He’s Got His Finger on the Button--of a Computer

When President Clinton travels, a black suitcase containing the codes to launch nuclear weapons is always with him.

Al Gore’s sidekick is a black IBM laptop.

Unlike Clinton’s suitcase, Gore’s ThinkPad 560, which can’t launch missiles, is always in use. On Air Force Two. In the limo. In the backstage “holding room” before he gives a speech. Almost any time and place he’s got a free minute and “secure” telephone connection, he’s checking his electronic mail.

Gore is an e-mail addict, people on his staff say. Every day, he reads through more than a hundred messages and sends out almost as many, sometimes doing it from his residence late into the night. During staff meetings in his office, White House aides say, he often has one eye on his computer screen, scanning through new arrivals in his mailbox.

He’s just as psyched about the rest of the Internet. In a recent interview, with Tracy Chapman tunes thumping from the speakers attached to the screen of his office computer, the vice president demonstrated his technological prowess, taking a reporter on a tour of his favorite World Wide Web sites.

Starting off with his White House home page on the screen he jumped to a site called MapQuest, which he uses whenever his children need directions. Then there were the weather pages, which, he said, “I usually always look at before I travel.” Next came the politics sites, including one run by CNN and Time magazine called AllPolitics. “I never use those,” he quipped.

After dropping in on an investment-related site and one devoted to technology news, Gore showed off several software applications he had downloaded from the global network and configured to work on his machine. One included a horizontal map of the world that sits in the corner of one’s screen and shows where it’s daytime and where it’s dark. “It’s like the clocks they have at the CIA,” Gore said proudly. “Except they use a thousand-dollar version that hangs on the wall. I got this one for something like 25 bucks.”

Gore has long had a reputation of being steeped in the stellar issues of technology policy. It was he who popularized the term “information superhighway.”

But over the last few years Gore has made technology a central part of not just his stump speeches, but his own office. For the vice president’s staff, clustered in the White House’s West Wing and the adjoining Old Executive Office Building, e-mailing has become the primary method of communication.

People at all levels, from young speech writers to Gore, troll the Internet to read out-of-town newspapers and conduct research. In meetings, Gore often draws on a large, erasable “white board” that sends a copy of his scribblings to a computer file.

The result has been one of political Washington’s most atypical workplaces. Junior staffers frequently message Gore directly with questions, cutting through layers of bureaucracy. “He’s the vice president,” said Greg Simon, Gore’s former chief domestic policy advisor. “You just can’t pop in and ask him a question.” But you can with e-mail.

At the same time, Gore says he uses e-mail so he won’t bother his subordinates.

“I just find [e-mail] to be a much easier way to communicate because you don’t have to worry about calling your staff on the telephone at a time when they’re in the middle of doing something else or when the number is busy or when they’re out eating lunch or . . . they really ought to be devoting their time to a higher priority matter than the one I want to get an answer to,” Gore said. “Yet, if I call them they’re going to think, ‘This is the top priority right now,’ and it’s really not.”

While he exploits the courtesy of e-mail, Gore also understands its subversive nature. Meeting with advisors generally requires blocking off time on his calendar days in advance. “With e-mail, he can communicate with anybody on the staff, even the most junior people” said Daniel Pink, Gore’s former chief speech writer. “In many ways, he defies the generational divide in the White House.”

In addition to the 100 to 150 messages a day he receives in his private mailbox--sent by White House staffers and close friends outside the compound--he said he gets about 400 a day at a public address (vice.presidentwhitehouse.gov). Those messages are read by aides, who sometimes forward particularly thought-provoking ones to him.

Recently, the vice president’s e-mail has also aroused interest on Capitol Hill. Because a copy of every message that’s sent and received is saved on a computer disk, White House lawyers have had to turn over some of those files to congressional investigators probing whether Gore broke campaign finance laws during the 1996 election.

But there are still some people Gore can’t reach with e-mail. The most important one is his boss.

Clinton “doesn’t use e-mail very much now, but he plans to start,” Gore said. “One of the driving forces that will push him to get on the computer on a regular basis is the fact that Chelsea is going to college in California. I’ve told him of the joys of communicating with your children off at college by way of e-mail.”

Does he ever goof off on the Internet in the office?

“Oh, it’s almost always relevant,” Gore said, laughing. “Dilbert would love some of the excuses I put the Web to.”

Political analysts say Gore’s computer savvy could be a mixed blessing if he runs for president in 2000. On the one hand, it risks perpetuating his stiff image; on the other, it could portray him as young and hip, they say. His understanding of computers also could generate important financial support from the technology industry, they add.

But Gore said he’s on the computer because he loves it. “It’s fun,” he said. “It’s really fun.”