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Karenna has always had a healthy sense of fun. In high school she raised money for her student government by wrestling a pig into the backseat of a friend's car and raffling off votes for which teacher would have to kiss it. She is the first to show up at a party. And she doesn't care much for Washington, even though that's where her father and grandfather taught her to ride her bike, on the Capitol grounds, and where she went to school. She shares her father's attachment to Tennessee, where she was born. "Everyone says I had a really strong Southern accent," she sighs. "I'm so bummed I lost it." She is self-deprecating about her experiences in the world of the powerful. Writing about Gore's second Inaugural in Slate, she described Chuck Berry stepping on her foot and how all the party tenting made her house look like the death scene in E.T. When she went off to Spain after college in 1995 to work on a newspaper there, she declined to use a car that had been found for her at a good price; she chose to live on her salary and take the subway instead.
Karenna was only three when Gore announced he was running for Congress. After his election, the family would go back to Carthage in the summers. As she grew older, Karenna often took messages from constituents who had missed a pension check or wanted Gore to call back and pray with them. Once someone stopped the 36-year-old Congressman in a grocery-store parking lot with 11-year-old Karenna at his side. The constituent wanted to thank him for making it easier to get an organ transplant. "I was at that moment struck by how he really impacted people," she says.
And it was shortly thereafter that the Gores learned just how much their willful eldest child could impact them. Karenna was a handful, even as a toddler. "Rules and limits are more important than a lot of parents realize," wrote Tipper in her 1987 book, Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society. "I learned that simple but important lesson myself with my first child, who was overly demanding and had me wrapped around her finger at two years of age." Tipper encouraged her daughter's independence, letting her draw on the walls and giving Karenna her 1960s polyester and suede hand-me-downs, which the teen preferred to her friends' preppy duds.
By the time she hit the teen years, her spirited nature veered into open rebellion. Karenna lectured her parents on how their rules infringed on her First Amendment rights. She was big on "adventuring," climbing out of her window to shimmy down a manhole into the D.C. subway system for afterhours partying. When her friends spray-painted the names of punk bands on the tunnel walls, Karenna, ever the iconoclast, threw up names of country singers like Emmylou Harris and Kenny Rogers. One night Karenna was dancing along the tracks and headed off to stomp on the third rail. A friend pulled her back, explaining that she would be electrocuted. "I always think of that," she says. "I could have died, because I really was about to go jump on that."