Addressing nearly 1,000 Latino youth at a leadership conference here recently, Vice President Al Gore made the type of effort to connect with his audience that increasingly is part of his campaign style.
"Su voto es su voz!" he said in slightly halting Spanish, urging the students to express their voices with their votes.And that was not his only venture into "espanol." Besides joking that he could dance the "macarena, salsa, cumbia" and "lambada," Gore greeted his listeners with a "buenos dias," told the students that they have the "corazon," or heart, to become community leaders, and repeated the refrain "Querer es poder," meaning where there is a will there is a way.
The audience ate up every "palabra."
Gore, who says that in the early days of his political career he got butterflies in his stomach while shaking hands with strangers, has loosened up by leaps and bounds this fall as he campaigns for his and President Clinton's re-election. Whether it's forays into foreign tongues or use of self-deprecating humor, Gore slowly is chipping away at his reputation for stiff formality and penchant for policy arcana.
These days, virtually no rally ends without Gore himself trotting out an expanding catalog of jokes. Such as:
- "How do you tell Al Gore from a roomful of Secret Service agents? He's the stiff one."
- "Al Gore is so stiff that the racks buy the suits off him."
And when Gore talks about his expanding repertoire these days, he refers not to some of the areas he has specialized in during Clinton's first term, such as aviation safety or streamlining the bureaucracy, but a wide variety of dances he allegedly has mastered.
At a senior center in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., for instance, Gore quipped that he has given new meaning to square dancing. In Johnson City, Tenn., it was country line-dancing. On Thursday, at an Irish-American forum in New York City, he boasted of his Irish step-dancing skills.
Such whimsy is a far cry from the Al of old, who insists he got weak knees and clammy hands while trolling for votes.
Aboard Air Force Two one recent night, as he and his entourage left a campaign rally in Birmingham, Ala., the shirt-sleeved vice president delivered a comic re-enactment of himself as a mumbling, bumbling political novice.
Gore's humor also was on display in New York City last week at the Alfred E. Smith dinner, an annual gathering of local politicos.
Following his Republican rival, Jack Kemp, to the podium, Gore rocked the crowd of 1,200 diners with a slide show that mockingly portrayed how he has "tried to break the vice presidential mold" by inserting himself into the center of the action.
The doctored picture showed Gore standing among members of the Supreme Court, looking on during a meeting between the president and Secretary of State Warren Christopher and floating in outer space in an astronaut suit.
Another had Gore suited up as a member of the New York Yankees. "They've asked me to serve as the honorary foul pole," Gore joked.