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When she met Drew, whatever pieces were left of Karenna's wild-child soul seemed to come to peace. "They were so intense, so focused and secure," says Megan Colligan, a college pal. Last year Gore got his first grandchild, Wyatt, born conveniently on the Fourth of July. As she does with her father, Karenna seems to delight in her husband for the things others might see as strange. Drew, 34, who works for a biotech venture-capital fund, is bright, attractive and good-natured. But like Gore, his mind is sometimes transfixed by the academic and arcane, as witnessed by a friend who watched Drew and the Veep happily spend a summer afternoon by the pool discussing daylight saving time. And he is routinely described as, well, goofy, the kind of guy who, when he realized he had no music, clipped the Wall Street Journal's list of top-100 CDs and bought them all, an abdication of judgment that sometimes leaves the couple's dinner parties sound-tracked by Milli Vanilli.
Adulthood has no doubt sharpened Karenna's political instincts, but they have failed her father on occasion. Some say Gore and his daughter are both stubborn and arrogant, each falling in love with the other's thinking simply because it's an echo of their own. Karenna, for instance, pushed to bring in Naomi Wolf, the feminist writer who advocates, among other things, teaching children the value of masturbation. Wolf's $15,000-a-month salary and memos pushing Gore to be an "alpha male" left the candidate withered by weeks of derisive press just as Bill Bradley started to make his big break in New Hampshire.
Karenna still considers Wolf a valuable voice on women's issues and a close friend. "I'm willing to take a few hits. I'm not going to argue with being pinned with stuff because I'm privileged to be at the table," Karenna says with a disarming ease. "I'm sure I'm not right about everything I've said or thought. But I feel very free to say what I think."
She does that often these days. But in her public speeches, Karenna can often be as stiff as her father, and girlish too. This has not stopped her fans from imagining a big political future for her. A friend recalls Karenna calling home from Harvard and talking to her younger brother Albert III. He was being badgered about whether he would follow his father and grandfather into the Senate. "I don't know. Why don't you ask my sisters?" he answered. "Yeah, why don't they ask his sisters?" an indignant Karenna said. Not to worry. Pauline, Gore's mother, and Nancy, his sister, had to stand to the side, but not this Gore girl. Says a powerful Democrat: "Tipper is the wife of one politician and the mother of at least one more."