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I recall that scene in the house tour, but remember Tipper standing nearby acting cutesy-kittenish (not a good look for anyone over five, and especially not for an overweight, middle-aged, self-confessed depressive.)

One incident at the Dem Convention, when Al Gore was nominated he looked surprised and then as thrilled as a prom queen. There was a flurry of quick hugs and handshakes; his son was standing behind him and to the side. When Al Gore turned to greet backers, the son, apparently thinking his father wanted to embrace him, moved towards him smiling, but Algore shoved him aside without looking at him, and the son, looking around, the smile still frozen on his stricken face, moved out of of the family circle.

The "kiss" got so much attention that the implied rejection of his son was not noted in any news reports. This segment was rerun recently and it seemed quite stark to me. The boy, slightly overweight, looking bright and expectant when his father turned around, and then awkward and embarrassed when he was brushed aside.

My husband thinks his children hung the moon and stars; his face lights up if he sees them even at a distance. On a crowded stage or anywhere else, he would see only them, embrace only them. I can't believe family guru Gore's brutish indifference to his son was not noticed by others.

Albert III is the invisible child, for sure. Gore got him into Harvard (one of those legacy things, apparently) and he disappeared from view, unlike his publicity-seeking sisters.

Here's some more on the Al/Tipper book, from the Washington Times:

"I hadn't intended to read that Gore book on families," David Frum writes at National Review Online (www.nationalreview.com). "I expected it to be a sugary celebration of home and hearth, a public-relations exercise aimed at convincing suburban moms and other swing voters that Gore was not in fact an android but a man with a heart as big as all of Tennessee. In other words: something yucky," Mr. Frum said. "Not so, according to Andrew Hacker, a very smart left-wing sociologist, in the current (Dec. 5) issue of the New York Review of Books. Hacker contends that 'Joined at the Heart' follows in the tradition of 'Earth in the Balance': another Gore production written in a voice of almost terrifying frankness. In 1992, Gore told us that if he ever became president, he would dismantle the American economy in the name of environmental regulation. Ten years later, he is ready to execute similar destruction on the American family. I think I am going to have to read the dratted thing after all." link