The Other Partner TIPPER GORE

When Hillary Clinton said she wasn’t one of those women who stay home and bake cookies, she could have been talking about Tipper Gore. Al and Tipper met at his senior prom. They dated each other exclusively while he was at Harvard and she got her psychology degree from Boston University. Later she earned a master’s degree. But since her husband was first elected to Congress in 1976, Tipper — a nickname her mother gave her as an infant from a favorite lullaby — has spent most of her time rearing the couple’s four children in Arlington, Va. Her main career is momwork: carpooling the kids, cheering at ball games, supervising homework.

Even so, maybe while the cookies were cooling, Tipper has managed to get out of the house. In 1985 she set out on a campaign against sex, drugs and violence in rock lyrics that cowed the record industry into putting parental- advisory stickers on the most raw-edged albums. Two years later, she published Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society, a how-to manual for parents who want to fight poptrash. When her husband launched his unsuccessful 1988 White House bid, there was speculation that Tipper’s crusade would cost him the support of MTVoters. Four years later, with family values finding their way into every Republican sound bite, she looks not so much prudish as prescient. “I feel like I’ve been a voice in the wilderness,” she says.

Tipper Gore also has the advantage of knowing that family values are sometimes arrived at the hard way. Friends say that in the late 1980s the Gore marriage went through a rough patch, strained first by the implacable career focus of a man who has eyed the White House for years, then by the shock of an automobile accident that nearly killed their only son.

Though the boy survived, his long and difficult recovery laid bare stresses in their marriage. “For Al, there was tremendous guilt that he should have been watching ((his son)) more closely,” says a friend. “With Tipper, it was anger. It’s very tough on a marriage to go through this stuff.” The Gores entered a counseling program designed to help families endure a medical crisis. Tipper insists that “there was no trouble in the marriage, ((but)) when you face an extremely traumatic situation that drops like a bomb, the smart thing to do is deal with the trauma.”

The Gores emerged with a different kind of partnership, putting more emphasis on teamwork. In April 1987, when she learned that her husband was making plans for his unsuccessful White House bid of the following year, Tipper reportedly hit the roof: he hadn’t let her in on the news. Gore’s decision to accept Clinton’s offer of the vice-presidential slot was arrived at differently, after much family deliberation. “Everyone liked the idea that the campaign would last three and a quarter months,” she says precisely, if a bit optimistically. This time, a lengthy bid for the presidency, which might have taken a year or more, would have been too much. “We didn’t want to be separated.”

People around Tipper say her son’s brush with death left her changed. “She seems beaten down,” says a friend. “Quiet and not as assertive as she normally was.” She had already been burned by some of the reaction to her campaign against obscene rock lyrics. While she always insisted that government censorship was never her goal, she found herself the target of a counterattack led by the A.C.L.U. Frank Zappa called her a “cultural terrorist.” Hollywood liberals — who were also big Democratic contributors — piled on, which led her husband’s advisers to encourage him to distance himself from his wife’s effort.

Even that didn’t cause her to back off entirely. The Parents’ Music Resource Center, based in Arlington, Va., which she formed in 1985 with a few other well-connected Washington wives — including Susan Baker, the wife of Secretary of State James Baker — still supplies schools and law-enforcement groups with updates. “The message is the same,” she says. “To be educated and aware of the messages in pop culture. I advanced this idea years ago, and I advocate it today.”

It used to make her wince to hear people accuse her of hating rock ‘n’ roll. To prove them wrong, she would point to her well-worn collection of Beatles, Rolling Stones and Grateful Dead albums as evidence of a normal ’60s youth. (Like her husband, she admits to having tried marijuana.) For good measure, she would remind reporters that she used to play the drums in high school (she still has her old drums set up in the basement). Maybe Tipper is more like Hillary than she at first appears. And maybe Hillary is getting more like Tipper. Last week, after Gore agreed to join the Democratic ticket, the Clintons celebrated — with Hillary’s homebaked oatmeal cookies.