She's a star on the campaign trail and was a featured speaker at the Democratic Convention, so the public already knows a lot about Schiff: She's married to a Manhattan doctor, Drew Schiff, and has a 14-month old son, Wyatt, who was born on July Fourth. We know she's a trusted advisor to her father, that she was the one who prompted the campaign's move to Nashville from Washington, and that, more infamously, it was she who brought feminist Naomi Wolf into the campaign huddle to talk about Gore's need to be an "alpha male."

Schiff insists that her role touting her father comes as naturally as her role as daughter or mother. "I don't feel like I have to spin anything at all right now because I care a lot about these issues and I know exactly what I want to say on them," she insists Monday in a Manhattan cafe. "And I think it's so much better to err on the side of talking freely."

But then she adds, disconcertingly: "I think my dad's been able to do that really well, actually. I think he's totally in his stride being who he is."

Actually, her dad really is someone who chooses his words carefully, measuredly. He's often cautious to a fault, as he himself has said. Al Gore might be a lot of wonderful things -- and it is Schiff's role to tell us -- but someone who enjoys "talking freely" is not one of them.

Welcome to Karennaland. She lives in a world of negotiating extremes, of alternating between sounding canned and sounding candid.

Is she a pol-in-training or just the daughter of a public man, struggling to maintain a side of her that's independent? That decision, it would seem, has yet to be made, but in this murky terrain, one foot in each world, she seems to have fashioned a fairly together life and a pleasing persona, if occasionally plastic on the stump.

It's also made her too savvy by half. Told that Salon had prepared a Gen X Quiz for her, the Gore campaign's ambassador to young voters says, "Oh, no!" Then her mood immediately brightens. "Bring it on, baby!" she says.

Then she shifts again. "Do you know all the answers to these questions?" she asks.

When I confess that, sure, I wouldn't know them all, she beats me to my own punchline: "Then again, you don't hold yourself to be reaching out to Gen X." She says it with a smile and a laugh, reminiscent of her dad's own rare glimpses of a funny, wiseass smugness.

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