Goring Al

Bill Bradley may force a Democratic primary fight after all

by Michael Crowley

TALKING POLITICS

That sputtering sound you've been hearing lately is nothing to be alarmed about. It's just Al Gore's presidential campaign getting under way.

Poor Al -- he had six years to prepare for this campaign, and it's started out miserably. He's been ridiculed for his careless claim that he created the Internet. Every day he's faced with another poll showing that Americans find him uninspiring and tedious. Newsweek even teased him for putting on weight.

Now Gore's lone Democratic challenger, once written off as hopeless, is showing signs of life. Often dismissed as too diffident, too ponderous, too above-it-all to run an effective campaign, Bill Bradley -- the former New Jersey senator and onetime New York Knicks star -- is getting under Al Gore's skin. Barely visible until the past few weeks, Bradley is teasing Gore, belittling his ideas, and letting everyone know there just might be a Democratic primary fight after all.

Bradley "is showing more spunk," says Boston College political-science professor Marc Landy. "I underestimated him. If you want to unseat the presumptive nominee, you must be more aggressive. And he's showing some of that."

There's no question that Gore is still the presumptive nominee. Whereas Bradley has been running for a few months, Gore has been raising money and locking up endorsements for years. Gore has the support of an incumbent president and his party's biggest names. He even has history on his side: a sitting vice president hasn't been denied his party's nomination since 1952.

And yet Bradley may be reminding people of why he was such a formidable presence in American politics for two decades, a man who from his boyhood was considered to be a possible future president. He is thoughtful, intelligent, and deeply honest. His politics convey an authenticity and independence that's hard to find in either party these days. And above all, he's in a position to remind Democrats of their core principles at a time when the party's heir apparent seems captivated by timid appeals to the suburban middle class. (Another candidate who might have done that, progressive standard-bearer Jesse Jackson, announced this week that he will not run in 2000.) Combine that with Gore's middling popularity, his propensity for gaffes, and the sheer entropy of the Clinton White House, and it's easy to doubt that Al's a sure thing. Says one Democratic operative with high-level presidential campaign experience: "The notion that it's wrapped up is premature."

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This was supposed to be Al Gore's moment, the beginning of his stroll down the red carpet to the Democratic nomination. Yet it's Bradley who's featured on the cover of the New Republic this week and has received major profiles in the Weekly Standard and the National Review -- all of which could help get elite opinion and, perhaps, fundraising on his side.

Meanwhile, Bradley's managed to embarrass the vice president by casting himself as the rural hick from Missouri to Gore's privileged son of Washington, DC. Front-runners with big leads generally like to ignore their opponents. But Gore was so annoyed that he took Bradley on -- and made himself look even more foolish. Last week Gore defended his own country roots to the Des Moines Register, saying of his father: "He taught me how to clean out hog waste with a shovel and a hose. . . . He taught me how to plow a steep hillside with a team of mules." The vice president, who as a child was driven to his Washington prep school by limousine, was quickly ridiculed by Republicans and the national media. The influential Register ran a mocking editorial cartoon titled "American Gorethic," showing Gore next to Tipper holding a pitchfork. The caption: "I was born with a manure shovel in my hand, and spent my days behind a team of mules, and my nights inventing the Internet."

But Bradley's better blows will come on matters of substance, not style, and Gore has lately made things easy for his rival. In a series of media events this month designed to show Gore stepping out of Clinton's shadow, the vice president tossed out a series of timid ideas -- his agenda for a more "livable world" -- that revealed how narrow a slice of the population his message is aimed at. Decrying the effects of suburban sprawl, Gore vowed at one event to combat traffic congestion, promising to create a new 911-style phone number to provide drivers with traffic updates. He unveiled a proposal to make prescription-drug labels more readable. And he staged an event in favor of an airline passengers' "bill of rights," to protect inconvenienced air commuters (an idea that wasn't even his own).

It was a lame way to begin a presidential campaign, and the national media treated it with something less than awe. "Forget the bite-sized morsels like school uniforms that Mr. Clinton doled out four years ago," the New York Times wrote. "To some, Mr. Gore is serving up crumbs."

This gives Bill Bradley a badly needed opportunity to distinguish himself. Running as a firebrand far to Gore's left isn't a serious option for the moderate Bradley, but painting himself as a principled man of substance is. And that's what he has begun to do.

In a speech to Virginia Democrats last month, Bradley mocked the notion of "rhetorical flourishes followed by tiny demonstration projects." And in Iowa last weekend, he zinged "the idea of winning an election by simply nickel-and-diming it."

Bradley is smart to hit Gore for his "litany of tiny little suggestions," Landy says. "This is what mayors and governors are for, but not what presidents are for -- and Bradley's picked up on that."

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In contrast to Gore's Tic-Tac agenda, Bradley is offering grand ideas about the state of the nation. Like other candidates, he's still sketchy on details. But he is gradually filling in the blanks. Complaining that "a robust economy isn't an end in itself; it's a means to an end," Bradley has been painting a picture of an America with unmet needs and unrealized potential.

Bradley, an opponent of Congress's 1996 welfare-reform law, says the "one in four children who are in poverty" should be a top national priority. He reminds us that 43 million Americans still lack health insurance, something the current administration has discussed a lot less since the Clinton health-care plan crashed and burned. He calls for a more cautious approach to Social Security than the untested stock-market investments that Clinton and Gore advocate. And he questions the way the Pentagon's $260 billion budget has continued to swell long after the Cold War's end.

There's also a strong reformist bent to Bradley's candidacy that provides a stark contrast to the suspect morality of the Clinton-Gore White House. When he retired from the Senate in 1996, Bradley declared that "politics is broken," that neither political party spoke to Americans anymore. Now he is reminding people that he isn't a hostage to the Washington machine, that he left the Beltway by choice and not by electoral fiat. All of which undergirds Bradley's call for sweeping campaign-finance reform, an issue the Republicans won't touch and on which Gore -- he of the Buddhist nuns and the White House fundraising calls -- has zero credibility.

"On the little stuff, he's trying to play to the left of Gore," says one key Gore adviser. "On the big stuff, he's trying to be the outsider, a Jesse Ventura or a Ross Perot."

"There is something to be said for Bradley's approach," says Clark Hubbard, an assistant professor of political science at the University of New Hampshire, "which is that during a campaign season, people want to hear about sweeping ideas, and they want to hear new things. If Gore spends too much time talking about the policies of the past and how they're going to be extended for four more years, it might be a problem."

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Does that make a Bradley upset realistic? Well, presidential politics are famously combustible, and there are plenty of scenarios causing, as the Gore aide puts it, "handwringing" at the White House.

There are the countless scandals and disgraces swirling around the Clinton administration -- from shady campaign finance to Chinese espionage to memories of Monica -- one of which could catch up with Gore. He might continue to shoot himself in the foot -- this is, after all, the man who referred to a certain Chicago Bulls superstar as "Michael Jackson." And God only knows what intervention in Kosovo might bring.

Still, Hubbard's not the only one who believes that "barring any kind of major disaster, Gore's going to be the nominee." It may be that it's too late for Bradley to catch up with Gore's lead in fundraising and organization. "Gore has been very deliberately and explicitly organizing a grassroots campaign effort here for years," says Hubbard. "It doesn't seem that Bradley's been doing any of that, and it's getting late in the game."

And even with a bolder, more expansive message, it won't be easy to seize the debate from Gore. After all, small-idea politics won Bill Clinton the 1996 election, and helped to buoy his popularity even through an impeachment. "It's been a winning formula for Clinton," notes a Democratic operative. "I assume Clinton is his informal campaign manager, which is a huge asset."

Gore said last week that "the person who deserves to be our next president is the one who understands how tired working parents are." A shameless pitch to the soccer moms, yes -- but also a good line, one that could connect with millions of Americans who might otherwise fail to see the relevance of a presidential campaign in their own lives.

The danger for Bradley, by contrast, is that his big ideas will come across as sanctimony. At a time of relative national prosperity, voters may not be interested in having rhetorical spinach jammed down their throats. The true test of Bradley's success will be whether he can borrow Clinton and Gore's knack for slick packaging without selling short his principles. Bradley's ideas may be bigger and better, but on some level, campaigns still come down to bumper stickers.

Michael Crowley can be reached at mcrowley[a]phx.com.