Weird Al

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.

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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Al Gore

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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.