Weird Al : A troubled and alarming vice president

There's a new, looser Al Gore. He left his assigned stool during his first debate with Bill Bradley at Dartmouth, to walk the stage, like Bill Clinton, and he invited questions from the audience before the show began. On the stump, he gestures broadly, spreading out his arms instead of holding them pinioned at his sides, elbows in, and jerking them up and down like pistons. When he smooches small children, he actually picks them up. (When a kid in New Hampshire started squalling at this close encounter, he murmured reassuringly, "I'm not too scary.")

But there has always been a new, looser Al Gore. His aides, and aides-in- waiting like Martin Peretz, have been assuring us, against the evidence of our senses, that he is a regular guy and a barrel of laughs since he first began running for president, in the 1988 election cycle. The new Al Gore is not only old, but an old fraud. The spontaneity he trots out to show his looseness is learned; you can almost read the messages streaming across the internal prompter: LEAVE THE STOOL . . . SPREAD THE ARMS . . . HOLD THE CHILD.

If Al Gore now is the Al Gore we have always known, we should ask what his enduring characteristics are, and what they might mean. Specifically, why is he so weird.

Consider a few obvious traits.

Gore is intelligent. Not as intelligent as James Madison or John C. Calhoun, maybe. But he went to Harvard and worked while he was there (unlike George W. Bush at Yale). He is generally believed to have written the book he signed, his 1992 ecological manifesto, Earth in the Balance, a feat that places him in lonely eminence among modern politicians, along with Pat Buchanan.

He is stiff as a railroad tie. Recently there have been a number of politicians with odd body language-Gerald Ford, George Bush-but Gore is uniquely dense and inert. His debate with Dan Quayle in 1992 was a typical performance. When making debater's points he swung his upper body heavily towards Quayle, like a de-mothballed gun turret. His face, whether speaking or listening, had the glazed look of a gaffed fish. When he tries to be more animated, the effect is painful, reminiscent of the Monster in Young Frankenstein singing "Puttin' on the Ritz."

Gore's physical rigidity is periodically enlivened by rhetorical frenzies. Louis Menand wrote in a New Yorker profile that Gore has, as a public speaker, "only two dials on the console: speed and volume. To convey gravity, he slows down; to convey urgency, he gets louder." He can bellow like Jesse Jackson or Louis Farrakhan, but unlike them, there is no crescendo: The triple forte simply pops out of nowhere. Just as the only forensic trick he knows is raising his voice, the only literary trick he knows is raising the temperature. In Earth in the Balance, he invoked Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Kristallnacht, and Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil" to describe modern man's mistreatment of the environment. "Ironically," wrote Gore, "Ethiopia, the first victim of modern totalitarian expansion, has also been an early victim of . . . our assault on the natural world." The famine victims of the mid Eighties "are, in a real sense, victims of our dysfunctional civilization's expansionist tendencies." Gore is as preoccupied with Nazism as Pat Buchanan: Buchanan defends those he believes were wrongly accused of war crimes; Gore accuses consumers and polluters of committing the moral equivalent of war crimes.

The Nineties have been a decade of shameless self-exposure in every arena, from daytime TV to the White House. But Gore was one of the leaders in exploiting private sorrows for political gain; if we don't remember, it's only because Bill Clinton does it so much more effectively. Gore made a ghoulish riff out of his son's near-fatal car accident at the 1992 Democratic convention in New York (the son was sitting in the audience, so the cameras could cut back and forth from Gore to his subject). Four years later at the Chicago convention Gore exhumed a sister who had died of lung cancer to decorate a sermon on the lethal effects of smoking. What is noteworthy about Gore's family snapshots is that they involve death; when Bill Clinton enraptured journalists with tales of standing up to his drunkard stepfather, the stepfather, in the time frame of his telling, was alive and kicking.

Are these random traits, drawn from the duffel bag we call the self, or do they hang together?

Gore has identified the episode of his son's accident as the turning point of his life. Though he exploited it in 1992, it moved him powerfully (whether that makes his exploitation better or worse is another question). The accident, he wrote in Earth in the Balance, made him "impatient with the status quo, with conventional wisdom, with the lazy assumption that we can always muddle through." It caused him to rethink not just environmental policy, but the spiritual and intellectual foundations of the modern world. (Gore blames Descartes and Francis Bacon for a mind-body split in Western man that leads to alienation from both emotion and nature-see Adam Wolfson's "Apocalypse Gore" in the March 8 issue of this magazine.) Gore began writing Earth in the Balance in the hospital where his son was recovering, and he describes the accident in the introduction. The act of putting the story down on paper, he haltingly told Michael Kelly, then with the New York Times, was "one of the most intense and painful and moving experiences I ever had": "I could not control the emotion. It was, it was. I mean, you know. I mean, I was just sobbing as I was putting it, as the words were finally falling out of me."