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AL GORE

President Clinton’s campaign entourage and the traveling press corps were getting antsy Sunday in Nashville. They were running two hours late because the president was dining on salmon and listening to jazz with a close friend.

No surprise–it was Vice President Al Gore.

“We spend so much time together, it’s almost like we can speak in code,” Clinton had told a Vanderbilt University audience hours before. “I think there has never been a relationship quite like this in American history.”

Presidential hyperbole aside, confidants say that the president almost reflexively asks a question when Gore isn’t around: “What does Al think?”

That Gore, 48, would be so positioned is no great surprise. He has been groomed for success since the cradle–first by his father, former Sen. Al Gore Sr., and now as Clinton’s loyal lieutenant.

Gore seems, at first glance, a mirror image of his boss. Both are Baby Boomers, Ivy League whiz-kid types and Southern moderates.

But while Clinton, given to jawboning and ambivalence, is like the student who stays up all night debating the meaning of life while never getting the term paper written, the buttoned-down Gore is the one who read all the books twice and turned in the paper early.

What he lacks in glibness, friends say, is compensated for with self-discipline and assertiveness.

On the campaign trail, where conventional wisdom holds he’s rehearsing for another presidential bid in 2000 (he tried in 1988), Gore has tried to overcome his mechanical, straight-arrow persona, often by making fun of his stiffness.

“He’s not a back-slapping, buy-you-a-drink kind of guy,” said longtime friend Tim Wirth, the former senator who is undersecretary of state for global affairs. “That’s not his deal.”

But just as Gore is criticized for being dry, critics also complain that Gore’s earnestness seems studied at times.

After his emotional attack on the cigarette industry at August’s Democratic convention, in which he recounted his sister’s death from lung cancer, some derided him as a hypocrite, noting that he profited from a tobacco allotment he acquired with his Carthage, Tenn., farm and later leased to his father.

Recently, Republicans have accused Gore’s staff of speeding up the citizenship process for thousands of immigrants to bolster Democrats’ chances at the polls in November. The administration has denied any political motives in streamlining naturalization procedures.

By and large, however, Gore has avoided big scandals since he first ran for Congress in 1976. He served in the House from 1976 to 1984 and in the Senate from 1984 to 1992.

In Congress, the Harvard University graduate developed a reputation for taking on difficult, technical issues such as global warming and technology and becoming expert in them.

In the early 1980s, Gore spent 18 months studying the details of arms control before coming out with a proposal for removing multiple warheads from nuclear missiles–an idea eventually adopted as conventional wisdom by liberals and conservatives.

“He learned everything he could before he ever spoke out publicly on it,” said former aide Roy Neel, recalling that Gore set aside 90 minutes each week for briefings by prominent weapons experts.

In the White House, Gore may well be Clinton’s closest adviser. Four years ago he insisted on, and got, a weekly lunch meeting with the president and the freedom to participate in nearly all Oval Office meetings.

From domestic spending to foreign policy, there are few important White House decisions made without Gore’s input, typically delivered quietly and behind the scenes, administration sources said.

The former congressman and newspaper reporter has assumed broad, if not complete, responsibility for fashioning White House policies concerning the environment and the information superhighway, a giant high-tech network of computer databases.

He also has overseen the administration’s downsizing effort, known as Reinventing Government, which has trimmed 240,000 federal jobs. The project has saved $10 billion, but that is far short of its goal of $100 billion.

Sometimes, Gore plays the role of New Democrat, as he did in advising Clinton to change course in support of a balanced budget and in supporting the welfare reform bill that so angered liberals.

Other times, Gore has leaned more toward the left, as the Vietnam veteran did in advising Clinton not to backtrack on his promise to lift the ban on gays in the military. Clinton did compromise in the end by agreeing to the current “don’t ask-don’t tell” policy.

Believing that the Republican-controlled Congress went too far in repealing environmental and health safety regulations, Gore urged Clinton to stand tough in last winter’s budget standoff.

Friends say that Gore’s doggedness and loyalty have been trademarks since childhood. Most of his youth was spent at elite East Coast schools, where he excelled in academics and sports, except for summer vacations when he worked on the family farm in Tennessee.

Though he opposed the Vietnam War, and worked in Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign, Gore enlisted in the Army and worked as a journalist to avoid hurting his father politically.

The military developed a hawkish tendency in Gore. As a congressman, he supported U.S. intervention to protect Kuwaiti oil shipping interests in the Persian Gulf, even though other Democrats were ridiculing the idea.

Likewise, in the White House, Gore has not been shy about advocating the use of force. He pushed for military action against the Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a position that put him at odds with Secretary of State Warren Christopher.