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Yet it was in these rowdy years that the political bond between father and daughter began to form. One night Karenna came home refusing to admit she was drunk. Gore had her draw a floor plan of the house; the next morning, as she looked at its wild misproportions, Karenna had to face up to the fact that she had not been sober. Still, this was the same 14-year-old who tagged along with him one Saturday afternoon in 1987 when he met with advisers to talk about a presidential run. As she has done repeatedly, Karenna came to define her father in her own way, a way at odds with his establishmentarian image. The teen decided that Gore and his insurgent bid were of a piece with the defiant punk bands she sneaked out to see. "I felt like we were trying to overthrow the Old Guard," she says.
Richard Holbrooke, then Gore's foreign-policy adviser, remembers Karenna being in the hotel room during preparation for a 1988 primary debate and looking up periodically from her homework to say, "Dad, I just don't think that's right." The young girl walked away from that campaign with two formative experiences. One was seeing how politics, which often pushed candidates away from their children, became caulking between her and her father. "He was so kind. Even in really stressful moments, when he was losing, surrounded by hostile questions, whenever I had concerns, it was important to him what I was feeling," she says. "I was never told to shut up and leave."
The other was falling in love wholesale with the behind-the-scenes maneuvering that went on around strategy and issues, following Holbrooke and media guru Bob Squier around, according to Tipper, "like a puppy dog." Karenna's interest, particularly in controlling the message, was also a reaction against how her parents' battles were portrayed in the press. The day after Gore's withdrawal from the 1988 race, Karenna's crying face was the cover of a D.C. political paper. But that, she says, was nothing compared with the tears she had shed three years before, when Tipper drew scorn from libertarians and artists for her campaign to clean up music lyrics. Within the walls of their Arlington, Va., home, Tipper's efforts led to fights. "It was like the embarrassment everyone has if their parents pick them up from the eighth-grade dance," Karenna says. "It was like that on acid."
Outside the home, however, her reaction was different. "Her father was fair game, but her mother was out of bounds. That was the beginning of the protective attitude," says Perry Cohagen, Karenna's college boyfriend. One reporter recalls a day during the 1988 campaign when reporters on the bus began making fun of Tipper among themselves. It was all funny--until they realized the 14-year-old blond was standing behind them. But Karenna didn't cry, and she had the last word. "You all have no idea what you're talking about," she said evenly, turning to walk away.
If you ask friends to describe Karenna, one word always comes up: tough. She was the Tennessee state champion in water skiing. Her coach, Glen Birdwell, says Karenna repeatedly skied after hitting the water so hard that she broke her ribs. And during one dry summer, when rattlesnakes began coming into the lake and the male skiers began to scream and scatter, Karenna grabbed a snake and held it aloft, its venomous mouth clamped in her grip.