Being Al Gore.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick
• Position: Presidential candidate

The "real" appeal of The Kiss

August's Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles was memorable for reasons that range beyond what is now simply called The Kiss. While there is no doubt that Al and Tipper Gore's final-night buss--variously described as spontaneous, cynical, passionate, and nauseating, it was all that and more--provided the most enduring image of the political season so far, The Kiss was only one part of an unprecedented invitation into the private life of a political candidate.

Judging from Gore's commanding and long-lived convention bounce--a boost that put him in the lead of the presidential race for the first time--there can be little doubt that many Americans readily jumped at the opportunity for a sort of psychic intimacy with the vice president. Designed to humanize a candidate routinely called "wooden" and "stiff" even by his supporters and to distance him from Bill Clinton's seedy personal life, the final two nights of the convention, highlighted by testimonials from family members, even allowed Al Gore to wipe out a double-digit gender gap with George Bush and to create a similar margin in his own favor. Somehow, the vice president went from being an object of scorn, if not pity, to being one of electoral desire. How that happened is no small matter: Politicians, every bit as much as artists and ad men, are in the business of trying to manipulate emotions and change minds. Whenever they succeed, attention should be paid.

Gore's acceptance speech played a role, of course. As rhetorically shapeless as it was fiscally generous, the vice president's address flashed huge wads of government cash to virtually every segment of the voting population. (On his campaign Web site, Gore proudly details his promised payouts to no less than 28 separate interest groups.) There's no discounting the power of such potential federal largess.

But we can also chalk up a large measure of Gore's success to what might be called the Being John Malkovich strategy. The evening before The Kiss, the Democrats aired a "Gore Family Video" put together by hip young director Spike Jonze, best known for the wonderful film Being John Malkovich, a fantasy in which people pay for the chance to literally get inside the head of actor John Malkovich for short periods of time. In part a meditation on the attraction of celebrity, Beng John Malkovich suggests that some of the audience's deepest thrills come from simply seeing public figures in the most...