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Perot's side cruised toward the discussion as if it would be another episode of the Ross-and-Larry mutual-admiration show. Perot had spent the preceding three months touring the country to speak about NAFTA. He had his charts; he had his arguments; he constantly advertised the fact that he had read the full NAFTA draft. Gore, meanwhile, spent the two weeks before the debate studying Perot's bearing and his character, while relying on his staff to dig up the goods on Perot's past. "He is at his best if he is confident that every possibility has been covered," Lorraine Voles, his former press secretary, told me. "If you can tell him Greg is covering the speeches and Jack is looking at the videos and the whole team is giving him everything he is going to need, then he'll feel secure and not worry that someone has forgotten to dig up an old speech." At Gore's request his staff prepared an omnibus edition of Perot's speeches, statements, and interviews about NAFTA, and also tapes of Perot in action. Gore studied them on his own and then assembled a team at the Naval Observatory -- the Vice President's official residence -- for a formal mock debate.

The team included Mike Synar, a congressman from Oklahoma, who took Perot's role in the debate; Mark Gearan, the manager of Gore's 1992 campaign and later the director of the Peace Corps, who played Larry King (and who, with his smooth choirboy face, looked as unlike King as can be imagined); Paul Begala, who after working for Gephardt had become a White House political counselor; David Gergen; Roy Neel; Jack Quinn, who was known within the White House as the man who would take either the blame or the credit for the Gore-Perot debate, depending on how it turned out; Greg Simon; Elaine Kamarck; Gene Sperling, from the White House economic-policy staff; Marla Romash, then Gore's press secretary; Bob Squier, a veteran Democratic consultant who could be relied on to steady Gore and give him confidence before big performances; and Tom Downey, a close friend of Gore's who had won a congressional seat from Long Island when he was twenty-five, in 1974, but had just lost his seat in the 1992 election.

Several days before the scheduled debate the team gathered at the Naval Observatory, around a huge table. As usual when Gore was preparing for a debate, there was informal banter -- what Paul Begala, using baseball lingo for fast practice, calls "playing pepper," in which Gore and his associates tossed questions and sound bites back and forth to develop his debating reflexes and find the sharpest way to make a point. This time Gore didn't complete the mock debate, ending it when he grew testy about what he considered heavy-handed programming by his advisers. Gore's attitude toward preparation is more selective than his reputation for plodding diligence might suggest. When the normal circumstances of his working life keep him up-to-date on issues -- and, in his view, sharp about the ways to discuss them -- he feels it is needless to spend hours demonstrating that he knows what he knows. "You know, I've done this before, guys," he said in the middle of yet another pitch about how he should handle questions from King and Perot, according to an adviser who was present. "I was a newspaperman for years. I used to have congressional investigations and subcommittees. I know what I'm doing."

What Gore really wanted to talk about was how to get at Perot. Everyone knew that Perot loved charts. "He's got every kind of chart," Greg Simon said to me recently. "The price of eggs matched to the number of seats on an airplane." Sperling was in charge of matching Perot chart for chart, especially to show that Mexico could be a significant market for U.S. goods. Simon, Neel, Quinn, and others pooled ideas about the best ways to make Perot lose his composure. [an error occurred while processing this directive] Their starting point was that Perot was like an overbearing grandfather. "He'll be fine as long as everybody sits there and listens to him," Simon said. "But if you start interrupting him, he'll lose it." Perot, a graduate of the Naval Academy, was extremely proud of his image as a self-sacrificing patriot. Several aides reasoned that if Gore could find a way to gibe at or raise doubts about that reputation, Perot would be unable to contain himself. Perot had virtually no experience with being treated disrespectfully, least of all in the friendly confines of Larry King's studio.

Mike Synar, Perot for a Day, had mastered the anti-NAFTA arguments, but no one could act as flappable as the real Perot. "This was really good, because the Vice President had to work harder at it," Greg Simon told me. "You didn't want to start by firing right at [Perot], because people would then say he had an excuse to get mad. You just wanted to drop in those little depth charges and five minutes later they would go off. Gore is an expert in knowing how to do that. He is very good at the offhand annoying comment."

There was one particularly annoying gambit Gore had in mind. During the 1988 campaign he had attacked Dick Gephardt's trade proposals by linking them to the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930, which helped turn a stock-market panic into a worldwide depression. This was a hoary but nonetheless effective way to discredit a political position -- a milder equivalent of Clarence Thomas's reference to a hostile committee hearing as a "high-tech lynching." The world economy in 1988 was different in every way from that of 1930; high tariffs did bring on the Depression, but in the 1950s and the 1960s high tariffs coexisted with trade and growth. Never mind. The important thing was that Gore knew that Perot would not be able to stand being compared to Reed Smoot and Willis Hawley.

Reading an article on foreign policy, Gore had come across an old photo of Smoot and Hawley. The very morning of the debate Gore told Greg Simon about the picture and said that he wanted to have a framed copy of it by that evening, to hand to Perot. Simon's assistant, Kristin Schneeman, had previously worked as a documentary-film researcher. She helped to track down the picture at the Bettmann Archive and asked for a copy, pronto. A Gore supporter living in New York dashed to Bettmann, got the print, and carried it onto the next flight to Washington. Schneeman shopped for a suitable frame and rushed to the television studio, where she met the courier. Just before Gore walked into the studio, his assistants handed him this prop. Bob Squier talked to Gore shortly before he went in: You're going to be great, just follow your instincts. Another staff member thought that the scene was like a trainer talking soothingly to a thoroughbred in the tense moments before a race.

Following the plan, less than five minutes into the debate Gore was deliberately interrupting Perot. As Perot began to list his complaints about NAFTA, Gore jumped in. "How would you change it?"

Perot: "Very simply, I would go back, and study -- first, we look at this, it doesn't work --"

Gore [interrupting]: "Well, what specific changes would you make in it?"

Perot [crabby]: "I can't unless you let me finish, I can't answer your question. Now, you asked me, and I'm trying to tell you."

Gore: "Well, you brought your charts tonight, so I want to know what specific changes you would like to make in the treaty."

Perot: "How can I answer if you keep interrupting me?"

Gore [this part of the mission complete]: "Go ahead."

Thirty seconds later, as Perot paused for breath, Gore was saying, "Okay, can I respond now?" -- further flustering Perot and launching the next attack. "We've had a test of [Perot's] theory," Gore began. Perot squawked, and Larry King asked, "When?" Gore continued, employing a super-slow and pedantic style of emphasis that is irritating in itself. "In 1930, when the proposal by Mr.... Smoot and Mr.... Hawley was to raise tariffs across the board to protect our workers. And I brought some pictures too. This is a picture of Mr. Smoot and Mr.... Hawley. They look like pretty good ... fellas. They sounded reasonable at the time. A lot of people ... believed them. The Congress passed the ... Smoot ... Hawley ... protection bill. He [gesturing at Perot] wants to raise tariffs on ... Mexico."

At this point it seemed only fitting -- practically polite -- to give Perot an attractive remembrance of his intellectual heritage. Gore offered the framed photograph with a thin smile. Perot took it, glowered at it, and slammed it face-down on the desk. The debate still had seventy-five minutes to run, but the competitive part was over. By giving in to anger, Perot had defeated himself. "The only surprise was how well Perot lived up to our expectations," Elaine Kamarck told me. "He got mad and stayed mad."

"The debate was a real turnaround for Gore with the Clinton team," David Gergen told me recently. "He turned all the skeptics into believers. And the President was doing handstands. I think it was extremely important for their relationship."

n the strength of his performance against Ross Perot, Gore did not have to persuade anyone that it would be a good idea for him to take on Jack Kemp in 1996. But the problems he faced in preparing for that debate were entirely different.

The team working with Gore was largely the same one that had helped him three years before. David Gergen had gone on to other pursuits, but Jack Quinn, Greg Simon, and Elaine Kamarck were still closely involved. So were Gene Sperling, Tom Downey, Paul Begala, and Bob Squier. Leon Fuerth, Gore's longtime adviser on foreign policy, played a role, as did Mark Penn, a pollster. The two people officially responsible for organizing Gore's debate-prep effort were Andrew Cuomo, then an assistant secretary at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (and now the Secretary), and Ron Klain, who had served in various roles on the President's and Vice President's staffs and became staff director of the Democratic caucus in the Senate in 1995.

In Jack Kemp the debate team feared that it might encounter Gore's most formidable opponent. Kemp had a reputation for charming audiences. His campaign, which favored Reagan-style supply-side tax cuts, was in spirit even more optimistic than Reagan's, because Kemp's fiscal optimism was not darkened by the need for simultaneous struggle against the Soviet threat. When critics tried to show that this or that tax proposal could never pay for itself, Kemp used Reagan's "There you go again!" strategy, suggesting that it was small-minded and penny-pinching to look only at the ledger books when what really mattered was the boundless opportunity of America's tomorrow. "We knew that if we didn't keep him off balance, he could just soar with his optimistic rhetoric," Gene Sperling, who briefed Gore on economic policy before the debate, told me. "At his best he had that wonderful optimism." Kemp was fit and handsome, still carried himself like an athlete, and indeed missed no opportunity to remind audiences of his impressive record on the football field.

What Gore had learned to do so well -- irritate an opponent to make him show his ugly side -- would probably not work with Kemp. Kemp had shown no inclination to blow his top; if cornered on specifics, he just started talking generalities, like Reagan. His most obvious weakness seemed to be his differences -- ideological, intellectual, emotional -- with Bob Dole. Practically until the moment Dole chose Kemp as his running mate, the two men had represented opposite strands of Republicanism -- Dole fretting about the deficit and studying the sky for rain, Kemp promising sunshine and surpluses if only taxes would go away. Much as Quayle had used his vice-presidential debate mainly to attack the presidential nominee, so Gore's team decided that its job was not to hurt Kemp but to embrace him and apply his own criticisms to his temporary ally, Bob Dole.

ORE'S team also tried to be realistic about his vulnerabilities. Everyone around him recognized how pompous he could sound -- particularly after his several years of isolation in the White House. A few of his associates, mainly Bob Squier and Gore's longtime associate Carter Eskew, and also Gore's eldest daughter, Karenna, could tell him so, in private. Even as a senator Gore had shown a tendency to sound condescendingly professorial when discussing what he liked to consider his fields of expertise -- technology, the environment, arms control. One man who observed Gore closely during the 1988 campaign says that Gore adopted this patronizing tone not when he was sure of his subject matter but rather when he was still trying to master it -- "suddenly using all kinds of arcane terms as if he was teaching you about them."

When Gore had been actively campaigning four years earlier, he could be kidded or jostled out of his starchiness -- and out of the maddeningly pedantic speech pattern in which he pauses for agonizing intervals before any ... complicated word, and sounds as if he has to slow down for an audience of dullards. Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist from MIT, says this style of speech is known as "motherese," after the way in which parents talk to children. It is also the way native speakers of a language address foreigners, and the way doctors and nurses often address patients, especially the elderly. Except when used with babies, it is grating because of its inherent condescension.

Roy Neel, who knew Gore before he entered politics, says that this speaking style stems not from arrogance but from perfectionism: "I think this is part of an overall style of communication that has evolved since he got into public life. He has an intense concern that what he says is crystal clear and precise. Al has wanted to be so damned sure that what he says is perfectly articulated that it could come across in a stilted way." An incumbent Vice President, who spends much of his time listening attentively to the President and the rest being listened to by respectful crowds and staff members, is like an athlete on a long layoff. His reflexes slow and his bad habits can go unchecked.

Gore's time away from the road also dulled what his associates considered a crucial (if carefully husbanded) asset: his sly, quick wit. Everyone who has worked closely with Gore says the rapier remark is noticeable in his private discourse: he'll use it to punctuate and lighten a stretch of plodding, serious policy talk. Of the dozen or so aides who have made this point to me, none has been able to offer anything so vulgar as a specific example. Fortunately, one exists on the public record. During the 1988 campaign Gore and Jesse Jackson were elbowing each other for the mantle of the "real" southern candidate. In a debate at the Kennedy Center, in Washington, D.C., Jackson prefaced a question to Gore with a reminder that he, Jackson, actually was from the South. "South Chicago?" Gore sneaked in with a grin. It took Jackson a second -- but then he erupted in laughter, as did the crowd, and reached out to shake Gore's hand with a "Good one!" expression.

The remedy decided on was Debate Camp. The encounter with Kemp was scheduled for October 9, 1996, in St. Petersburg, Florida. For most of the previous week Gore and several dozen advisers moved to the Mote Marine Laboratory, on the outskirts of Sarasota, to get their man in tip-top physical, intellectual, psychological, and rhetorical shape. The assistants who were on the government payroll rather than the campaign staff were careful to use vacation time while at camp.

As organized by Andrew Cuomo and Ron Klain, the camp was analogous to a heavyweight boxer's encampment in the Poconos before a title bout in Atlantic City. One staff member who was there describes Gore retrospectively as "Champ." At the direction of Tipper and Karenna, Champ had a wholesome training table: lots of fruits and vegetables, no Clinton-style chips and junk food. In the mornings he would hit the light and heavy bags, going through the issues with his domestic-policy and foreign-policy advisers. (These were the familiar crowd: Fuerth, Sperling, Squier, Kamarck, Stephanopoulos, Begala, Penn, Voles. An addition was Gore's speechwriter, Dan Pink.) In the afternoon he'd take a look at some of the lab's environmental exhibits or shoot baskets at the hoop that had been brought right into the practice-debate hall. (Sports moved indoors when Tropical Storm Josephine hit the area, midway through camp.) One afternoon Gore was playing an increasingly intense pickup game with his aides, many in their twenties and thirties (he was nearly fifty). As the teams split up into Shirts and Skins, Gore, a Skin, revealed an impressively fit and muscular torso. George Stephanopoulos said to Gene Sperling, "I guess this is his subtle way of saying, 'You guys think you're so cool, but try to look this way in a dozen years.'" [an error occurred while processing this directive] Then, in the evening, after a healthful dinner, the climax of the day: a full-scale mock debate between Gore and his favored, most demanding sparring partner -- Tom Downey. The debate took place on a stage exactly like the real one in St. Petersburg, at lecterns the height of the real ones, with a moderator, Ron Klain, sitting where the real moderator would sit, and with Gore and Downey both dressed in suits. The debate started and ended on the same schedule as the real one, so that Gore's body clock would be properly set.

Ron Klain liked and respected Downey, but he was known to be skeptical that a former politician could suppress his ego enough to be an effective sparring partner. Klain and others were therefore delighted and relieved by Downey's ability to re-create Jack Kemp's mannerisms, arguments, and spirit. "Every time he would come back not with the best response to Gore but the best Kemp response to Gore," one participant recalls. "This is what made the sessions so successful."

In contrast, at his training camp Jack Kemp had the Republican senator Judd Gregg playing Gore in mock debates -- and playing him like a cartoon liberal who was extreme about the environment, who yearned for taxes and big government, and who walked right into Kemp's traps.

Even before Debate Camp began, Dan Pink and other aides had reviewed hours of tapes of Kemp giving his stump speech, and they felt they had identified the areas that would require specific planning and preparation. Although Kemp could sometimes be glib and underprepared, at his best he had a jock bravado that audiences loved. Gore needed to find a way to overcome that charm and block those metaphors. In a late-afternoon discussion Karenna Gore proposed that in his comments at the beginning of the debate her father should offer Kemp a deal: if Kemp would hold off on the gridiron allusions, he would agree not to deploy his amusing stories about chlorofluorocarbons. Gore's delivery should be self-deprecatory and deadpan.

For the tax-cut plan as a whole Gore's strategy was to hit two points whenever he could. One was a reminder that Gore wasn't the only person to criticize Bob Dole's tax plan. Jack Kemp had criticized it too -- until shortly before Dole chose him as his running mate. The other was a warning about the risks of cutting taxes too much. Every time Gore discussed the Dole-Kemp proposal, he was supposed to call it a "risky tax scheme" and say that it would "blow a hole in the deficit" and endanger "Medicare, Medicaid, education, and the environment." In contrast, the Democrats had a "positive plan" that would balance the budget and protect these four areas.

Gore had a specific way in which he liked to take in data and prepare debate themes. He sketched out ideas and arguments -- points Kemp might make, and his possible responses -- on large pads of paper, placed on easels. He would rip off pages as he came up with more and more refined versions of his arguments; when he was satisfied, he would hand the sheets to his staff. (He now has an electronic "whiteboard" in his office, which prints out replicas of what he has written.) "He had an exact formulation that he liked in his briefings," Gene Sperling told me. "He'd tell us, This is how I like to get it: for each issue, the three main points, and the ten best supporting facts, and the best reply, and so on. It's very rewarding to do things the way he says, because once he has it how he likes it, he owns the information. It was impressive."

When Debate Camp was over, the participants took away souvenir T-shirts that read

VICE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE PREPARATION TEAM
"MOAT" MARINE LABRATORY, SARASOTA FL
     4 DAYS
     75 CHARTS
     18 ANECDOTES
     22 METAPHORS
     200 QUESTIONS
           AND 1 HURRICANE

HE training paid off. In the ninety minutes of the real debate Gore executed his strategy so relentlessly that the only surprise for his team was how weak a showing the real Kemp made. "Where's Downey?" Andrew Cuomo began calling in the green room halfway through the debate. "Suit up Downey! This guy can't hack it!"

The debate's sole questioner was Jim Lehrer. Candidates increasingly prefer single-moderator debates; journalists on a panel of questioners compete for air time and feel pressure to outdo one another with more-elaborate and nastier questions. Lehrer's opening question invited Kemp to lay out his main debating points: In ninety seconds, what would he say were the main personal and ethical differences between his candidate and Bill Clinton? In his practice debates against Downey, Gore had placed tremendous emphasis on honing his standard answers so that they would exactly fit the allotted time. Downey had encouraged Gore in this, saying that a debater who chronically ran long, forcing the moderator to say "You're over time, please wrap up," looked sloppy and unprepared. Gore's team suspected that Kemp would not be disciplined about shrinking his answers to the proper time, making Gore seem all the sharper. Their suspicions proved to be correct. Within the first few minutes of the debate, when Kemp was asked to make a ninety-second statement and Gore to make a sixty-second reply, the audience saw the difference between a candidate trying to breeze through on natural charm and one carrying out a plan.

Kemp [smiling and relaxed, the football captain addressing the pep rally,]: "Ninety seconds? I can't clear my throat in ninety seconds! [No laughs from audience. Bad start.] Jim, Bob Dole and myself do not see Al Gore and Bill Clinton as our enemy. We see them as our opponents. It's the greatest democracy in the world."

Kemp continued in similar off-the-cuff style until, noticing that his ninety seconds were about to run out, he concluded with this feeble appeal:

"Abraham Lincoln put it best when he said you serve your party best by serving the nation first. And I can't think of a better way of serving this nation in 1996 than by electing Bob Dole the President of the United States of America.... Ultimately [we] leave it to the American people to make up their minds about who should be the leader of this country into the twenty-first century."

Gore [very polite, not interrupting, but knowing exactly what he has to say and how long he has to say it]: "I'd like to thank the people of St. Petersburg for being such wonderful hosts.... And I would like to thank Jack Kemp for the answer that he just gave. [No kidding!] I think we have an opportunity tonight to have a positive debate about this country's future. I'd like to start by offering you a deal, Jack. If you won't use any ... football stories, I won't tell any of my warm and humorous stories about ... chlorofluorocarbon abatement." [Deliberately wooden expression, delayed small laugh from crowd, but does the job. Only two football references in the rest of the debate.]

Kemp [too eager to please]: "It's a deal."

Gore [laying out the plans for the rest of the evening]: "What I do want to talk about tonight is Bill Clinton's positive plan for America's future. We have a plan to balance the budget while protecting Medicare, Medicaid, education, and the environment. Creating millions of new jobs, including one million new jobs in America's inner cities. I'm excited about the chance to talk about this plan and even more excited about the chance to work on it if you the people of this country will give Bill Clinton and me the privilege of doing so for four more years."

Half a dozen more times in the debate Gore mentioned fixedly the positive plan that would balance the budget while protecting the big four: Medicare, Medicaid, education, and the environment. ("Don't give him a line if you don't want him to use it," one of Gore's advisers told me.) The only theme Gore emphasized more often than his own positive plan was the risky tax scheme from the other side. He repeated this like a catechism during the debate. "The press was all over us for repetitiveness, but it was a good strategy," Paul Begala says. "In the flow of debate it may seem redundant -- but it will be cut up by news editors after that, and this way the bites will all have your central theme."

Gore had no single climactic moment in the debate, nothing comparable to handing Perot the Smoot-Hawley picture or wheeling to confront Dick Gephardt. He didn't need one; Kemp simply failed to fight back.

Gore's team introduced one other approach in that debate, which has heavily influenced his rhetorical behavior this year. During Debate Camp, Andrew Cuomo searched for ways to make the Vice President's points seem more vivid and human. Why not tie them to actual human beings? In his first State of the Union address Ronald Reagan had pioneered what came to be called the "Lenny Skutnik moment" -- the time when the President would point to a guest sitting next to the First Lady, in the balcony, and explain how this citizen symbolized some important national theme. (Skutnik had rescued a victim of the 1982 Air Florida jetliner crash from the ice-covered Potomac River.) Since then the Lenny Skutnik moment had become obligatory in State of the Union addresses. But until now no one had thought to use it as a weapon. Ron Klain, directing many of the day-to-day operations, thought it was a mistake to emphasize these sob stories. Cuomo won: Gore closed the debate with a reference to the Macneale family, which was worried about how to save for tuition for its kids. The Clinton-Gore Administration had a positive plan to help the family! The Macneales would be endangered by the Dole-Kemp risky tax scheme. For the debate against his next opponent Gore salted the audience with his Lenny Skutniks and asked them to stand as he read their names and told their stories.

Copyright © 2000 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; July 2000; An Acquired Taste - 00.07 (Part Three); Volume 286, No. 1; page 33-53.