The Stiff Man Has A Spine.

• Author: STARR, ALEXANDRA

Gore's record shows he's got what it takes to be president

THERE SEEMS TO BE AN UNWRITTEN rule in newsrooms today: A mention of Al Gore is incomplete without a reference to his wooden presence. "[M]ost of the press about Gore on the stump could run under the headline `Stiff man still stiff,'" Melinda Henneberger observed in The New York Times. Gail Collins remarked on Gore's eerie resemblance to Howdy Doody on the editorial page of The Good Gray One. The New Yorker hunted down the vice president's college basketball teammates and reported his playing was ... well, you fill in the blank.

But a funny thing about Gore--he's been in the public eye for nearly a quarter of a century. After serving as congressman, senator, and vice president, Gore has left a long trail of footprints (unlike, we might add, a certain Texas governor). And while spinning new metaphors to describe Gore's lack of charisma can make for entertaining copy, it is the vice president's record that gives the best indication of the president he would be.

The paper trail provides much to commend him for the top job. By all accounts, Gore is a workhorse. When he decided to become involved in the thenfevered debate on nuclear weapons in the 1980s, he set aside eight hours a week for 13 months to study the issue, and emerged from the cogitation with his own strategic plan. Gore has brought similar diligence to his work as vice president. "He is a quick study, but when he has to, he really puts in the time to understand issues," says Larry Haas, who worked on the vice president's reinventing government initiative. "He is committed to being very, very knowledgeable on policy"

After serving as the commander-in-chief's shadow for the past seven years, Gore's policy positions (and his reputation) are indelibly twinned to Clinton in the eyes of most voters. But Gore is no Clinton clone in demeanor or ideology. For one thing, Gore is more disciplined than the president. While Clinton is known to relish interminable debate, Gore favors quick action. Former staffers say Gore served as resident grown-up in Clinton's first term, prodding the president to issue decisions. According to The Agenda, Bob Woodward's chronicle of Clinton's first year in office, Gore's frustration did spill into plain view on at least one occasion. When the president mournfully asked what he could do to pass his economic program, Gore, exasperated, retorted, "You can get with the goddamn program!"

In addition to differences in their modus operandi, Gore seems more of a dyed-in-the-wool centrist than the president. While Clinton publicly agonized over signing the 1996 welfare reform bill, Gore pushed the president to make it law. The vice president was also a strong proponent for fiscal discipline before Clinton caught budget-cutting fever. In Clinton's inaugural year, Gore looked into freezing Social Security cost of living allowances (COLAs). It was a daring move, considering social security's status as the third rail of American politics. The administration ultimately decided against cutting entitlement spending in its inaugural year. But when the Republicans captured the House and Senate in 1994 and began clamoring for full-fledged deficit reduction, Gore was instrumental in persuading Clinton to offer a balanced budget of his own.

While Gore has more moderate political instincts than Clinton, the vice president can be a bolder politician. Clinton doesn't choose his vacation spots without consulting pollsters. His presidential agenda seems almost exclusively dictated by what will play well with the public. The vice president, in contrast, seems committed to the issues he cares about. Gore pushed hard for intervention in Bosnia and Haiti. He stuck with the low-glamour issue of reinventing government for six long years. He fought for improvements to the 1996 telecommunications bill and pushed the president to threaten a veto when Republicans were hell-bent on complete deregulation. Thanks to the vice president, the Clinton administration is the most pro-environment in a generation. When the 1997 climate-change negotiations were on the verge of collapse, Gore flew to Kyoto over the howls of his political advisors and helped broker a compromise. To be sure, the vice president is no wide-eyed idealist. He may be able to hold forth for hours on the poisoning of the environment, but he is a clear-eyed vote counter, too. Still, look at his record and the message comes across: This stiff man has a spine.

The Democratic Hawk

In July of 1995, President Clinton was agonizing over Bosnia. The town of Srebrenica had just fallen to the Serbs, and the media was filled with bone-chilling reports of genocide and mass rape. Gore, who had argued for U.S. intervention since the early days of the administration, was adamant that the United States respond to the carnage. In a meeting with the president, he described a photograph of a young Muslim refugee who had committed suicide by hanging herself with a floral shawl. Gore's 21-year old daughter was haunted by the photograph, said the vice president. What she couldn't understand, he continued, was why the United States wasn't doing more. The story made an impression on the president at a decisive moment. "We've got to try something," Clinton concluded.

Gore has never shied away from tough foreign policy decisions. When he decided it was in the United States' strategic interest to dislodge Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991, he joined just nine other Democratic senators...