Bill Bradley's Long Shot - presidential candidate needs clearer platform

Progressive, The, April, 1999 by John Nichols

On a radio program in New Hampshire recently, Presidential candidate Bill Bradley was asked to distinguish himself from Al Gore, the man he must displace in order to secure the Democratic nomination.

This was no easy task.

The former Senator from New Jersey and Vice President Al Gore are almost indistinguishable figures. Both have famous names, impressive educational resumes, solid records of legislative service, and middle-of-the-road politics.

"I think we clearly have a difference on welfare," Bradley responded.

For a few seconds, it seemed as if Bradley might actually be preparing to challenge Gore on a platform of progressive ideals--such as maintaining America's commitment to poor children. In no time, however, the former New York Knicks star was reflecting on values, basketball, the perils of partisanship, and the fact that "I'm not really running against Al Gore."

With less than a year to go before the Democratic primary process yields the party's 2000 nominee, Bradley has emerged as the most serious challenger to the hyper-aggressive and exceptionally well-funded Gore campaign--which reportedly is raising in excess of $600,000 in contributions each week.

While other candidates could still enter the race, including the Reverend Jesse Jackson, it is Bradley who in the critical first months of 1999 rose to the task.

Sort of.

A notoriously ambivalent Presidential campaigner, Bradley has been identified as a potential contender in each of the past four campaign cycles--turning down what many saw as ripe prospects in 1988 and 1992, and ditching a potential 1996 challenge to Bill Clinton only after stirring intense national speculation.

So uncertain has been Bradley's ambition that even some of the former Senator's most enthusiastic boosters were surprised when he finally decided to take on Gore. His declaration was less than stirring: "I looked in the mirror and said, I'm ready. I'm really, kind of, at the top of my game. And, therefore, I bring my experience, talents, abilities, whatever they are, and offer them to the American people."

While Gore has been making cold calls to precinct committees in Iowa and New Hampshire for years, Bradley remains a slow starter.

"Do you go to the prom with the guy who asks you three times or the one who never calls?" muses outgoing New Hampshire Democratic Party chair Jeff Woodburn, who recently accepted Gore's invitation.

Gore--who is at least as conservative as Bill Clinton--has had remarkable success collecting the support of traditional liberals. When the AFL-CIO brass met in Miami in February, Gore was given the marquee spot on the speaker's roster, while Bradley had to hustle a last-minute invitation.

Despite his long tenure in the limelight as a National Basketball Association star, three-term Senator from New Jersey, best-selling author, and national scold on issues such as campaign finance reform and race relations, the latest Time/CNN poll shows that 54 percent of Americans do not know who Bill Bradley is. Polls in the key early battlefields for the nomination--Iowa and New Hampshire--show him trailing the Vice President by as much as a 4-1 margin.

In some ways, Bradley has much to offer the Democratic Party's core constituencies. His concern for the poor appears genuine. He supports gay and lesbian rights. His race record is impeccable.

Novelist E.L. Doctorow calls him "one of the most principled and compassionate public servants of our age." Bradley's friend Harvard professor Cornel West calls the candidate "a member of a rare and endangered species in our public life: the respected statesman who fuses the life of the mind with public service."

A commitment to federal programs aiding the poor was a hallmark of Bradley's eighteen-year tenure in the Senate. He was one of only twenty-one Democratic Senators who in 1996 broke with the Clinton-Gore Administration to vote against the welfare reform plan that ended the federal government's sixty-year guarantee of basic support for needy kids.

"I thought there was a federal obligation to individual children who are poor--not simply an obligation to take a pot of money and send it from one group of politicians to another group of politicians in a state," he explained.

Few who know Bradley doubt him when he says, "Racial discrimination is the ultimate evil for me." He abandoned his own Republican roots to become a Democrat in large part because of what he called "the leadership on civil rights by a Democratic President"--Lyndon Johnson.

Bradley's experience playing professional basketball made him an impassioned advocate for racial reconciliation. "I saw that if you're black in America, you never know when the next moment might bring a slight, a slur, a slug," he says. "Besides enjoying the warmth of my black teammates' friendship and the inspiration of their personal histories, besides seeing the powerful role of family in their lives and the strength of each one's individuality, I began to understand distrust and suspicion.... And I realized how much I will never know about what it is to be black in America."