THE WILDERNESS CAMPAIGN.

"Hey, Dwayne? . . . Dwayne?" "Yes, Mr. Vice-President?"

"Could I have some more coffee?"

"Yes, Mr. Vice-President. Coming . . ."

"Thanks, Dwayne."

It was ten in the morning in Nashville, a quiet weekday, with most of the neighbors off to work, and Albert Gore, Jr., sat at the head of his dining-room table eating breakfast. His plate was crowded with scrambled eggs, bacon, toast. His pond-size mug had, in a flash, been refilled by Dwayne Kemp, his cook, a skilled and graceful man who had been employed by the Gores when, as his boss often puts it, "we were still working in the White House." Freshly showered and shaved, Gore was wearing a midnight-blue shirt and gray wool trousers. In the months after losing the battle for Florida's electoral votes and conceding the Presidency to George W. Bush, on December 13, 2000, Gore seemed to let himself go, dropping out of sight, travelling around Spain, Italy, and Greece for six weeks with his wife, Tipper. He wore dark glasses and a baseball cap tugged down low. He grew a mountain-man beard and gained weight. When he began appearing in public again, mainly in classrooms, he took to introducing himself by saying, "Hi, I'm Al Gore. I used to be the next President of the United States." People looked at this rather bulky and hirsute man--a politician who had only recently won 50,999,897 votes for the Presidency, more than any Democrat in history, more than any candidate in history except Ronald Reagan in 1984, and more than half a million more votes than the man who assumed the office--and did not know quite what to feel or how to behave, and so they cooperated in his elaborate self-deprecations. They laughed at his jokes, as if to help him erase what everyone understood to be a disappointment of historic proportions--"the heartbreak of a lifetime," as Karenna, the eldest of his four children, put it.

"You know the old saying," Gore told one audience after another. "You win some, you lose some--and then there's that little-known third category."

Gore has since dispensed with the beard but not the weight. He is still thick around the middle. He eats quickly and thoroughly, and with a determined relish, precisely like a man who no longer has to care that he might look heavy on "Larry King Live." "You want some eggs?" he asked. "Dwayne's the best."