Al Gore's Speech in Tennessee Expected to Emphasize Differences in Candidates' Education Plans
DARYN KAGAN, CNN ANCHOR: Now we move on to the presidential campaign trail where the race between Al Gore and George W. Bush remains as tight as ever. Bush, today, will spend his day on a bus tour of Florida. Gore, meanwhile, has set his sights on his home turf, the state of Tennessee. His first stop is Nashville; that's where we find our Jonathan Karl. Jonathan, it's not supposed to be like this. A presidential candidate having to spend time this late in the campaign in his own home state.</s>JONATHAN KARL, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, that's absolutely right. If you had asked the Gore campaign a year ago if they expected to be in Tennessee just two weeks before the election, they would have told you you were crazy. But the Gore campaign also pointing out some things about Tennessee: This is very Republican state. A much more Republican state than it was when Al Gore represented it in Congress and in the Senate. What they say is, look at Tennessee now -- Tennessee has got two Republican senators, its got a Republican governor, it's a solidly Republican state. And even the Clinton-Gore administration -- Clinton-Gore campaign barely carried it in 1996. So they're saying, hey, it shouldn't be a surprise that Gore has to fight here in Tennessee. But very clearly, here, Al Gore does not want to go down in history as the first presidential candidate to lose his home state since Gorge McGovern lost South Dakota in 1972. Now, the reason why he's here right now in Tennessee State University, he's delivering his latest in a series of speeches outlining what the vice president calls "the big choices" facing voters as they go into the voting booth this year. The big choice he'll be talking about here is education. He's going to be talking about, on one hand, his education plan, which he says would reduce class size by helping local school districts hire more teachers, by helping local school districts finance new school construction; he's also saying that he would expand public school choice by tripling the number of charter schools -- public school choice, not private school vouchers. And the vice president also expected to talk about his plan to make preschool education universal. The other side of the coin, the other side of the choice is George W. Bush's plan, which the vice president will call a hollow plan -- hollow because George W. Bush, the vice president says, spends all his money on a big tax cut and cannot afford the kind of investment that Vice President Gore would make into education. That's the line from the Gore campaign here in Nashville. Daryn, back to you.</s>KAGAN: And that's where we find our Jonathan Karl. Jonathan, thank you very much for that report.