The Problem with Al: Jerk, pretender, fraud.

We've heard it a thousand times: At home, around the dinner table, he's a charming and effortless host. And funny. And straight-arrow honest. And hip. "Friends are puzzled by the Al Gore they see campaigning around the country," begin the inevitable What's-wrong-with-Gore? newspaper accounts. Occasionally, the "friends" cited are ill-concealed fellow Democratic politicians, but more often they are journalists themselves-CNN pundits and Washington Post reporters who want so much to like Gore, and are so confused by his strange hustings persona that they have manufactured a news story about it.

And the stories are all the same: "Longtime associates" and "close friends" will say that the Gore who hired Naomi Wolf and flip-flops on everything and cannot answer a simple yes-or-no question is not the Gore they know. The Gore who drones condescending lectures out on the stump isn't the Gore they had rosemary-focaccia sandwiches with just last Tuesday. The Gore who can't pick a campaign manager and stick with him for longer than eight weeks isn't the Gore who sings funny made-up songs 'round the campfire. The Gore who broke campaign-finance laws and then lied about it isn't their Gore, the good-old-Al, let's-play-Boggle-after-sorting-our-recyclables guy who likes to work out with weights and listen to the Grateful Dead. They cannot understand why the Al Gore they all find so likable is so disliked.

What's wrong with Al Gore? Why are his negative poll ratings so solidly stuck in the 40s? The assorted "strategists" and "family friends" finger something called "Clinton fatigue"-the almost counterintuitive suggestion that the support of a popular sitting president is somehow tainting. A country weary of scandal has pinned the tail on the vice president, goes the thinking. How ironic, say "Gore intimates" and "Beltway observers," that it's Al Gore-family man, environmentalist, ramrod decent-who's wearing the tin hat in the lightning storm.

But does anyone doubt that if Bill Clinton himself-the creator of the eponymous "fatigue"-somehow, some way found a loose thread in the Constitution, pulled it, and unraveled enough of it to run for a third term-Could happen! The guy is very, very good at that kind of thing!-does anyone seriously doubt that he'd be five points up in the battleground states and maybe, maybe, pulling ahead in Texas? People don't dislike Gore because he reminds them of Clinton; they dislike Gore because he doesn't remind them of Clinton. When Clinton strides into a room and grabs the mike, hugs the fat lady, talks for 20 extemporaneous minutes, wolfs down a pulled-pork sandwich, and shuffles off to the next backwater district, you know he's loving every minute of it. He's doing it because he needs it: The campaign trail is his bacon double cheeseburger and zaftig big-haired intern all rolled into one, and he's going to savor every last greasy moment of it. No one loves being loved more than our rascally, callow, charming president.

When Gore grabs the mike, you instinctively think, "Uh oh." When he hugs the fat lady, they both look creeped out. And when he uses his growling I'm-gettin'-into-it voice, the effect is so discomfiting that it's hard not to look away in embarrassment. Watch the tape of Gore speaking at the NAACP convention in Baltimore. His stemwinding preacher voice develops a very distinct Driving Miss Daisy quality. Watch the smiles freeze on the faces of his audience. See those on the dais shift uncomfortably in their seats. Notice his head, sliding from side to side on his extremely white shoulders in a weird, off-putting imitation of every young black woman who has ever appeared on a bad TV talk show. You half expect him to say, "You go, girl!"

A few years ago, I heard a stand-up comedian talk about his itinerant, womanizing, ne'er-do-well father. The father, apparently, was quite something-a white-trash version of the dad in Angela's Ashes. When he wasn't drunk, he wasn't around; and when he was around, he dispensed rotten, amoral advice to his adoring young son. "Kiddo," he drunkenly slurred one day, "lemme tell you something. Remember this when you're older. I don't care if it costs you all your money, your wife, your kids-whatever. But when you're on a hot [sexual] streak, you've got to ride it out!" His father's counsel, for some reason, struck home. For a boy his age, the father must have seemed impossibly glamorous. So for a large part of his young adult life, the comedian lived just that way: irresponsible, promiscuous, chasing women at every opportunity-in other words, trouble.

His father, though, could carry it off with just enough charm to keep the sheriff at bay. His son, sadly, didn't have the right amount of twinkle in his eye to play the devilish, lovable rake. "I just looked like a jerk," he said. "A big, fat jerk."

And that, in a nutshell, is Al Gore's problem. Whether talking about Medicare in spook-the-old-folks sound bites or intoning gospel-style at the NAACP convention, he just looks, well, like a jerk. Like a salesman trying to scare Grandma out of her vote, or a white guy trying to talk black to show how cool he is. He looks like the kind of guy who commissions a focus group to edit his wardrobe. He looks like the kind of person who would use a family tragedy-the death of a sister, say, or a child's being struck by a car-in a political speech and somehow manage to cheapen both family tragedies and political speeches.

Because "Dad" got away with so much-lying under oath, chasing interns, raising money illegally-the "son" thinks he can too. Because "Dad" got away with asking for a definition of the word is, the "son" tries to get away with wondering what the term "fundraiser" really means. Gore has all the symptoms of an emotionally battered child-twisted loyalties, multiple personalities, and no sense of self. Like every drunken bad-example dad, Clinton slips through life unscathed, while the son, following in his footsteps, gets creamed.

Clinton, though, for all of his faults, is an authentic character and not without a certain amount of courage. It was his sheer gall, in the end, that carried him through impeachment. His post-ordeal popularity is a sign of the grudging, carefully delineated respect the American people give him for toughing it out. Next to him, Gore seems tinny and shrill, inauthentic, childish, dishonest. Clinton may be a liar, but Gore is a fraud. And, sadly for Gore, the American people can adjust to a liar but cannot stomach a fraud. It is the difference between genuine charm and manufactured emotion; it is the difference between the real, however unattractive, and the fake; it is, ultimately, the difference between Frank Sinatra and Frank Sinatra Jr.

Maureen Dowd, the deeply confused New York Times columnist, pegged Gore early as a version of the brown-nosing Eddie Haskell from TV's Leave It to Beaver. But even here, Gore is a Clinton-come-lately. As any Leave It to Beaver expert will tell you, Eddie Haskell had a certain eerie charm. He'd slither into the Cleaver kitchen with his sickly-sweet grin and greet Mrs. Cleaver with a totally transparent "You look lovely today, Mrs. Cleaver," and she-no fool she, Mrs. Cleaver, the only woman in a house of men-she'd smile, amused by this oily attempt at charm, and point him upstairs, to Wally and the Beaver's room. Eddie Haskell is just one of the multiple incarnations of Bill Clinton-along with the accident-prone Beaver and the (in high school, anyway) hapless Lumpy.

No, the television character who most resembles Al Gore is the charmless and unlikable Margaret, the unpretty girl-next-door on Dennis the Menace who never quite fits in with the gang. Either she's too pushy or she's a tattletale or she's just plain jerky-in any case, no one really wants to play with her. The other Margaret on the national scene, Hillary Clinton, is just as lost as Gore. Her negative poll ratings remain in the "I hate her" zone, and her every icy smile and mirthless laugh reminds people that she is not her husband.

All drunken louts leave devastation in their wake. And Bill Clinton leaves his two political legacies-his vice president and his wife-frantic and confused like two rats in a coffee can. His masterstroke of self-preservation-a thundering shift to the right after the ferocious thrashing of the '94 elections-yielded concrete, conservative results: more free trade, welfare reform, a balanced budget. But lost were the House, the Senate, about a dozen governorships, and the soul of the Democratic party. We are now treated to the spectacle of a pro-union yet pro-free-trade, NAACP-endorsed yet welfare-reforming, one-hundred-thousand more out-of-control race-profiling cops on the street Democratic party vying for suburban moderates, blue-collar workers, and the urban poor, a coalition that hasn't existed since 1976. Dad, happy, besotted, snores blissfully on the couch. Mom copes, by slipping into deep denial-"Everything's fine, the marriage is fine, things are going great, I've never been happier." The son breaks into Dad's liquor cabinet and takes the family car out for a joyride. That's the way it is in dysfunctional families, and that's the way it is in Campaign 2000.

It's a sad sight-the vice president crisscrossing the country in a desperate effort to reclaim the magic, to tap the empty keg and get the party moving again. Doesn't he know that Dad already lapped up all the booze and chased all the broads? Doesn't he know that the party's over? In more ways than one?