Now I had to pass this on for surely nobody else will; this is a
psychological profile, in essense, of Tipper Gore who got on TV and said
"Oh Al, he is extremely sexy"....well that never flew but they still
try.
No offense to Gore supporters on list, for once I was a Democrat but
things change - so this picture painted of Tipper on the graceful porch
of their Victorian Home, just does not equate to their dog, which news
media found lying on porch in bad condition virtually dying slow death
from unattended wounds, etc.
Rather like that house, Mr. and Mrs. Slum Lord Gore own, which just does
not equate to her many visits with the homeless....note in this item how
they then ridicule these people - the old veteran, homeless and a bum -
presented to people who are on public welfare and at the trough like
Gores and Clinton - and then they expose these people as a joke?
Some joke....once in Columbus, in the early morning hours, two men came
up to me and started talking.....meanwhile a third kicked street people
off sidewalk where a little heat gate gave them warmth - by the Lazarus
Store Town Sreet side....so while I stood there watching these people
being kicked off street, which never happened before, it occured to me
Clinton was due in area - got to shoo away anything well, that showed
face of America press should not see?
So this profile on Tipper looks like it was drawn up by an astrologer
with psychoogical background? Tipper, of course......she would have
had to give out the stories.
So the paradox of the Gores.....from Slum Landlords to caring loving
people, having fun with Secret Service and ridiculing the homeless?
You believe this was done in the name of humanity? And Tipper
describes herself as earthy.....now there I would agree. Earthy - for
she is about as low as you can get to subject the poor and homeless to
her hospitality, only to turn it into a dog and pony burlesque for the
news media - wonder if that dog lived or died?
So read this Passion Play as reported by Tipper, no doubt authored in
part by Tipper, and sent to news media, by Tipper - a modest, humble
person - earthy, sexy husband, and no wonder creator of Superman knocked
him off, for Superman was turning into New World Order, via Hollywood -
and Gore, waitng in the wings......But the creator of Superman, knocked
him off rather than see Al Gore attempt to play the role.....
Saba
Tipper Gore's passionate, surreal life Al Gore's wife would bring
tenderness and determination to the White House Tipper Gore on the
balcony of her office in the Old Executive Office Building. 'We are
ordinary people living in extraordinary circumstances,' she says.
By Ann Gerhart
THE WASHINGTON POST
July 11 — The whole point of Secret Service protection is to keep
people like paranoid schizophrenics away from people like Tipper Gore.
So here is what she does: Wades into public parks seeking them out.
Ask outright if she wants to be first lady, and Tipper Gore will
feint every time: "It's more that I think Al would make a terrific
president."
UNTIL HER HUSBAND'S presidential campaign heated up last
summer, Tipper Gore, who has a master's degree in psychology, rode most
Fridays with a van delivering health care to homeless people. She would
get down on her haunches in weed-filled squares and rat-infested
underpasses, reach out her hands and cajole tough cases into shelter.
Some of her homeless friends, afflicted with a variety of
mental disorders, never knew this woman was married to the vice
president – until they got invited to parties in this nice house at
34th Street and Massachusetts Avenue. Tipper's mother, Margaret
Aitcheson, was often at the parties, flicking her cigarette into the
fireplace because, she once explained, "that environmental son-in-law of
mine won't have an ashtray in the house."
More on the Gores•Coverage of the Gore campaign
•The life of Al Gore
•2000 Elections coverage
•Candidate Web search
Skila Harris, Tipper Gore's former chief of staff, remembers watching
with a sense of amused disbelief as "The Captain," a homeless vet all
scrubbed up and in a white suit, stood in the Gores' dining room
chatting with the music director of the National Symphony Orchestra.
"I thought, 'If Leonard Slatkin had any idea this guy is
a crazy homeless person . . .' But that's how she is," says Harris. "We
would get hits on their Social Security numbers all the time – when
you're homeless, you can get arrested a lot – and we had to say [to
the Secret Service], 'You have to figure something out to let them in.
These are Tipper's friends.'"
Asked how his wife could possibly continue to wander
across the street into Lafayette Square to visit these friends were she
to live in the White House, Vice President Gore laughed, then said:
"I would be surprised if she didn't invite them in."
NON-STOP SCHEDULE 'I'm basically a social worker at heart, and I'm
applying myself to the political process.'
— TIPPER GORE
This is Tipper Gore at 51, stubbornly clinging to the
idea that she can have some say over her life even as she pounds the
country – 14 cities last month – campaigning for a job she may not
want.
Even with Navy stewards to take care of the vice
president's residence and a personal assistant to get the dry cleaning,
her competing roles are instantly recognizable to women of her age.
She's a mother of four, and her baby – the one who nearly died – is
now a brawny high school football player, still knocking around the
house, playing poker with his buddies on the front porch and needing the
attentions of his mom before the advanced-placement history exam. But
the nest is nearly empty.
She's the only child of an increasingly frail mother who
lives in the pool house, where everything's on the first floor. She has
a grandbaby who just started walking, lurching toward uncovered sockets.
There's her job – a weird job, unpaid, no title, the
stationery reads "Mrs. Gore's Office" – that she has shaped to fit her
need to advocate, agitate and counsel on behalf of society's more
stigmatized people.
And on top of all that, at a time when she might
reasonably conclude she has done her time in public service, Tipper Gore
has a husband who wants to be president of the United States.
If she permits herself a sigh over this, a wistful
imagining of a private life, it's never in public.
Instead, she wants for her husband what he wants for
himself, so she works to help him get it.
On her own terms.
Ask outright if she wants to be first lady, and she will
feint every time: "It's more that I think Al would make a terrific
president."
Off camera, aides and friends agree, Tipper Gore is just
as she appears to the public – spontaneous, animated, warm and
nurturing.
NO SILENT PARTNER With the blond hair and broad smile and adoring gaze,
Al Gore's high school sweetie pie presents as the perfect political
wife, which veils her tenacity.
But far more complex. With the blond hair and broad smile
and adoring gaze, Al Gore's high school sweetie pie presents as the
perfect political wife, which veils her tenacity. Tipper is no silent
partner. "She is my closest adviser," the vice president said in an
interview. Long ago she accepted the "whither thou goest" model of
marriage, then ditched the part about "I will mindlessly follow."
Her sunniness exists side by side with a steely resolve
to remain herself. Her outgoing nature bangs up against her fierce
demand for privacy. Her lack of interest in political expediency
conflicts with what her husband needs from her.
"It's definitely an interesting juncture in her life,"
says the Gores' eldest child, Karenna Gore Schiff, 26, "and she plays by
her own rules."
The reason insiders think it would be great fun to watch
Tipper Gore try to succeed as first lady is that she is full of kinetic
energy, pulling as hard as she can in three competing directions. She
loves being an iconoclast, she's a fiercely protective creator of the
home, and she's a deeply involved political operative.
As a woman, Gore is physical, earthy even. She
Rollerblades, shoots rapids, dives into waves, jumps out of her seat to
dance at Bruce Springsteen concerts, plays drums, takes frankly sexy
photos of her shirtless husband, pushed all four babies out without
painkillers, teaches every pregnant staffer how to breast-feed. "I think
my experience being a mother of four should count for something!" she
says, and she throws her head back and roars.
She has been known to play tricks on her Secret Service
agents to amuse herself, and once she signed herself out of protection
and disappeared on a camping trip with one of her three daughters.
TARGETED FOCUS ON WORK
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The focus of her work is as narrow as her sense of fun is
wide. No to teas; yes to sticking the star on the National Christmas
Tree, because she gets to ride up in the cherry picker. Her passions
have been fixed for years and are uniformly controversial: mental
health, homelessness, gay rights, women's economic equity, abortion
rights, the infamous push for labeling obscene and violent rock lyrics
that left her hammered although, in hindsight, looking like a cultural
prophet.
Her husband isn't the only wonk. Aides say Tipper will
read a women's studies book, then all the books in the "suggested
reading" section. She can hear streams of scientific jargon and then
integrate them into her own remarks a half-hour later.
Gore sees herself as a "facilitator." She is a rapt
listener, particularly gifted at drawing out teenagers and young adults.
"I'm basically a social worker at heart, and I'm applying
myself to the political process," she says of her official work.
When Bernard Arons, director of the federal Center for
Mental Health Services, met with Gore early in the first term, he tried
to talk her out of mental-health advocacy. "I wanted to be honest that
it wasn't such a great idea," he recalls, "because the stigma associated
with mental illness rubs off. But she would not be moved."
"She would get something in her mind, and we would be
off," says Sally Aman, her former press secretary. On the spur of the
moment, with none of the customary advance work, Gore and Aman went off
to the killing fields of Rwanda, tagging along with Gen. John
Shalikashvili, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Tipper had
seen news clips of orphaned children, says Aman. "She was mortified, and
said she had to do something."
The pair served food in a UNICEF center and spent 10
hours in an orphanage with "children clinging to us, wanting to be
held." A baby died in Gore's arms. She shot some photos, filed them with
a wire service, and the two flew home.
"And we thought we were [emotionally] fine, because it
had been a very methodical trip, so full of work. We got back to Andrews
[Air Force Base] in the early morning, and stopped at the 7-Eleven for
coffee, and there was her photo on the cover of USA Today," recalls
Aman. "And then we lost it, crying and laughing at the same time,
because it was so intense and surreal."
THE HOME FRONT
Step across the gracious porch of the Queen Anne
Victorian where the Gores live, and this is where Tipper does her most
important work: calibrating the emotional machinery of her family. She
sees the campaign as a "marathon," she says, and she's the coach.
On a normal day, she gets up early and exercises, then
ignores the papers if it's a bad day for Gore 2000, skims them if it's a
good one. By 8 a.m., she may have talked to staff and had a conference
call. Her daughters are scattered about. Karenna heads GoreNet, the
campaign's youth outreach, and lives in Manhattan. Kristin, 23, writes
for TV in California. Sarah, 21, is working in a museum abroad. She
talks to all of them several times a week.
Their lacrosse sticks, plenty worn, still sit in a bin in
the foyer. They're near the cherry-red drum set Al gave Tipper. (She
started drumming in high school, in an all-girl band called the
Wildcats.) Any head of state can stare at them while seated for lunch at
the ornate mahogany table in the formal dining room.
In the sun room, a Mother Goose book lies under a coffee
table, where Karenna's year-old son, Wyatt, can chew it. The walls are
hung with paintings borrowed from museums and black-and-white family
photos shot by Mom. Unlike at the White House, the family and public
rooms are one at the house on Observatory Hill.
Tipper says: "You can see how we live. We do open the
house for receptions, but it hasn't been on a weekly basis because this
is a home first. Even now, with all this heating up. I don't want
anything that would interfere with Albert's exams. I mean," and she
laughs, "these are the things I think of."
Tipper says: "As I like to say, we are ordinary people
living in extraordinary circumstances," and then she looks at you
keenly, as if trying to gauge if you can possibly understand.
Albert III, 17, is a senior at Sidwell Friends School.
They went to a mother-son banquet at school in May, and Karenna says her
mother came home feeling "emotional and happy and a little sad that he
will be going off to college." Gore, sitting back on a flowered chintz
chair in her living room, starts to blurt out a story about her son's
cooking expertise, then suddenly stops. Almost unconsciously, she
straightens her shoulders and pulls her palms through the air in front
of her, adopting a centering move from the yoga she practices.
"He actually" – she pauses, purses her lips – "I'm
always saying to myself, I don't know how he'd feel if I told this, if
he saw this in print, that's the only thing. Then again, I want you to
know a little more about us." It's a small family tale, endearing,
really, but the cost of the telling always has to be measured, her
natural openness always fighting with her learned guardedness: Will the
offering violate the children's privacy, open the door to more
embarrassing queries?
The story is this: In about fourth grade, Albert started
making his three older sisters pizza muffins after school, slathering
tomato sauce onto Thomas' English muffins. "They'd be, like, 'Does
Albert have our snack ready? Okay, I'll have another pizza muffin, and
have we seen this episode of "Laverne and Shirley" before?""
"That was our afternoon," she says, and there's a sigh.
"The good old days."
There will be none of that in the White House, should the
Gores get there. Here, she can cut her own roses and let the dogs run
free. There, even roses stand on ceremony and pets are photographers'
prey.
The environment of this level of public life, suggests
Harris, the former chief of staff, "is unnatural, surreal, however you
characterize a situation where normal existence is impossible to
achieve. It's a sacrifice for anybody, but if you're a free spirit, the
cost is a little bit higher."
Mary Elizabeth Aitcheson, the free spirit in question,
grew up differently from other children of the '50s in suburban
Virginia. Her parents went through a bitter divorce when she was four.
Her mother, an accountant, had recurring and sometimes incapacitating
bouts with depression. Tipper, nicknamed for life from a lullaby, lived
with her grandmother and grandfather, a banker. Her father, who owned a
plumbing supply company, saw her on weekends. She was an only child.
ONE DATE TO DECIDE 'People confide the most amazing things in her, and
then she finds ways to help them through it.'
— AL GORE
on his wife Twice blessed, a tomboy and a looker, Tipper
met Al Gore at a party after his senior prom at St. Albans High School.
She was 16. He was 17. Both had other dates.
"He was my first" – Tipper looks for the proper word
– "love, but not my first boyfriend. No!" They had a date the
following weekend, and that was that. When Al went off to Harvard, she
followed him a year later, studying first at a junior college before
transferring to Boston University. As soon as she graduated with a
psychology degree in 1970, at 21, they got married.
"I don't necessarily recommend that kind of beginning to
a relationship that ends in marriage," says Al Gore, "because I know how
rare it is for two people . . . to grow and think and not become very
different people along life's journey. We have been blessed to find each
other and to find a way to fall in love all over again at each new stage
of our lives."
He knows how sappy this sounds, right?
"I'm sorry," he pleads, "but it's the case. I can't help
it. I'm sorry!"
By the time Tipper was 27, Al's sense of duty or destiny
or both had interrupted her life twice.
Seven months after they walked down the aisle, he shipped
off to Vietnam, leaving his bride in a Nashville apartment. After
Karenna was born, Tipper took a photography course, then worked part
time at the Nashville Tennessean while getting her graduate degree in
psychology at Vanderbilt University in hopes of being a therapist.
"And then Al dropped his bombshell on me," she writes in
"Picture This: A Visual Diary," her 1996 photographic journal. He was
thinking of running for Congress, "and our lives changed forever." She
hasn't had a paid job since.
She wanted to campaign only on her days off. "But Al and
I had operated as a team," she said, "and there was no way I could feel
comfortable doing anything but wholeheartedly supporting him."
This conviction only deepened, Tipper's friends suggest,
until his happiness became as important to her as her own. "It's like
your husband is a doctor, and he gets promoted to head surgeon. What do
you say? No?" offers Chris Downey, who met Tipper when both were young
wives of congressmen. "No, you say, 'Sweetheart, that is a great
opportunity, and we will figure out how to make it work.'"
He never gave her an ultimatum, say those closest to
them. "It would never unfold in that way," says Harris, who knew the
Gores for years before she went to work for them. "They are
decision-makers together. They are too close. She knows him inside and
out, and she believes that he will make a good president. [But] this is
not effortless. It is not without stress or tension."
A MOTHER'S HORROR 'She has a sixth sense and a seventh sense and an
eighth sense, and she knows when something needs to be said or done. For
her, nurturing goes beyond making sure that people are comfortable or
happy; it goes to the spiritual needs.'
— AL GORE
on his wife In 1989, after a family outing to an Orioles
game, Albert III ran from his daddy's hand into the path of a car in the
parking lot. The parents watched in horror as their 6-year-old flew
through the air, was dragged along the road and lay still. He nearly
died and didn't fully recover from extensive internal injuries for two
years. The ever-adaptable Tipper overcompensated, taking care of
everybody else, laying off her household help, getting family therapy to
help them cope with the aftermath.
And then she went to pieces. Clinical diagnosis:
situational depression. Treatment: antidepressants.
Tipper Gore says she has not had a recurrence and is not
under any form of treatment now. She put herself on a mental health
fitness program of exercise, balanced lifestyle and plenty of fun. Asked
who takes care of her, she answers quickly, "I take care of myself,"
then adds a moment later, "And Al takes care of me.
"I learned that I need to set and prioritize my
boundaries, and then I need to enforce them. And I do that. And I try to
remind other women to do that – that if they don't take care of
themselves, they are going to pay some kind of price."
"She is definitely not afraid to say, 'Forget it, I'm not
going to do that.' I've seen it many times," says Karenna Gore Schiff.
"When faced with the choice of something that is important for whatever
reason, whether it is a big Washington dinner party or a political event
that is crucial, she will many times say, 'That sounds boring, we're not
going.'"
CHARGED ISSUES
The night of the White House Correspondents' Association
dinner, while the vice president, the first lady and the president sat
pinned to the dais of the packed Hilton Washington ballroom and tongues
clucked over her absence, Tipper Gore was at RFK Stadium, bopping with
the gay men and lesbians at the "Equality Rocks" concert. She talked for
a long time to the families of murder victims Matthew Shepard and James
Byrd. She whaled away on the drums and brought down the house.
Her idea of a perfect evening.
The candidate's most requested surrogate is still working
the rope line after offering platitudes at a racial unity event in
Dayton, Ohio. The crowd is wild for Tipper Gore. Men in dashikis strain
to touch her; grandmothers with white permed curls lean in for a kiss.
She poses for a yearbook picture with kids who make the peace sign. She
reaches out and strokes cheeks. She is a toucher, a winker, a mugger, a
giggler. Here, as everywhere she goes, someone pulls her close to
whisper in her ear. Her Secret Service agent stays watchful as Gore
bends in, murmurs something comforting, clasps the hand.
The Confession. It comes unbidden. People approach to
thank her for giving them courage, to find a sympathetic ear, to get
treatment.
"It's uncanny," says the vice president. "People confide
the most amazing things in her, and then she finds ways to help them
through it." He talks about being in a photo receiving line with the
Clintons and his wife at a fundraising blowout at MCI Center – 14,000
people and Robin Williams, too! – "and some young woman just stopped
when she got to Tipper and blurted out something and burst into tears.
So Tipper took her away for 15 minutes and counseled her and then handed
her off to someone [for] help. And then she came back to the photo
line."
Despite being a lackluster speech-giver – her voice,
musical and often merry in conversation, goes flat in front of the mike
– Gore can electrify her audience in a way her husband cannot. In
Cincinnati, public school employees treat her like a rock star, climbing
on chairs and screaming her name.
Political strategists disagree on whether family
surrogates can draw votes to their candidate, but here is what Gail
Lewis, 44, of Columbus, Ohio, single mother and school custodian, says:
"I probably wouldn't have come to this except she was coming. I raised
two kids. She's raised four kids. She knows the deal. She's no phony,
and I think he listens to her."
A CLOSE ADVISER 'I try to remind other women ... that if they don't take
care of themselves, they are going to pay some kind of price.'
— TIPPER GORE
That he does. Former aides confirm what Al Gore claims
about his wife being his closest adviser. They talk several times a day,
consulting on strategic moves large and small. She does not lobby for
specific policy outside her areas of expertise. Instead, she says, "Your
work on the environment is something you are passionate about; don't let
that get lost in the mix," explains Camille Johnston, her press
secretary, and the admonition becomes a major address on energy policy.
Gore pushed the vice president to relocate his campaign
to Nashville, and she was instrumental in his hires of key campaign
managers Tony Coelho, Donna Brazile and now Bill Daley. Since there have
been so many campaign changes – so many starts and stops – one may
question her expertise, although not her involvement.
Her instincts about personnel are not always good, says
one former senior Gore aide, "but they're better than his."
The vice president puts it this way: "She points things
out all the time. I have overlooked something, things about people,
things about crowds, a child's face, an emotional reaction that one
person in a session had that nobody else had."
More intimately, Tipper has helped him develop his own
emotional core, Al Gore says. "She has a sixth sense and a seventh sense
and an eighth sense, and she knows when something needs to be said or
done. For her, nurturing goes beyond making sure that people are
comfortable or happy; it goes to the spiritual needs. She knows when you
need something that you don't even know that you need. To talk about
something deep; to deal with something way below the surface."
On the other hand, maybe someone with the soul of a
social worker can't be fully successful at presidential politicking. She
projects an accessibility that makes Gore strategists salivate, but they
can't fully exploit her – because she won't let them. And the vice
president won't make her do it.
"For better or worse, she makes life enjoyable for
herself," says Karenna. Her mother said yes to an Albuquerque event so
she could go aloft in a hot-air balloon. In Florida, her staff made a
detour to ride Space Mountain at Disney World three times.
"It could be an isolating life, if you weren't careful
about that," Tipper says. "But it's also been an expansive life."
If her husband is elected president, say those who know
her best, she will radically change the description for the world's most
derivative job. It's unclear how she will manage the tension between her
need for high jinks and the often scripted ceremony of being first lady,
between her need to connect with people one-on-one and the necessary
aloofness of the role.
"I don't see why you can't be both," she says firmly. "I
can change and adapt. Frankly, I do that very well," she adds with a
rueful chuckle. "To have a larger forum to advocate for issues I feel
deeply about is something I hope I have the opportunity to do, but I
don't see that as inconsistent with being able to continue being the
individual I am and to live life the way that is important to me."
ONE EXTRA SECRET
[Secret.......you got to be kidding.....A Saba]
Juggling her determination to be a maverick individualist
and her role as emotional core of a family, all while being a deeply
involved political operative, is hard work, headed toward impossible.
On the morning of her 30th wedding anniversary, Tipper
slipped a little something into the vice president's CIA briefing
folder.
He reads this thick packet of global intelligence – the
day's super-duper classified secrets – just in case he needs to
suddenly run the country.
The hand-drawn insert pulled Al Gore up short, but he has
been around this playful wife of his a long time, so he looked over the
breakfast table at her and demanded: "What's this?"
"I guess you'll have to figure it out," she said.
Tipper had drawn an invitation to run away, to join in an
escape caper. "It was pretty good to pull off!" she chortles as she
remembers. "I did it all in symbols: U and I" – she points to her eye,
now glinting with mischief – "are helicoptering – and I drew a
helicopter and a beach and a house on it and waves and sea gulls, and I
drew a clock for one hour later.
"And he was so cute, he got a huge grin, and he said,
'You're kidding, right?' and I said, 'No, I'm not. Let's go. You have an
hour, so you better pack.""
Off they went to Bethany Beach, Del., in May, Tipper
having rearranged an entire presidential campaign and conspired with the
Secret Service and kept these actions from the vice president, all the
while tucking the rendezvous between their son's championship lacrosse
games. This was not like taking the credit card and phoning for a
weekend at the Inn at Little Washington. Elaborate event advance had to
to be done: Find a house, get it secured, find lodging for aides and a
few press (on your tete-a-tete – God!).
"Between talking and kicking back and reading and having
it be" – again a pause for propriety – "uh . . . raining outside,"
she says, "it was actually very romantic."
They were the only people in the frigid ocean that spring
day, she having waded in to body-surf. He followed, she says with a wink
and saucy grin: "He feels like he's gotta keep up with me."
She picked Bethany because she and Al went there as
teenagers, when they were only allowed out for the day. They'd climb on
his motorcycle (yes, America! Al Gore had a motorcycle!), romp in the
ocean all day, find a public shower, stop for dinner and get back to
Washington about 10 at night.
"I was remembering that and thinking that's what we
should do," she says. "But we can't motorcycle over anymore."
She pauses. The closest she now gets to a motorcycle is
seeing one in a motorcade. And then she adds, brightly:
"But it was pretty special to helicopter over! And we had
a blast."
© 2000 The Washington Post Company
So, if you got this far.....End of Passion Play......Now how about
Passion Plan on the Slum Land Lord who fights off middle age crisis.
(and the Bush Whackers will love this one)
Transcript of Vice President Gore's live discussion
The day in photos
Subscribe to washingtonpost.com's political e-mail and alerts
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Bush reaches out to NAACP Coming up: alt.Philadelphia Bush
spokesman ridicules Gore
Clinton's search for Mideast peace AIDS to reduce African
populations Arctic Mars habitat faces setback WashPost: Tipper
Gore's unusual life Turmoil in N. Ireland nears its peak
A. Saba
Dare To Call It Conspiracy
A. Saba
Dare To Call It Conspiracy
http://www.msnbc.com/news/431371.asp
