Time to Explore the Bradley Myth

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 27, 1999 | by John Elvin

Bill Bradley has been presented by the establishment media as a maverick centrist, but his record shows him to be a predictable liberal in the style of Walter Mondale.

Although Bill Bradley abandoned his Missouri roots to take up with the liberal establishment at Princeton and Oxford, he surely must have studied the political wisdom of home-stater Harry S Truman, for whom such elitism was anathema. A lesson taught by Truman involved a fraternity man who asked the former president how one could get a start in politics. Truman advised the young Ivy Leaguer that he already was started in politics: "You're spending somebody else's money, aren't you?"

It could be more than just coincidence that Bradley once candidly admitted: "I have found that it is not so easy to stop spending the taxpayers' money." Both Truman and Bradley acknowledged one of the primary perks of political power is the privilege of plunging one's hand deep into the public pocket, again and again. Their shared appreciation of this privilege should not be surprising.

But wait a minute. Sure, Truman was a veteran politician. Bradley, however, is benefiting from the perception that he's an outsider, a maverick, a "private citizen" offering an alternative to a tainted political hack in the person of Vice President Al Gore. Well, it just ain't so. The fact is that Bradley is a Washington insider who arrived in the Senate ahead of rival Gore and stayed longer, serving a total of 18 years.

The myth also asserts that Bradley is enigmatic and unpredictable, but a review of his Senate votes and positions on contentious issues from the time of his arrival in the Senate in 1978 to his departure in 1996 shows otherwise. Bradley is no more a maverick than such cookie-cutter predecessors on the presidential campaign trail as Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis. The establishment media may dub him a centrist New Democrat, but the record shows he's predictably liberal.

Is this to say Bradley is just another New Jersey Democrat? Insight's review of the public record over the course of Bradley's career suggests that he is nothing if not a conventional politician -- right down to the fine art of saying one thing while doing the opposite. This tactic was evident, for instance, when 18 of the Americans serving on a "humanitarian mission" in Somalia under a U.N. general from Turkey were killed by local peace lovers. Bradley quickly made public noises about withdrawal and voted for a nonbinding "Sense of the Senate" resolution calling on President Clinton to justify continued presence there. But on substantive measures to set a deadline for pulling out, Bradley balked. And when it came to a vote that would have halted or restricted the policy of putting U.S. troops under U.N. command with foreign officers, Bradley was a citizen of the world.

Indeed, Bradley sees America's defense spending as aimed at "threats of the past" He spent his 18-year career in the Senate fighting for billion-dollar defense cuts and reductions. As for programs aimed at defending the United States against accidental or intentional missile launches, he consistently voted to postpone, retard and cut funding. His position here is clear from the 100 percent rating he received from the antidefense National Organization for Women, or NOW, and his 92 percent rating from the left-wing Professional's Coalition for Nuclear Arms Control.

According to Project Vote Smart, Bradley voted against allowing even underground nuclear-weapons tests and pleased foreign spies by voting for full disclosure of funding requests and spending authorizations for U.S. intelligence activities. On another controversial military issue, that of homosexuals in the ranks, Bradley is all for it. "There have been gays in the military as long as there has been a military," Bradley told the Boston Globe. "They've only had to hide."

One indication of Bradley's occasional maverick streak, so often mentioned in press reports, concerns his short-lived alignment with conservatives on the first vote to provide aid to the Nicaraguan contras who resisted the Cuban-backed Sandinistas. He was one of only 10 Democratic senators to do so and earned honorable mention in a radio address in which President Reagan expressed gratitude to those who supported the successful measure.

Reagan had caught his temporary ally in the midst of a flip-flop-flip. First, Bradley announced opposition to helping the anti-Sandinista movement, then voted for it, and then (after he was denounced by liberal colleagues, attacked in a barrage of constituent mail and visited in his New Jersey office by protesters who had to be arrested to get them out of the place) he opposed contra aid the next time it came up for a vote. The lesson might be that, if you catch Bradley taking a position with conservatives, enjoy it while it lasts.

On domestic issues such as welfare reform, Bradley again expresses one view while voting the opposite. He frequently stated his opposition to a "hand-out" approach to welfare and the need to add provisos that require recipients to exercise responsibility in return for the help they're getting from American taxpayers. But when it came down to votes, he consistently opposed reform efforts such as workfare -- even balking at a 1988 measure to require recipients to work 16 hours a week -- as well as opposing drug tests for recipients, and required school attendance for children in welfare homes. He also served as a guardian for the taxpayer-funded Legal Services Corp., which long used federal money to challenge welfare reform in the courts.