Al Gore was inaugurated as the 45th Vice President of the United States on January 20, 1993. As Vice President, Gore has formed an unprecedented partnership with President Clinton, serving as an advisor and as head of a wide range of Administration initiatives. Together they have led this country into a period of economic growth marked by the creation of 10 million new jobs, a deficit cut in half within the last four years, and the lowest combined rate of unemployment, inflation, and mortgage rates in 27 years.

Among elected officials, Vice President Gore’s environmental record is unparalleled. He is the author of the best seller EARTH IN THE BALANCE: Ecology and the Human Spirit, which outlines an international plan of action to confront the global environmental crisis. Vice President Gore also launched the Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) program, an international project to coordinate the work of children, educators, and scientists in monitoring the global environment.

Throughout his career in public service, Vice President Gore has sought to prepare our nation for the challenges of the Information Age. President Clinton’s technology and economic plan is based in large part on legislation introduced and steered to passage by then-U.S. Senator Gore. Moreover, Vice President Gore has led the effort to ensure that all children—rich and poor, urban and rural—have access to the benefits of the communications revolution by challenging the industry to connect every school in the nation to the Internet by the year 2000.

Vice President Gore has traveled the country to meet with people who live in poverty-stricken inner cities and rural areas to discover firsthand what they need to rebuild their lives and communities. He chairs the Community Empowerment Board, which oversees various initiatives designed to bring together distressed communities to develop plans for revitalization.

To help create a federal government that works better and costs less, Vice President Gore heads the National Performance Review. The initiative has saved taxpayers more than $58 billion and reduced the size of the federal government by more than 230,000 positions—making our current government the smallest since President Kennedy’s Administration. In addition, his commitment to stronger families has resulted in policies strengthening fatherhood, increasing flexibility for mothers and fathers in the workplace, and requiring new television sets to be equipped with a device known as the V-chip to give parents more control over information that comes into their homes.

Vice President Gore was born on March 31, 1948, and is the son of former U.S. Senator Albert Gore Sr. and Pauline Gore. Raised in Carthage, Tennessee, and Washington, D.C., Vice President Gore received a degree in government with honors from Harvard University in 1969. After graduation, he volunteered for enlistment in the U.S. Army and served in Vietnam. Returning to civilian life, Vice President Gore became an investigative reporter with The Tennessean in Nashville. He attended Vanderbilt University Divinity School and Vanderbilt Law School.

Vice President Gore began his career in public service in 1976, when he was elected to represent Tennessee in the U.S. House of Representatives (1977-1985). He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1984 and was reelected in 1990 (1985-1993). A candidate for the Democratic nomination for President in 1988, he won more than three million votes and Democratic contests in seven states.

Vice President Gore is married to the former Mary Elizabeth “Tipper” Aitcheson. They have four children: Karenna (born August 6, 1973), Kristin (born June 5, 1977), Sarah (born January 7, 1979) and Albert III (born October 19, 1982). Vice President Gore owns a small farm near Carthage, where the family belongs to New Salem Missionary Baptist Church.