The Daughter Also Rises
Karenna Gore Schiff fell in love with her dad's campaigns. Now
she's a key adviser, and heir to his political legacy
BY TAMALA M. EDWARDS
This year dynasties are not just about Republicans and men named
George Bush. Waiting for Al Gore in Los Angeles will be someone
whose face is carved with the angular clarity of his own. It
belongs to a slight blond, his 27-year-old daughter Karenna Gore
Schiff. It would be wrong to look for her only in the family box,
gamely playing host to family and friends while wearing a
perma-smile. Karenna's fingerprints will be across the program,
from the choice of speakers to the entertainment to the look of
the stage. On Wednesday she will give the speech kicking off the
roll-call vote that will formally nominate her father. The gauzy
biographical film touting Gore as the man from Carthage will be
vetted by her; her pen will edit the remarks of both the Vice
President and Tipper Gore. And when Senator Joseph Lieberman,
Gore's running mate, shows up to take his place, you can be
certain that she weighed in on the decision to put him there.
The Gore dynasty story is different from Bush's because the
talent in the next generation rests not with a brother, nephew or
son but with a daughter. It is true that Tipper has helped make
Gore a better candidate by jump-starting his soul. But Tipper
doesn't like politics. Her daughter, on the other hand, is taken
with it, fixated on strategy and tactics, fanatical about Gore
and his political future. "For Tipper, it's win-win. If he wins,
he's President. If he loses, she hates to see him in pain but she
gets to have her husband back," says a family friend. "For
Karenna, the only thing is winning."
It is Karenna who makes herself most available to the press. She
has taken on a public role, heading Gorenet, an effort to reach
young voters, and speaking on behalf of her father, offering up
anecdotes of Al the Dad to humanize him. She is an expert at
casting new spin on his political vulnerabilities. Asked on
television what was the best advice her father ever gave her, she
says her father taught her to stick by a friend in trouble--a tale
that adds a family-values patina to Gore's stand by a President
in big trouble.
Karenna makes the best argument for Gore's intellectualism. "My
dad is very forcefully logical about things. In some ways, that's
why we get along quite well, because I like that," she says,
sitting in the back of a Manhattan Italian restaurant in a
cardigan and clogs. "Whenever you set up a heart-vs.-head thing,
people always tend to say the heart is better. I think it's not
as simple as that. Assumptions or prejudices are often emotional;
if you look at things logically, you can often realize what
things are and work through them."
But as much as she makes the case for him in public, Karenna is
usually more effective offstage. Asked about her, the first thing
the Vice President praises, before her "passion for social
justice," is her political skills. "She has nearly perfect
pitch," Gore says, beaming. Indeed, at 22, in a room full of
White House advisers, Karenna came up with the best line for Gore
in his debate against Jack Kemp: "If you won't use any football
stories," Gore said, "I won't tell any warm and humorous stories
about chlorofluorocarbon abatement." This time around, she has
helped develop lines like "The presidency is not an academic
exercise," which Gore used to nail Bill Bradley in the primaries.
She tweaks Gore's speeches and debate answers, always pushing him
to speak plainly and with heart. One of her key contributions,
says her mother, is that Karenna doesn't "soft-soap it." Her
father recalls an occasion when all the hired hands told him he'd
given a great speech. Karenna waited until they were gone. "Dad,"
she started, "it wasn't a great speech."
And she sometimes offers her father a sense of how things are
playing in the real world. In March Gore created a fire storm
when he broke with the White House to support permanent residency
for Elian Gonzalez, a move seen as pandering to Florida's Cuban
vote. At first the campaign stonewalled the press, hoping the
problem would "just go away," as a top adviser put it. "[Karenna]
said, 'You need to explain this.'" About a week later, Gore went
on the Today show. Though it failed to undo the damage, it did
take some of the bite out of the daily coverage.
Usually spouses and children are dreaded by campaigns, not so
much as bulls but as jackasses loose in the china shop. Karenna
has been savvy enough to cultivate warm relationships throughout
Goreville, from top advisers to state operatives. She has offered
herself up as another avenue for staff members who don't believe
their voices are being heard. "She always tries to communicate
that it's safe to talk to her, that she's not going to rat on
you," says a senior Gore aide. Says another: "I hear people say,
'Let's fax a copy to Karenna.' 'Has anybody talked to Karenna
about this?'"
Where her father can be wooden and diffident, she is warm and
immediate, with a face that looks better without makeup. When her
father reached out to shake her hand at her May law-school
graduation, she pulled him into a hug. Gore may be known to some
as "Prince Albert," but his eldest child is known for never
putting on airs. She's the kind of person who, Michael Kinsley,
editor of the online magazine Slate, recalls, did not mind doing
scut work as an editorial assistant.
Karenna has always had a healthy sense of fun. In high school she
raised money for her student government by wrestling a pig into
the backseat of a friend's car and raffling off votes for which
teacher would have to kiss it. She is the first to show up at a
party. And she doesn't care much for Washington, even though
that's where her father and grandfather taught her to ride her
bike, on the Capitol grounds, and where she went to school. She
shares her father's attachment to Tennessee, where she was born.
"Everyone says I had a really strong Southern accent," she sighs.
"I'm so bummed I lost it." She is self-deprecating about her
experiences in the world of the powerful. Writing about Gore's
second Inaugural in Slate, she described Chuck Berry stepping on
her foot and how all the party tenting made her house look like
the death scene in E.T. When she went off to Spain after college
in 1995 to work on a newspaper there, she declined to use a car
that had been found for her at a good price; she chose to live on
her salary and take the subway instead.
Karenna was only three when Gore announced he was running for
Congress. After his election, the family would go back to
Carthage in the summers. As she grew older, Karenna often took
messages from constituents who had missed a pension check or
wanted Gore to call back and pray with them. Once someone stopped
the 36-year-old Congressman in a grocery-store parking lot with
11-year-old Karenna at his side. The constituent wanted to thank
him for making it easier to get an organ transplant. "I was at
that moment struck by how he really impacted people," she says.
And it was shortly thereafter that the Gores learned just how
much their willful eldest child could impact them. Karenna was a
handful, even as a toddler. "Rules and limits are more important
than a lot of parents realize," wrote Tipper in her 1987 book,
Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society. "I learned that simple but
important lesson myself with my first child, who was overly
demanding and had me wrapped around her finger at two years of
age." Tipper encouraged her daughter's independence, letting her
draw on the walls and giving Karenna her 1960s polyester and
suede hand-me-downs, which the teen preferred to her friends'
preppy duds.
By the time she hit the teen years, her spirited nature veered
into open rebellion. Karenna lectured her parents on how their
rules infringed on her First Amendment rights. She was big on
"adventuring," climbing out of her window to shimmy down a
manhole into the D.C. subway system for afterhours partying. When
her friends spray-painted the names of punk bands on the tunnel
walls, Karenna, ever the iconoclast, threw up names of country
singers like Emmylou Harris and Kenny Rogers. One night Karenna
was dancing along the tracks and headed off to stomp on the third
rail. A friend pulled her back, explaining that she would be
electrocuted. "I always think of that," she says. "I could have
died, because I really was about to go jump on that."
Yet it was in these rowdy years that the political bond between
father and daughter began to form. One night Karenna came home
refusing to admit she was drunk. Gore had her draw a floor plan
of the house; the next morning, as she looked at its wild
misproportions, Karenna had to face up to the fact that she had
not been sober. Still, this was the same 14-year-old who tagged
along with him one Saturday afternoon in 1987 when he met with
advisers to talk about a presidential run. As she has done
repeatedly, Karenna came to define her father in her own way, a
way at odds with his establishmentarian image. The teen decided
that Gore and his insurgent bid were of a piece with the defiant
punk bands she sneaked out to see. "I felt like we were trying to
overthrow the Old Guard," she says.
Richard Holbrooke, then Gore's foreign-policy adviser, remembers
Karenna being in the hotel room during preparation for a 1988
primary debate and looking up periodically from her homework to
say, "Dad, I just don't think that's right." The young girl
walked away from that campaign with two formative experiences.
One was seeing how politics, which often pushed candidates away
from their children, became caulking between her and her father.
"He was so kind. Even in really stressful moments, when he was
losing, surrounded by hostile questions, whenever I had concerns,
it was important to him what I was feeling," she says. "I was
never told to shut up and leave."
The other was falling in love wholesale with the
behind-the-scenes maneuvering that went on around strategy and
issues, following Holbrooke and media guru Bob Squier around,
according to Tipper, "like a puppy dog." Karenna's interest,
particularly in controlling the message, was also a reaction
against how her parents' battles were portrayed in the press. The
day after Gore's withdrawal from the 1988 race, Karenna's crying
face was the cover of a D.C. political paper. But that, she says,
was nothing compared with the tears she had shed three years
before, when Tipper drew scorn from libertarians and artists for
her campaign to clean up music lyrics. Within the walls of their
Arlington, Va., home, Tipper's efforts led to fights. "It was
like the embarrassment everyone has if their parents pick them up
from the eighth-grade dance," Karenna says. "It was like that on
acid."
Outside the home, however, her reaction was different. "Her
father was fair game, but her mother was out of bounds. That was
the beginning of the protective attitude," says Perry Cohagen,
Karenna's college boyfriend. One reporter recalls a day during
the 1988 campaign when reporters on the bus began making fun of
Tipper among themselves. It was all funny--until they realized the
14-year-old blond was standing behind them. But Karenna didn't
cry, and she had the last word. "You all have no idea what you're
talking about," she said evenly, turning to walk away.
If you ask friends to describe Karenna, one word always comes up:
tough. She was the Tennessee state champion in water skiing. Her
coach, Glen Birdwell, says Karenna repeatedly skied after hitting
the water so hard that she broke her ribs. And during one dry
summer, when rattlesnakes began coming into the lake and the male
skiers began to scream and scatter, Karenna grabbed a snake and
held it aloft, its venomous mouth clamped in her grip.
Karenna settled down in her last years in high school and headed
off to Harvard. Friends from those years remember her as the girl
with long hair and sandals who kept water skis under her bed and
the occasional honky-tonk song on the stereo. The Karenna usually
on display was a bit of a mess--forgetful and prone to showing up
at the last minute with wet hair. One morning, as students turned
in papers, Karenna came running through the yard with bedhead and
wearing one sock, finally holding her computer disc out to an
amused professor. "I can't get this off," she lamented, "You've
got to help me!"
But that Ms. McGoo persona belies a focused and rigorous mind.
Karenna wrote a thesis on slave narratives from the 1930s that
earned a departmental prize. She fiercely held her own in debates
with friends, often refusing to back down even to better
arguments. As her father entered the vice presidency in her
sophomore year, she carried on a constant high-level exchange
with him on the computer and over the phone, with Gore sending
his speeches. Friends recall Karenna sitting intently in front of
the TV during the State of the Union addresses and the disastrous
1994 election returns. She didn't offer expansive opinions to
those in the room. She saved those for her father, who would
usually call within minutes of the end of political events.
Though Karenna traveled with Tipper during 1992, she spent the
last four months of the 1996 re-election campaign with her father
on Air Force Two. She considered taking a formal role, until it
was explained to her that she would have to talk to those damn
journalists. So she kept to the background. While staff members
often headed off during speeches to make phone calls or take a
break, Karenna always parked herself in the audience, intently
watching her father and the faces in the crowd. "Schedule,
advance, balloon drop, strategy, speeches, issues, everything," a
Veep staff member ticks off, listing the things the 22-year-old
put on her radar. "She is her father's daughter, and she has his
eye for detail."
In October 1996, on one of the rare times Karenna was not on
Gore's plane, she agreed to head over to the Washington home of
family friends for a drink. Chris Downey, wife of former
Congressman and Gore friend Tom Downey, had been insisting she
had someone she wanted Karenna to meet. Downey now says that when
Andrew Schiff, a New York doctor and heir of the
turn-of-the-century industrialist Jacob Schiff, walked into the
room, in a crisp shirt with his hair still wet from the shower,
Downey knew from their faces that a wedding was in the offing. By
the following July, Karenna, then 23, married Drew in the
Washington cathedral where her parents had wed years before. Gore
and his daughter danced at the reception to the strains of
Tennessee Waltz.
When she met Drew, whatever pieces were left of Karenna's
wild-child soul seemed to come to peace. "They were so intense,
so focused and secure," says Megan Colligan, a college pal. Last
year Gore got his first grandchild, Wyatt, born conveniently on
the Fourth of July. As she does with her father, Karenna seems to
delight in her husband for the things others might see as
strange. Drew, 34, who works for a biotech venture-capital fund,
is bright, attractive and good-natured. But like Gore, his mind
is sometimes transfixed by the academic and arcane, as witnessed
by a friend who watched Drew and the Veep happily spend a summer
afternoon by the pool discussing daylight saving time. And he is
routinely described as, well, goofy, the kind of guy who, when he
realized he had no music, clipped the Wall Street Journal's list
of top-100 CDs and bought them all, an abdication of judgment
that sometimes leaves the couple's dinner parties sound-tracked
by Milli Vanilli.
Adulthood has no doubt sharpened Karenna's political instincts,
but they have failed her father on occasion. Some say Gore and
his daughter are both stubborn and arrogant, each falling in love
with the other's thinking simply because it's an echo of their
own. Karenna, for instance, pushed to bring in Naomi Wolf, the
feminist writer who advocates, among other things, teaching
children the value of masturbation. Wolf's $15,000-a-month salary
and memos pushing Gore to be an "alpha male" left the candidate
withered by weeks of derisive press just as Bill Bradley started
to make his big break in New Hampshire.
Karenna still considers Wolf a valuable voice on women's issues
and a close friend. "I'm willing to take a few hits. I'm not
going to argue with being pinned with stuff because I'm
privileged to be at the table," Karenna says with a disarming
ease. "I'm sure I'm not right about everything I've said or
thought. But I feel very free to say what I think."
She does that often these days. But in her public speeches,
Karenna can often be as stiff as her father, and girlish too.
This has not stopped her fans from imagining a big political
future for her. A friend recalls Karenna calling home from
Harvard and talking to her younger brother Albert III. He was
being badgered about whether he would follow his father and
grandfather into the Senate. "I don't know. Why don't you ask my
sisters?" he answered. "Yeah, why don't they ask his sisters?" an
indignant Karenna said. Not to worry. Pauline, Gore's mother, and
Nancy, his sister, had to stand to the side, but not this Gore
girl. Says a powerful Democrat: "Tipper is the wife of one
politician and the mother of at least one more."
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