http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/26/politics...ign/26gore.htmlA Transformed Al Gore Returns to the Spotlight at a Risky Moment
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
Published: July 26, 2004
BOSTON, July 25 - At this point four years ago, Al Gore was the man of the hour.
But in the years since he accepted the Democratic Party's presidential nomination and tried to emerge from President Bill Clinton's shadow by declaring, "I stand here tonight as my own man," he has undergone personal and political transformations.
He won 539,000 more votes than George W. Bush in 2000 but lost the presidency, becoming the symbol of an aggrieved party that believed the 2000 election was stolen. He walked away from another run in 2004.
He is the man who abandoned the caution that marked his three decades in politics to endorse Howard Dean in this season's primaries, only to watch him lose. And lately he has given caustic policy speeches that stoke anti-Bush passions in a way that Senator John Kerry, the Democrats' likely candidate for the presidency, is seeking to avoid.
So Mr. Gore's appearance as a speaker shortly after the opening gavel on Monday, holds promise and peril for him and his party as both try to move into a new era.
Carter Eskew, a top strategist for Mr. Gore in 2000, said that the former vice president would use his time in the spotlight to reinforce the now well-understood concept that "every vote counts."
"He feels his election in 2000 is an opportunity to make that very obvious but very powerful point," Mr. Eskew said. "That cliché has suddenly come into very stark relief in this election, and he's a good messenger for it. He's the embodiment of the moment at which the country took a different path."
But Mr. Eskew acknowledged that Mr. Gore, 56, would have to "walk a fine line between exciting the base of the Democratic Party and reaching out to people in the television audience who are unaffiliated and don't go in for a lot of rally and pep talk."
Other analysts said Mr. Gore might have difficulty reaching beyond that base because of the harshness of his critiques of Mr. Bush's policies, particularly regarding Iraq.
"There are some Democrats who quietly appreciate him for his growl, but they don't want to embrace him for it," said Ferrel Guillory, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Mr. Guillory said that Mr. Kerry and his running mate, Senator John Edwards, wanted to criticize Mr. Bush's policies, but that "they want to put it in an idiom that appeals to centrists and undecideds, whereas Gore's growl doesn't reach into that segment of the voters."
In the years since he lost the 2000 election, Mr. Gore has moved from Washington back to his home state of Tennessee, which he represented in the House and Senate for 16 years.
He has taught college seminars and steeped himself in business activities, including serving as a director on the board of Apple Computer and as an adviser to Google. He and his business partner, Joel Hyatt, one of the founders of Hyatt Legal Services, have acquired a cable news channel and intend to make it over into a channel for young adults.
Mr. Gore also donated to Mr. Kerry $6 million that he had left over from his 2000 campaign and about $250,000 to the Democratic Parties in Tennessee and Florida.
What that augurs for any political ambitions Mr. Gore may harbor is unclear, but in Tennessee, which turned on its native son to support Mr. Bush in 2000, he has kept a relatively low profile.
"He's receded into the background," said Ed Cromer, editor of The Tennessee Journal, a political newsletter. "It's all sort of puzzling."
Still, part of Mr. Gore's political message lives on this year. Mr. Edwards's evocation of "two Americas" can be traced to the theme that Mr. Gore developed at his own convention: "They're for the powerful, and we're for the people."
But since Mr. Gore honed that theme, the terrorist strikes of Sept. 11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have altered the political debate. Bruce Reed, president of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, said: "The contexts and the challenges the country faces this time are dramatically different from last time. This election is about national security and the war on terror, so the focus of the campaign would have changed anyway even if Gore were running."
Mr. Guillory said that because the context of Mr. Gore's candidacy was so different from Mr. Kerry's, the party had moved on, leaving Mr. Gore a "paradoxical figure."
"Gore doesn't return as a beloved figure," Mr. Guillory said. "There is some admiration for his enunciating in the strongest possible terms what Democrats are thinking about Bush, but it's poignant now how little real embrace of Gore that there is."
He added: "The party has moved on with different personalities and a different idiom. And as the party looks back to a model, it looks to Bill Clinton's ability to build a coalition and enunciate a vision."
Mr. Eskew said he had no regrets about how Mr. Gore had tried to distance himself from Mr. Clinton. "We did it as well as we could," Mr. Eskew said. "The difference for John Kerry is that Gore was Clinton's vice president; Kerry has the luxury of the passage of time and the fact that he was never Clinton's surrogate son. And the world is different now; it's a different moment."
Mr. Gore surprised the political world in December 2002 when he announced that he would not seek the presidency in 2004. His late father, also a senator from Tennessee, once said that his son had been raised to be president, and Mr. Gore had been seeking the Oval Office, at least overtly, since 1988. But after the disputed 2000 election, not everyone in his party was sympathetic to him, with some saying that the election, held at a time of peace and prosperity, should not even have been close.
They blamed his populism and his tar-baby relationship with Mr. Clinton and scoffed at his failure to carry Tennessee, making it clear that if he wanted the nomination in 2004, he would have to fight for it.
Mr. Gore was in a political wilderness of sorts yet was still perceived as the strongest and best-known candidate in the field. But he told CBS News in December 2002, "The last campaign was an extremely difficult one," adding that many Democrats had no appetite for a rematch between him and Mr. Bush.
"I don't think it's the right thing for me to do," Mr. Gore said then of running again.
Mr. Reed of the leadership council said that by deciding not to run this year, Mr. Gore seemed aware that the party had moved on. "He did a very noble thing by stepping aside in 2004 and keeping it from becoming a grudge match," he said. "He recognized that for the Democrats to win, the campaign had to be about the future, not about the past."
Whether Mr. Gore still has political ambitions or a political future remains a question.
Mr. Cromer of The Tennessee Journal said that Mr. Gore's new style would probably not go over very well in his home state. "The yelling and the harsh rhetoric, that just wasn't Gore years ago," he said. "In Tennessee, it's possible to be liberal if you have a conservative style, but he seems to have adopted sort of a flamboyant style. He seems to be a little bit over the top."
But Mr. Eskew said Mr. Gore was the happiest he had seen him in years. "He's not making the same sorts of calculations that people in politics have to make," he said. "In an odd way, sometimes things come to you in a way they don't when you are chasing them. He's in a very good place right now, and if political opportunity came to him, he might be interested."
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