He can't run as Clinton's heir the way George Bush ran as the kinder, gentler Reagan. The veep already has differentiated himself in small ways. He sticks to his schedule and often finishes events ahead of time. And he is doing what his predecessors have done in similar situations. He is trying on personalities.
Democratic audiences get an avenging liberal.
His liberal stump speech adopts the Dickensian view that we live in the best of times and worst of times. Even in our prosperity, he warns, we commit undetected vices and sins. Just as his fellow Southerners once cast a blind eye toward the evils of slavery, the comfortable majority today overlooks horrors that will appall later generations of Americans. And in unguarded moments, you get a nice guy who enjoys talking about policy and wants people to like him. The one strain running through all the Gores is that the vice president is a liberal politician eager for an ideological fight and confident that his opponents almost surely will underestimate him.