Play Of The Week

By Bill Schneider/CNN

WASHINGTON (April 26) -- The rule for vice presidents is the same as the rule for small children: they should be seen and not heard. After all, they can say the most embarrassing things. Remember Dan Quayle?

Maybe someday they'll grow up and make something of themselves, but until then, no one takes them too seriously. If that's the rule for vice presidents, then Al Gore Is a very precocious child.

People are supposed to make jokes about the vice president Everybody knows that. Even the vice president.

"How can you tell Al Gore from a room full of secret service agents," Gore has joked. "He's the stiff one (64K WAV sound)."

His job is to be a cheerleader for the president. "My number one objective is to do everything I possibly can to help President Clinton be the best president possible, and he is doing a magnificent job (128K WAV sound)."

Occasionally, he is the president's attack dog. "That is precisely what the Republican leadership of Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole are doing, throwing up smoke screens to hide their own poor record on crime with cheap charges about the President's judicial appointees," Gore said recently.

But Gore has become an unusually influential vice president. He plays a key role In the Clinton Administration's political decisions. Just this month, Gore engineered the appointment of the new commerce secretary, as well as the new budget director and acting trade representative.

Why has Gore become so prominent? It's because he embodies the idea of a New Democrat. He's the czar of reinventing government. "The key is this: Through reinvention, we've cut government and not vital services to the American people," he says (64K WAV sound).

Remember, Gore ran for president as a New Democrat back in 1988. He was a moderate, tough on crime, strong on defense and the candidate of the Democratic Leadership Council.

Clinton put him on the ticket in 1992 to reinforce his own image as a New Democrat. If Gore is the New Democrat side of President Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton is the liberal side. Since Clinton intends to run for re-election as a centrist New Democrat, Gore is up and Hillary is down.

But Gore also has enormous credibility on the environmental issue. And that, too, is proving valuable to the president. There they were this week, an Earth Day, like two guys out of a Dockers ad, clearing debris from a flood-damaged canal in along the Potomac River.

Congressional Republicans are vulnerable on their environmental record and they know it. On Monday, Gore laid down a challenge.

"There is a very simple litmus test to determine whether their alleged conversion on the environment is real or phony," he said. "The test is whether or not they're willing to drop these riders that hurt the environment that are part of the appropriations process."

On Wednesday, the Republicans backed down. They allowed the riders to be dropped or modified. With that, a budget deal was finally made. However, Gore may have scored his biggest victory yet this week, when his longtime aide, Peter Knight, was named campaign manager for the Clinton-Gore re-election effort.

Knight will also help the vice president collect favors and build a network of supporters. For what purpose? Could it be that Gore still has presidential ambitions, say, in four years? Yes, according to a recent article in The New York Times.

According to the article: "Mr. Gore is meticulously laying the foundation for his own bid for the White House." For the record, Gore isn't talking. "I really don't have any comment on it..." he said.

But if the thought ever does occur to Gore that maybe, just maybe, he might run for president, he couldn't do much better to position himself than he did this week, on issues and organization. That's no joke. It's the vice presidential play of the week.

Vice presidents often do get nominated for president because they have a claim on party loyalty. It worked for Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale and George Bush.

In the general election, however, voters usually have trouble seeing a vice president as his own man. George Bush was the first incumbent vice president to get elected president in more than 150 years.

If Clinton wins re-election, Gore may hope to become the second. But a lot will depend on whether when he leaves office, Clinton is as popular as Ronald Reagan was in 1988.

This commentary originally appeared on CNN's Inside Politics..

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