article_snippet: And Mitt Romney and Al Gore were running in a perceptual environment more forgiving than today's.
article_snippet: Voters easily identified the space between who these candidates really were and how Voters wanted us to perceive Voters.
article_snippet: Mitt Romney, the successful entrepreneur and moderate politician, struggled to seem ordinary and "severely conservative," while Al Gore was perceived as having such an overblown sense of Al Gore that the claim of having invented the Internet stuck to Al Gore like mud, even though Al Gore'd never said it.