"[3] The ticket increased in popularity after the candidates traveled with their wives, Hillary and Tipper, on a "six-day, 1,000-mile bus ride, from New York to St.

"[7] Gore also successfully debated against the other vice presidential candidates, Dan Quayle (a longtime colleague from the House and the Senate) and James Stockdale.

"[9] In addition, one of Gore's major works as Vice President was the National Performance Review,[10] which pointed out waste, fraud, and other abuse in the federal government and stressed the need for cutting the size of the bureaucracy and the number of regulations.

[11] The economic success of this administration was due in part to Gore's continued role as an Atari Democrat, promoting the development of information technology, which led to the dot-com boom (c.

[12] Clinton and Gore entered office planning to finance research that would "flood the economy with innovative goods and services, lifting the general level of prosperity and strengthening American industry.

"[13] Their overall aim was to fund the development of, "robotics, smart roads, biotechnology, machine tools, magnetic-levitation trains, fiber-optic communications and national computer networks.

[13] The economic initiatives introduced by the Clinton-Gore administration linked to information technology were a primary focus for Gore during his time as vice president.

Gary Stix commented on these initiatives a few months prior in his May 1993 article for Scientific American, "Gigabit Gestalt: Clinton and Gore embrace an activist technology policy."

Stix described them as a "distinct statement about where the new administration stands on the matter of technology ... gone is the ambivalence or outright hostility toward government involvement in little beyond basic science.

On taking office in 1993, the new administration set in place a range of government initiatives for a National Information Infrastructure aimed at ensuring that all American citizens ultimately gain access to the new networks.

Howard Rheingold argued in The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, that these initiatives played a critical role in the development of digital technology, stating that, "Two powerful forces drove the rapid emergence of the superhighway notion in 1994 ... the second driving force behind the superhighway idea continued to be Vice-President Gore.

In the foreword he stated the following: Since I first became interested in high-speed networking almost seventeen years ago, there have been many major advances both in the technology and in public awareness.

In contrast, when as a House member in the early 1980s, I called for creation of a national network of "information superhighways," the only people interested were the manufacturers of optical fiber.

"[25] The Clipper Chip, which "Clinton inherited from a multi-year National Security Agency effort,"[26] was a method of hardware encryption with a government backdoor.

[32] The ability of a proposal such as the Clipper Chip to meet the stated goals, especially that of enabling better encryption to individuals, was disputed by a number of experts.

"[37] In a prepared statement, Gore added that NetDay was part of one of the major goals of the Clinton administration, which was "to give every child in America access to high quality educational technology by the dawn of the new century."

"[39] He also reinforced the impact of the Internet on the environment, education, and increased communication between people through his involvement with "the largest one-day online event" for that time, 24 Hours in Cyberspace.

[40] Gore contributed the introductory essay to the Earthwatch section of the website,[41] arguing that: The Internet and other new information technologies cannot turn back the ecological clock, of course.

But more than delivering information to scientists, equipping citizens with new tools to improve their world and making offices cheaper and more efficient, Cyberspace is achieving something even more enduring and profound: It's changing the very way we think.

"[43] He also began promoting a NASA satellite that would provide a constant view of Earth, marking the first time such an image would have been made since The Blue Marble photo from the 1972 Apollo 17 mission.

He launched the GLOBE program on Earth Day'94, an education and science activity that, according to Forbes magazine, "made extensive use of the Internet to increase student awareness of their environment".

[49][50] In 1998, Gore began promoting a NASA satellite that would provide a constant view of Earth, marking the first time such an image would have been made since The Blue Marble photo from the 1972 Apollo 17 mission.

"[55] The phrase "no controlling legal authority" was severely criticized by some commentators, such as Charles Krauthammer, who wrote that "Whatever other legacies Al Gore leaves behind between now and retirement, he forever bequeaths this newest weasel word to the lexicon of American political corruption.