of confetti holding some mysterious term--"digital earth" or "distributed intelligence"--and say, "Schedule some time. I want to talk to you about this."
Gore's way of approaching the world--devouring all available information and breaking it down into pieces he can hold in his hand and turn over in his mind--has won him a reputation as a forward thinker on difficult issues. But it doesn't always help in politics. (Take, for example, the least effective bite-size phrase of Gore's career: "No controlling legal authority," a snippet of legalese he picked up from his counsel, Charles Burson, and repeated seven times during his disastrous March money-scandal press conference.) Gore has spent the past six years studying the master, trying to break Clinton's seamless performance into component parts he can make his own. But Clinton's gifts are as irreducible as a sunset; Gore has not picked them up yet, and he won't. "He does the steps," says former presidential adviser Dick Morris, "but he doesn't hear the music." Even Tipper Gore concedes his reticence as a public figure, while arguing that it has its own virtue. "Bill Clinton is fantastic; there's no question about it. And he's a very different personality type than my husband," she says. "But I don't think we're always looking for the same thing in our leaders. I know it's important to be able to connect with people, but I also think it's important to be able to believe someone is going to solve some of the problems that need to be solved."