The Candidates and How They Govern

Al Gore: Vice president is passionate about the details, but he is bedeviled by a stubborn decisiveness he is trying to curb.

By EDWIN CHEN, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON--Al Gore began developing his reputation as a stickler for detail as soon as he won his father's old seat in the House of Representatives. As a first-year congressman, he read all his office mail and then parceled out each letter for action.

Over the years, that reputation has grown.

When discussing a program involving hundreds of satellites, he wanted to know their colors--to ensure that their "reflective quotient" would not affect night light on Earth adversely. As host of an major environmental conference, Gore took a personal interest in the lineup not only of the speakers but also of the entertainers. And as a candidate for president, he personally designed the logo on Gore 2000 bumper stickers and posters.

Besides his tendency to micromanage, Gore would bring to the Oval Office a penetrating intellect, a steely discipline, an insatiable appetite for preparedness and an uncanny ability to stay on script.

But unless the vice president learns to control those tendencies better, they well could land him in trouble, as they have in the past. He reacted awkwardly on a trip to Beijing, for example, when Chinese hosts surprised him with a champagne toast.

And Gore knows he needs to improve.

One little-known aspect of his penchant for detail is his fascination for the visual.

Whether crafting a speech or developing an arms control proposal, he loves to make use of graphs, pictures, diagrams, even flip charts on an easel.

"I can generally absorb a lot more information if I can see it in a visual pattern," the vice president explained in a recent interview.

Gore has been known to doodle on a dinner napkin to make a point. During one speech he held up a polystyrene cup, making believe that it was a nuclear warhead. And a bemused President Clinton still talks about their first working lunch in 1993, when Gore "brought in his little chart showing me how there were more greenhouse gases being put in the atmosphere in the last 30 years than in the previous 500."

Explained Lorraine Voles, a former top Gore staff member: "He has to see it all. He puts together concepts and ideas that way."

Focusing on details--and seeing it all--is central to understanding Gore and his decision-making style. That style is so little known around town that Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) confessed when asked about it: "I don't have a clue."

Gore approaches decision-making methodically. He likes to gather the broadest range of advice possible but does not reveal his own thinking until after reaching a conclusion.

Once there, he is unlikely to budge.

Repeatedly, aides past and present cited that trait when discussing Gore's style. And most could not recall a single time that he abruptly changed his mind on a major issue.

On the campaign trail, Gore's inner circle of advisors saw a vivid example of the way he operates last winter in Nashua, N.H., when they tried to persuade him to cancel a time-consuming campaign outing because of a New England blizzard.

Common sense seemed on their side.

But they miscalculated.

Gore may be a cerebral technocrat who prizes reason, but he sometimes acts purely on instinct or emotion, as his aides learned anew on that frigid Jan. 15 morning.

After patiently listening to near-unanimous entreaties to cancel from aides in Nashville and Washington, Gore abruptly ended the conference call by announcing: "We're going."

All the advisors knew it would be futile to argue.

Once America's 45th vice president makes up his mind, it is nearly impossible to change it--though no top aides are willing to say that for the record.

"It's rare to find a politician who's as certain as Gore is," said a former top White House strategist who has advised both Clinton and Gore. So certain, the former advisor added, that it borders on "hardheadedness."

'I'm a Stickler to a Fault'

A longtime confidant still on Gore's payroll elaborated. "It's possible to modify an approach. It's possible to rethink tactics. But change his mind? Not unless circumstances have changed or the decision had been based on incorrect information," this person said. "The vice president conserves his energy for what follows next, rather than constantly relitigating an issue in his mind."

Gore's stubborn decisiveness, coupled with a devotion to details--"I'm a stickler to a fault," he admitted--makes all the more remarkable his current effort to loosen up.

He confirmed in an interview that he is on a mission to delegate more decisions and to stop trying to be so completely scripted that he often seems awkward when the unexpected arises.

"I think I've gotten better at that," the vice president said.

In the current campaign, he has touted experience as a factor that voters should weigh--meaning that Bush, a two-term governor, comes up short.

Yet because Gore served eight years in the House and eight in the Senate before becoming vice president in 1993, Bush arguably has more unadulterated executive experience, having served since 1995 as the Lone Star State's 46th chief executive.

The vice president, on the other hand, rarely has been able to call his own shots, despite his proximity to the Oval Office (18 paces down a West Wing corridor).

Still, Gore's method of operation for the last quarter-century foreshadows the governing style that he would bring to the White House.

For starters, Gore does not apologize for his detail-oriented, leave-no-stones-unturned management technique--even though some Democrats cringe at memories of former President Carter, who was such a micromanager that he kept tabs on who used the White House tennis court.

"I have found that sometimes what others think of as detail can actually be a factor that determines the outcome of an issue or an effort," Gore said.

He cited as one such detail recent reports that oil company profits have increased by 500%. That was what led Gore to demand a Federal Trade Commission investigation of the industry.

In an interview, the vice president acknowledged that his meticulous, thoroughgoing style has hampered his ability to respond nimbly to unanticipated developments or circumstances.

The most vivid such case arose during Gore's high-profile visit to China in 1997 amid an unfolding scandal back home over illegal campaign donations from Beijing. Human rights activists were criticizing Gore for hobnobbing with the same men who had ordered the killings of democracy advocates at Tiananmen Square in 1989.

During a public ceremony, Chinese leaders ambushed Gore with a champagne toast that the vice president's advance team had been told would not happen.

Gore's stiff and awkward response--as he sloshed the champagne around--became the most memorable image of that trip, which many advisors did not want him to make in the first place.

"I think that, if you try to prepare for every last contingency, then you don't have a chance to be spontaneous. . . . And I have tried not to do that because, first of all, it's impossible and, second of all, it doesn't make much sense," he said in the interview.

Gore Studies Up on Arms Control Minutiae

The most frequently cited example of Gore's painstaking, methodical style is the way he went about mastering the intricacies of arms control in 1981.

Working with Leon Fuerth, then a House Intelligence Committee specialist, Gore waded into the minutiae with a determination and level of interest that Fuerth said he had never seen in a member of Congress.

For more than 13 months, Gore and Fuerth met weekly, plodding their way through a syllabus that Fuerth had prepared.

Not once was any session interrupted.

"I like to learn as much about a subject as I can, if I'm really sinking my teeth into it," Gore explained.

After mastering the complexities and nuances of arms control, he proposed a credible compromise approach that was controversial at the time--especially among Democrats--but today forms the basis for America's nuclear deterrence program: a single-warhead intercontinential ballistic missile.

But for someone with the reputation of a calculating, finger-to-the-wind politician, Gore also has taken a number of actions that entailed risks.

As vice president, he championed a controversial energy consumption tax despite strong opposition within the Clinton administration and Congress.

Gore also took on Ross Perot in a high-stakes debate on the North American Free Trade Agreement, even though many White House advisors argued against granting Perot such a prominent opponent on national television--especially when congressional approval of NAFTA then seemed far from certain.

And as a contentious United Nations summit on global warming teetered on the verge of collapse, Gore flew to Kyoto, Japan, on the spur of the moment and spent 16 hours in a hotel suite negotiating with all sides. His efforts salvaged the conference.

"I don't think I take any foolhardy risks," Gore said. "But I think sometimes you have to throw the long ball, so to speak."

Several years after Kyoto, another gamble did not produce such a happy outcome.

Faced with growing questions about his fund-raising activities in 1996, Gore wanted to call a news conference to explain his actions. He was agitated because his integrity had been challenged.

Nearly all his advisors, and most of Clinton's, urged Gore not to do it. He turned a deaf ear.

On short notice, Gore appeared before skeptical reporters in the White House briefing room and repeatedly argued that there was "no controlling legal authority" that prohibited his efforts.

"Dumbest thing he ever did," one of Gore's closest associates said.

Moreover, it took Gore several days to recognize the extent of his self-inflicted political damage, in large measure because of the absence of aides willing to deliver bad tidings.

"The hardest thing to say to Al Gore is, 'I don't know,' or, 'You're wrong,' " said one longtime advisor.

Indeed, numerous staff members and allies over the years have found Gore to be an unusually difficult man to advise, because he often is, or believes he is, the smartest, most prepared and best informed person in the room.

Asked about that perception, the vice president sighed deeply and replied:

"Well, if I was ever that way, I'm not now, because learning requires an appropriate appreciation for what you don't know."

By all accounts Gore is a more empathetic listener today, one upshot of his son's 1989 near-fatal car accident, which caused Gore to become more attuned to the needs of others, including his own family.

Gore also learned to soften his style by working with a management consultant after his inept 1988 run for the Democratic presidential nomination.

"I felt that I needed to know more about how to run a large organization, including a Senate office," Gore said.

Decisions Driven by Intellect, Emotion

Many of the vice president's more recent staffers find it hard to imagine that there were days, as recently as when Gore was a senator, when his brusque manner reduced aides to tears.

But that is not to say that Gore has tamed his hard-edged streak entirely, as both Clinton and Republican leaders have learned.

According to Bob Woodward in his 1994 book "The Agenda," when the new president in 1993 seemed to waffle during budget negotiations with congressional Republicans, Gore snapped after the president sought his advice:

"You can get with the goddamn program!"

Gore "does have an edge," conceded a former chief of staff who remains an advisor. "He's a man with a mission in life and not a hail-fellow-well-met, and that can be off-putting. Often he's misunderstood."

To an extent that may surprise some, emotion sometimes drives Gore's decisions.

On a trip home to Tennessee in 1980, then-Rep. Gore met with a Girls State gathering and was stunned to hear that most believed nuclear war was inevitable. In an instant, he decided to champion arms control.

Gore also reacted on an emotional level to the escalating ethnic violence in Bosnia in the mid-1990s.

Clinton was vacillating about what to do. Gore urged him to intervene, telling the president that his eldest daughter, Karenna, then 21, wanted to know why more was not being done to stop the brutality after she saw pictures of the horrors there.

"I think there is a tendency to think of the vice president as only a policy intellect and not to recognize how much of his views come from his experiences, his values and . . . people he's encountered in his life," said Ron Klain, the vice president's former chief of staff. "I think it's a very big part of him."

Because of Gore's well-documented fights over budget priorities with the likes of Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole, he is widely viewed now as a fiercely partisan and combative vice president.

But that obscures Gore's record as a distinctly bipartisan member of Congress, attributable in good measure to the noncontroversial nature of the issues he took on: creating an organ transplant network, cleaning up toxic dump sites and preventing infant formula contamination.

Gore enhanced that reputation when he became one of only 10 Senate Democrats to support the Persian Gulf War resolution in 1991.

After the war, he co-authored a bill on sanctions against Iraq with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

Today, Gore does not rue the gusto with which he confronted GOP leaders in Congress in their fights over spending priorities, which led to a partial government shutdown that proved disastrous for Republicans in the 1996 elections.

"If there was a basic difference on an issue of principle, then partisanship can play a constructive role in solving the situation: not muddying things, but giving people a clear choice," he said. But he added that his instinct is to build bipartisan coalitions.

Over the years, Clinton has vigorously touted Gore as the most effective and influential vice president in history. His running mate brought to the ticket in 1992 and then to the White House expertise in areas where he was lacking, Clinton said, such as arms control, the environment and science and technology.

Clinton also valued Gore's insider's knowledge of the way Washington works, especially Congress.

Health Care Disaster

And that raises perhaps the most enduring enigma of Gore's tenure as Clinton's chief advisor and understudy--and of his style of operation.

It involved the president's controversial attempt to remake the nation's health care system in what was intended to be the crowning achievement of his first term.

Never did Gore, by his own admission, utter a word of caution as the White House Task Force (headed by First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton) went about drawing up a massive bill to revamp one-seventh of the nation's economy--while spurning congressional input.

Did Gore simply fail to grasp the political debacle in the making, even though he was a task force member and has said that he operated "behind the scenes"?

Or did he see the gigantic land mine but choose not to warn the president?

Gore stammered somewhat when the question was posed:

"No, I didn't think that--I mean, that wasn't an issue that I was asked to be in charge of."

Copyright 2000 Los Angeles Times