Issue date: Feb 27, 2000

In this article:
"How many people can pick up the phone and tell him the truth?"
Karenna was part of the "earthy, hippie, crunchy"
Also this week:
Christopher Zorich
Alyssa Milano
Back to Celebs

By Contributing Editors Cokie & Steve Roberts

ey! I'm Karenna. Howzit goin'?" The slender young woman with silky blond hair glides through the crowd at Gore headquarters in Nashua, N.H., a few days before the first primary of the 2000 presidential race. The oldest of the vice president's four children, she's a celebrity in her own right, and the volunteers want to shake her hand, take her picture, hear her pep talk. "It feels very cold out there," she empathizes, drawing an appreciative laugh. "February in New Hampshire is a rite of passage, isn't it?"

Joe Grandmaison, a veteran local organizer, looks on approvingly. Karenna's presence is a way of saying: "Hey, Dad and Mom really appreciate what you're doing." After her warm words, he adds, it's easier to push the volunteers out the door, back into the biting wind. A few minutes later, the veep's daughter pulls on her knit cap and tan mittens (with a hole in one finger) and is out the door, too, greeting voters on Nashua's main drag. "I have no use for the married daughter," cracks one burly young man. "I want to meet the single ones."

But Al Gore has plenty of use for his married daughter. At 26, she's a new mother, a Columbia University law student and one of his closest advisers. "I like to be a sounding board and hopefully a conduit of some sort," she told us during a conversation on her cramped campaign bus. She talks to Dad almost daily, reporting back on her campaign trips, offering advice, cutting through the cordon of counselors who surround all candidates and sometimes shield them from reality.

"Anyone who has the completely unfiltered ear of the candidate has a lot of influence," says a Gore confidant. Most of the vice president's advisers hesitate to be "brutally honest," but his daughter "can do that," says the insider: "How many people can pick up the phone and tell him the truth? That's hard to do."

Al Gore boasts that his daughter has "nearly perfect pitch" when it comes to politics, and she joined her mother, Tipper, in persuading Dad to loosen up and let his "funny, decent side" show through. According to one adviser, the two women told him straight: "If you don't do it, you're going to lose."

Karenna doesn't always take her own advice to "loosen up." During a series of TV interviews at headquarters, a picture of her father, his arms sternly crossed, peers over her shoulder as if to say, "Stay on message, kid." She does, repeating almost word for word the same answers about getting young people involved in politics. But when the cameras click off, she is a lively, engaging woman, gobbling down cough drops to ease a cold and joking that her next assignment is "going door to door to infect the voters." At this point in her life, she is a stir-fry of ingredients: her father's firmness and her mother's sense of fun, a political pro who kids a friend about her leopard-skin underwear and seems to wonder how she became a grown-up so fast.

While Dad clearly values Karenna's insights, her advice isn't always on key. She was responsible for bringing controversial feminist author Naomi Wolf into the vice president's campaign, causing him a flurry of embarrassment some months back.

And her hard-wired access to Dad irritates some Gore advisers. "Political operatives always want to control who the candidate is talking to," one of them admits. "So family members drive them nuts."

Karenna won't discuss what she tells her father, but one of her main jobs is heading Gorenet, an organization with a hip-sounding name that is really just an old-fashioned political effort to entice young people into the campaign. At times she has shared the "skepticism and detachment" that mark her generation's view of politics. The key to attracting them, she says, is "showing that the decisions politicians make affect their daily lives."

One example is abortion. "A lot of people my age don't remember before Roe v. Wade; it was decided the year I was born," she notes. But the next president could have the opportunity to appoint three or four Supreme Court justices, she points out, who could reverse that decision. Outlawing abortion, she warns her contemporaries, "could happen again."

Because Karenna has a foot in two worlds, the campaign uses her in different ways. In New Hampshire, dressed in snazzy purple ski pants, her job was to energize college students and young professionals to donate time and cash to the Gore cause. But she's also a young mother, appearing on morning TV with her own mom, wearing a demure pink sweater set and pitching her appeal to women who are already rearing, and worrying about, their own families.

We're used to seeing boys join the family business. George W. Bush, for instance, played a vital role in his father's 1992 campaign before running for governor of Texas. But girls are another matter. Jimmy Carter was ridiculed for quoting his daughter, Amy. Chelsea Clinton is like the Johnson, Nixon and Ford daughters, a quiet, pleasant prop for photo sessions. But Karenna Gore Schiff is a daughter with plenty to say -- to her father and the public.

With a husband from a wealthy banking family, her life on Manhattan's Upper East Side is hardly typical, but like many young mothers she's juggling school, work and family and seeing the future in suddenly different terms. She jokes that son Wyatt, born with impeccable timing on July Fourth, is getting so big, "I'm mourning his lost youth already." But he's one of the main reasons she's plunged into the campaign.

"Having a child really changed my perspective," she says. "I thought it would make me retreat more into my private world, but it's made me feel a lot more political, actually. His life will be very much affected by whoever wins the election, and that makes me feel a responsibility."

As a political child, Karenna has been both attracted and repelled by public life. Her mother was always championing some cause or other. When Karenna was 9, Mom banned Nestle's Quik after the company was accused of wrongdoing in the Third World. (Karenna had to sneak gulps of chocolate milk at friends' houses.) Things got worse when Karenna was 14 and her mother crusaded against violent song lyrics. "It was every teenager's worst nightmare," says her childhood pal Lucy Martin. Karenna agrees: "I was a supersensitive teenager trying to be cool, and this didn't help my image." But looking back, she admires her mom's guts and foresight: "She was ahead of her time."

Despite those rough patches, Karenna pursued politics at the exclusive National Cathedral School near the vice presidential mansion in Washington, where she helped devise a fund-raising scheme that lives on in school lore. Students were asked to vote with their donations for the most popular faculty member, who would then kiss a pig in front of the whole school. Karenna transported the animal from a farm in Virginia and stashed it at the Gore house, where it "took a leak on Al's foot," as Lucy recalls.

At Harvard, Karenna was part of the "earthy, hippie, crunchy" crowd, according to a classmate. She seriously dated a hockey player (a small-town boy from Canada), played lacrosse and field hockey, adopted a "grungy sort of look" and shunned the social scene. After graduation she drifted a bit -- a year in Spain, a job at the online magazine Slate -- but that aimlessness ended in fall 1996.

Chris Downey, a close friend of the Gores, was convinced she'd found the perfect match for their daughter. When there was "finally a lull" in Karenna's social life, she invited her to dinner with Drew Schiff, a young doctor involved in New York Democratic circles. "Both of their eyes, like, dilated" when they met, recalls Chris, the wife of former New York congressman Tom Downey. "I knew. I just knew."

So did the couple, who were engaged within months. "It seemed more normal to me to get married in your early 30s," after starting a career and seeing the world, recalls Karenna. "But it just happened. You can't argue with fate." Some friends were taken aback, but then again, says a college roommate, "She gets very passionate, so it doesn't surprise me she would fall madly in love."

Despite her "hippie" phase, Karenna is very much a Gore, part of a tradition of public service that began with her late grandfather Al Gore Sr., a senator from Tennessee who lost his seat in 1970 after supporting civil-rights legislation. His defeat is embedded in "family legend," she says, "sort of a myth" that Gores are taught to live by. "The thing that always sunk in was that he stuck to what he thought was right."

Next on Karenna's agenda: finishing law school this spring. She kids about being "in denial" over final exams: "I'm sliding for home, and it's going to be messy." Then there is the rest of the election campaign, and if her father wins, perhaps a post in his administration.

Political types already are suggesting another possibility, that Karenna will follow the family path into elective office. The idea "feels a bit funny," she says, but quickly adds that politics is a "really noble profession that I certainly wouldn't rule out." After all, she was only 3 when her dad first ran for Congress. That's the age her son will be in 2002.

Go to the top