At the moment the trouble lifted for Al Gore last week, the Vice President was stepping onto a basketball court inside a Connecticut middle school. Gore was marking time, waiting for Janet Reno to finish her press conference so he could step up to his own battery of TV cameras and proclaim that he was out from under the shadow of a special prosecutor. While he waited, Gore shed his suit coat and strolled to the foul line, chatting with a few dozen seventh- and eighth-graders who were trying out for the school's team. He bounced the ball a time or two, looking about as casual as Gore ever looks in public, then turned to the basket and, with exaggerated ease, lofted the ball into the air. It swished through the hoop perfectly, catching nothing but net, and the kids shrieked in delight; Gore got the ball back and spun it smartly on his index finger. As he left the court, he turned to the children and said, "Those who don't make the team, keep trying. Repetition--practice--is the key to success."
That formula--dogged preparation for a rote maneuver that is designed to look bold and spontaneous--has worked well for Gore over the years. As a Congressman in the early 1980s, he would lie flat on his back late at night in an empty House gymnasium and hurl the ball at the hoop again and again; when at last he could make the trick shot, he unveiled it in a pickup game with other lawmakers. Representative Gore studied the arms race with the same intensity, working 10 hours a week for a year before championing a simple solution to the Soviet first-strike threat--the single-warhead Midgetman missile. He crammed his mind with facts about computers and technology, coining the term information superhighway way back in 1979. And so meticulous were Gore's preparations for his 1996 debate with Jack Kemp, the putative heir to Ronald Reagan's Great Communicator throne, that the Vice President demanded his practice room be cooled to the precise temperature of the debate hall--and made sure his aides factored in the audience's effect on the ambient temperature. After four climate-controlled mock debates, he went out and demolished Kemp in the real one, repeating his favorite memorized phrase--the Republicans' "risky $550 billion tax scheme" again and again.
Now, with the threat of an independent prosecutor receding, Gore can get on with the business of applying this practice-makes-perfect credo to running for President. It's a task that, even in this era of permanent campaigns, might seem premature for a Vice President, except that it has become the organizing principle of Clinton's status quo second term. Clinton's legacy is now predicated on electing Gore ("It's going to take another presidential election to set these ideas in cement," Clinton has told friends), which is why Gore's electability has become an issue so early in the game.
Though Gore's aura of invincibility has been dented by his strange fund-raising adventures among Buddhist nuns, he remains the Democratic front runner; since Truman, no Vice President who has tried for it has been denied his party's nomination. If he is elected, Gore could bring to the job an extraordinary combination of qualities: he is smart, decisive and prepared (his father, Senator Albert Gore Sr., chose the job for him when he was a boy growing up on the eighth floor of a Washington hotel). He even has a core of convictions.
