Gore was making one of a series of stops, but his knowledge of Oprah's background was akin to a biographer's examining the early days of Abraham Lincoln. The vice president recited the name of the televison station Oprah moved to from her radio days. It gets worse: "I remember specifically one crime scene we went to together. I was at the newspaper. You were with Channel Five." It is not recorded whether Oprah remembered the time she covered a routine crime scene with other reporters, including Al Gore. That was, after all, 25 years ago.

Gore, we learn, had been coached even beyond recalling the name of the media stations Oprah had worked for. She likes human-redemption stories, and Gore confessed that until his son was hit by a car and injured, he had been "a little bit of a workaholic." Meaning? He is no longer that, he has been redeemed, and that means more time with wife and children.

Whereupon Oprah was furnished with a pretaped segment that she put on the air. It showed Gore and Tipper cuddling on a couch, reminiscing about their marriage. "I gave her a bracelet a few years ago," Gore told Oprah, "with an inscription on the inside of it: 'To the bravest person I know.'" Tipper looks lovingly at him, and Gore goes on: "The feeling that we have for one another is deeper and more intense now even than during the first romance."

People do a lot to become president. But there are things self-respect is there to intercept. It isn't to deny the genuine intimacy of the relationship to question whether it should be disemboweled for Oprah and her legions.

I was driving a distance last Feb. 1 and the radio station reported Gore's victory in the New Hampshire primary over Bill Bradley. He was at his campaign headquarters hotel and was given the microphone. In the car, we awaited the usual formalities. But Gore could not be stopped. He spoke as though drugged on an elixir that he knew would carry him from New Hampshire through the remaining primaries, to the convention through the campaign, depositing him, as surely as the Earth rotates about the sun, in the White House on Jan. 20, 2001.

This isn't self-confidence with Mr. Gore. It is a kind of mania. And it is a dislocation that warrants the serious interest of serious voters.