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Gore's awkwardness onstage was plain to see last week as he busied himself with Important Work to prove he was moving beyond the campaign-finance scandal. The week's events and ceremonies were related to some of his favorite subjects--education, the environment, Internet smut--but Gore's performance was frequently off-key. The swoosh of his basketball in the Woodrow Wilson Middle School gym may have been exhilarating, but it could not make up for what had come before: a listless, interminable session in an overheated school library during which Gore droned on and on, consulting index cards and discoursing on the role of public education during the industrial revolution. When the school gave Gore its sweatshirt, he didn't have the presence of mind to unfold the thing, much less put it on. And when it was time to go, he left an auditorium of squirming adolescents with this rousing farewell: "The hospitality you have given me thus far equals or exceeds that of any school I have ever visited."
When Gore wants to, his formality gives way to real charm, but even that is carefully calibrated. It is commonplace to say Gore wears a wooden mask in public and removes it in private to reveal a funny, knowing, ironic man of the world. But the quick wit Gore deploys in White House meetings or off-the-record encounters with reporters is just another layer of the onion, another protective device. He trusts almost no one, worries about leaks and guards himself to such an extent that some aides are not sure they have ever met the real Gore. "When he watches TV," a former adviser says, "you can almost see the voice in his head saying, 'Al Gore is watching TV. He is doing this so he can rest his brain, so in a minute he can do something that will change history.'"
Around midnight, after a three-city tour of Texas last month, the Vice President came wandering back to the press compartment of Air Force Two. Sliding in behind a table with the two reporters covering him that day, he picked slices of fruit from their plates and spent two hours swapping opinions about movies and telling stories about old chums like Erich Segal, who, Gore said, used Al and Tipper as models for the uptight preppy and his free-spirited girlfriend in Love Story; and Gore's Harvard roommate Tommy Lee Jones, who played the roommate of the Gore-like character in the movie version of Segal's book. When Jones won an Oscar in 1994 for The Fugitive, Gore tried to phone congratulations to him backstage, "but somebody kept hanging up on me," Gore said. "It was, 'Sure you're Al Gore'--click." Then he moved on, grabbing a cocktail napkin to diagram a new system for making Internet connections via satellite. Through it all, he never let anything slip or allowed the conversation to turn back to the job. When he praised a pbs documentary on Harry Truman, a reporter observed that as Vice President, Truman rarely saw F.D.R. Gore changed the subject. And when the other correspondent asked him about the state of Clinton's second term, he rolled his eyes and moaned, "Don't make me work." Then he retreated to the front of the plane and sent back an answer in writing.