The Kids In The Hall

By TAMALA M. EDWARDS

While Al Gore will sometimes surprise his staff with an occasional prank or imitation, his sense of humor is on the dry side. So it was quite useful that Gore's senior staff members on the campaign trail were always ready with a dose of exuberant wit. Whether surrounded by needling reporters or awakened in the middle of the night, Chris Lehane, Gore's bantamweight press secretary, winked his way through every bon mot. While other staff members gravely questioned Bush's experience, Lehane instead laughingly squealed, "He's as confounded as he is confused! He's as flummoxed as he is floundering! He's as puzzled as he is perplexed!" Then there was Greg Simon, the traveling policy adviser, who spent the final two months on the trail providing the press with a daily song. "Hello press pool my old friend./The long campaign week's at an end," he sang at the end of Gore's work-around-the-clock Labor Day trek, to the tune of Simon and Garfunkel's Sounds of Silence. "We've been assaulted by a wet tarmac./We ate our way through a cheese-steak attack..." A welcome relief from the weighty world of lockboxes.

--Tamala M. Edwards