Run for Presidency Begins for the Man From Carthage

By FAYE FIORE

June 16, 1999 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

CARTHAGE, Tenn. — The sun beats down on Main Street with a ferocity that sends Ricky Wilburn and his mother to the Sonic Drive-In for a hot fudge sundae and a Route 44-size Diet Coke big enough to fill his gas tank.

It is Saturday afternoon, his day off from the local boot factory where he makes buckles. There would seem to be little that connects a man like Wilburn, who grew up in this tiny town and will probably never leave it, to a man like Al Gore, who lays claim here, but never stays. And there isn’t, except this place.

“Al always comes back here to start off his campaigns,” Wilburn declares proudly, shooing away a fly that assaults his mama’s ice cream cone. “He don’t make nothin’ official till he comes back here first.”

Today, Vice President Gore returns to Carthage to announce his run for president on the steps of the old courthouse where he has launched every campaign since he ran for Congress in 1976. He will shed his blue suit and his Washington polish, roll up his sleeves and reach out to the masses. And Carthage, where cows graze roadside and the Sonic’s waitresses deliver your cheeseburger on skates, will provide the backdrop once more.

It is the sort of place where you can get the mayor on the telephone, except for the day last week when somebody baked him a chocolate pie and he had to run out to pick it up. It has one high school, no liquor stores, six police officers and, at last count, 2,476 residents. The school gymnasium is its hot spot, the high school football games its passion, the Wal-Mart its beacon of progress. If you want to see a movie, you have to drive to Lebanon 20 miles away.

This is where Al Gore grew up. Sort of. Here in the hills 58 miles east of Nashville, he spent summers, long weekends and holidays on his family’s farm, where his mother still lives. He owns about 80 acres of his own next door.

The rest of the time he was the privileged son of Tennessee Sen. Al Gore Sr. Home was an elegant apartment on the eighth floor of the Fairfax Hotel on Washington’s stately Embassy Row. An exclusive prep school groomed him for Harvard. John F. Kennedy came to their house for dinner.

More the Product of Washington

At 51, the cerebral vice president is far more the product of Washington than anywhere else. But it is Carthage that he fiercely claims, even at some political expense. When Gore recently spoke of plowing hillsides and cleaning out pig parlors, he was nearly laughed out of Iowa. Speaking of hog waste, Republican National Committee Chairman Jim Nicholson retorted, “You’re shoveling a lot more of it right now than you ever did back then.”

But there are plenty who attest to his country boy claim, including former senior ABC News correspondent Bob Zelnick in an otherwise critical biography, and the people of Carthage itself. By their accounts, Carthage did produce Al Gore; it just didn’t do it alone.

Most summers of his youth--and the entire year when he was 7--Gore was sent by his father to live with tenant farmers in a house with no electricity or indoor plumbing, Zelnick writes. He got up before dawn to feed the cattle and shovel the pig stalls. Once his father instructed him to clear an overgrown field with a small hand ax, a project intended to build character. It took him all summer.

“It’s not a question of whether he’s phony . . . he did all that,” Zelnick said in an interview. “But Al Gore Jr. is not a man of the countryside. He is a man of privileged Washington who did some things in the countryside that made an impression” on him.

Jimmy Carter had Plains, Ga., Bob Dole had Russell, Kan., and Harry Truman had Independence, Mo., small towns that suggested those politicians were more connected to America than to Washington. This is, after all, a country that idealizes the notion of old-fashioned values and humble beginnings.

But with Gore comes the awkwardness of his dual residency, a tension about who he really is.

His father’s modest beginnings were the stuff of American political myth--he attended a one-room schoolhouse in Possum Hollow, studied law at a night school run by the Nashville YMCA and went on to serve as Tennessee’s Democratic senator for 18 years. He tried to give his son the experience of both hard work and entitlement, and created in the process a person from two inimical places.

Gore’s Core Is Subject of Debate

Even here in Smith County, where more than 80% of the voters are registered Democrats, the vice president’s core is the subject of some debate, although a lopsided one. Few doubt that he’s from here. The welcome sign on the edge of town declares that. But is he of here, shaped by this classic Southern community of friendly people, hard work, church choirs and fried chicken on Sundays?

Not surprisingly, the answers divide along party lines.

“They are not from here, they are Washington product. . . . He only comes here when he wants something,” croaks Albert McCall Sr., 70, owner of D. T. McCall & Sons Furniture. He is sitting in one of the green recliners on his showroom floor, a devoted Republican who thinks Gore has failed to defend gun ownership and tobacco, the region’s No. 1 cash crop.

Democrats like John Bass, a town mortician and lifelong Gore family friend, see it another way: “You have to leave sometimes to do your calling, and politics is one of those. But that doesn’t mean you can’t come home.”

Which Gore does. A lot. Almost everyone in Carthage seems to have met him--at a watermelon rally, the department store, over the hot buffet at the City Cafe. The vice president’s cream-colored Jeep is a familiar sight in town.

Still, it is easier for the rest of the world to envision Gore as a blue-blazered prefect at St. Alban’s prep school than a farm boy cooling off in a cow trough. To invoke that rustic image is to invite criticism, particularly from politicians who know Gore’s world of nobility as well as Carthage knows his rural roots, but have louder voices.

“Maybe he was there, but should he open himself up to contrasts to an opponent who eventually is going to say, ‘If you’re from Tennessee, what were you doing in boarding school all those years?’ ” said Burdett Loomis, a University of Kansas political science professor who observed the Dole-Russell relationship up close. “I can’t imagine that Carthage would really claim him.”

But it does. Washington may be Gore’s universe, but Carthage is where he finds his center, the place he goes to revive and replenish. Like the accommodating mother of a child with wanderlust, this little town lets him come and go without curfew, makes room for his entourage and puts on its best dress when the world comes to call.

When the national media converge today to record Gore’s official candidacy, Carthage will haul out the bunting, shut down the town square and probably trim the bushes. As many as 7,000 party faithful could descend, nearly triple the population of the entire town. Traffic will gridlock. The weekly Carthage Courier, unable to penetrate the security to reach its distribution racks, had to publish a day early, requiring Eddie West, the paper’s only reporter and editor, to work Sunday.

Nobody complains. And their tolerance is not purely out of love for the hometown boy.

Carthage may be little, but it isn’t stupid. West called up Hope, Ark., last week to find out what it’s like to produce a president. “You can’t buy this kind of publicity,” was the answer.

As it is, business at Carthage restaurants and department stores booms whenever Gore takes to the courthouse steps. Tourists are already trickling in. And Markham’s department store has stocked what must be the world’s largest collection of Gore 2000 souvenirs.

Al Gore has come a long way since that first courthouse announcement in 1976 when he got so nervous he threw up beforehand.

So has Carthage.

For two years, Bill Markham has been selling cobalt-blue mugs proclaiming “Carthage--Home of Al Gore, 43rd President of the United States of America.”

Alongside the mugs is this disclaimer: “Get yours early. No refunds if he loses the election.”

Coverage of Al Gore’s candidacy announcement and an analysis of his campaign prospects will be available today on The Times’ Web site:

http://ukobiw.net/politics