CAN BRADLEY SCORE?

A sizable crowd had turned out to see him, two dozen Iowans at least. There were farmers in overalls and several housewives, businessmen in sweater vests and wide ties, members of the local high school basketball team proudly wearing their letter jackets. Steam rose from the coffee cups and crumbs of donuts littered the tables and patches of snow slid off the snow boots and melted on the tile floor. Donut Land was cozy and warm. But Bill Bradley wanted to talk about insecurity.

“Yes, we’ve got a good economy right now,” he said, pacing between the vinyl booths. “Things are good if you look at the big numbers. But there’s a sense of insecurity, too, if you look at it in terms of your own lives. If you look at things a year from now, or the year after, things don’t look quite so secure, do they?” Bradley is six-five, and the Iowans craned their necks upward as he passed among them, like a quiet prophet.

He ticked off what he as president could do to assuage their fears, which, truth to tell, there didn’t seem to be a lot of, there in Donut Land, where everyone had a tummyful of donuts and the morning coffee was starting to kick in. But America needs more child care, Bradley said, and health care, and many more government loans so people can go to college whenever they feel the need.

“So those are the reasons I’m running,” Bradley said. “But you know, there’s something else.” His voice, which was already soft, almost sleepy, grew softer. “I’ve been on the road in America for thirty years, as a basketball player, a politician, a writer, a businessman. And I’ve formed an idea in my mind about who we are. And basically I think we are a good people. There’s goodness in each one of us, if we can see it in our neighbor. And if we can see it in our neighbor, that then allows us to have more connection. And if we have more connection, then we’re less fearful.” He paused. “Less lonely.”

Several of the Iowans stared into their coffee cups, perhaps contemplating their loneliness, perhaps wondering about free refills. Bradley went on, slowly: “And then, with less loneliness, we can then begin to see the whole. ” He described a sphere with his enormous hands. “And when you see the whole, you see our collective possibilities. So that’s the real reason I run.”

He folded his arms and concluded his speech and there was polite applause when he’d finished. The Iowans shrugged on their parkas and made for the door, some of them stopping at the counter for a few more donuts-to-go. I talked with a middle-aged woman who told me she was a “Democratic activist.”

“I’ve liked Senator Bradley for years,” she said. “And I really liked what he said about . . . you know, our collective . . . whole. Seeing that.” Then she laughed. “Just don’t ask me what it is.”

* * * * * * *

You can, if you put your mind to it, figure out a way that Al Gore will lose the Democratic presidential nomination. It takes some doing, but conventional wisdom never rests from its zig-zagging, and already those Americans who deeply care about the next presidential election — a group numbering in the high two figures and growing daily — are flirting with the idea that Gore is politically vulnerable. Among Democrats, the polls tell us, his name recognition stands at 100 percent, but fewer than 50 percent list him as their favored nominee. He is a comically inept campaigner and still carries the stench of the fundraising scandals from the last presidential election. His relationship with traditional Democratic constituencies — black voters and labor, for example — is tenuous. The “front-loading” of the Democratic primaries, which crams most of the delegate-selection into a month-long period in early 2000, could allow a well-funded dark horse to emerge quickly if Gore wobbles in the New Hampshire primary or the Iowa caucuses. And so on.

There’s only one problem with the Gore-is-vulnerable hypothesis: He needs an opponent.

In the abstract Bradley could be a formidable adversary. He has been a bona fide national celebrity since the 1960s, first as a college basketball all-star with Princeton, then as a forward for the two-time NBA champion New York Knicks, and finally, until his retirement in 1996, as a prominent three-term senator from New Jersey. In the Senate he prided himself on his command of complicated, not to say boring, issues: monetary exchange rates, South American debt consolidation, and tax reform. He has built a small but nationwide constituency of cult-like devotion, and he has access to the deep pockets of Wall Street and Hollywood; just last week, the Hollywood pashas Michael Eisner and Barry Diller hosted a gilded “get-acquainted” party for him in Los Angeles. He is an accomplished politician.

But he is also, to judge by his tour of Iowa last week, a listless and uninspired candidate, the Perry Como of the campaign trail. Whether he spoke to a gathering of Democratic activists in Keokuk County or a group of community college athletes in Ottumwa, it was easy to imagine him suddenly slipping to the floor and drifting off to sleep in mid-sentence. At the community college, whose basketball team won last year’s national junior college championship, he was ushered into a private room to give a pep talk to the school’s coaches.

After a brief reminiscence about the glory days of the Knicks, Bradley got down to the pep talk. There was little talk, and less pep.

BRADLEY: I’ve been walking around this decision, about running for president, for ten years. Now I’m saying, ‘Give me the ball.’

COACHES: Great.

BRADLEY: Of course, it’s a tremendous organizational job.
COACH: Yeah.

BRADLEY: It’s gotta be done mostly by Iowans. Gotta raise a lotta money.
COACH: I bet.
[Silence.]

BRADLEY: So where’s the tournament you play in?
COACH: Hutchison.
BRADLEY: Hutchison.
COACH: Yeah.
BRADLEY: [Silence.]

COACH: I remember that game where you scored, like what, sixty points.
BRADLEY: Fifty-eight.
COACH: Right.
BRADLEY: [Silence.]

COACH: So, did you keep in touch with Red Holtzman?

It can be painful to watch, but of course he is just getting started on the trail, having only declared his candidacy a month ago. “He’s an athlete,” one Bradley aide said in Iowa. “He has to work up a sweat, and then he really performs.”

He has other compensating advantages as well. He is an accomplished politician, as I say, and of a kind that the press finds irresistible. With few exceptions, you will search the establishment media in vain for a harsh or skeptical word about Bill Bradley. His appeal to journalists is less a matter of his moderately liberal ideology than it is of his persona: a man of ideas whose intelligence, learning, and sense of irony place him off to one side of the grubby world of politics — the anti-political politician. (He insists on calling himself a “citizen-politician,” which gives you an idea of how carefully he nurtures the image.) Adlai Stevenson perfected the type, in the 1950s. Eugene McCarthy inherited the mantle in the ’60s, as did, briefly, Bobby Kennedy (I mean the later, Aeschylus-quoting Bobby, not the 1950s right-winger who asked Joe McCarthy to be the godfather of his first child). More recently we’ve had to endure Gary Hart and Mario Cuomo. By striking the occasional literary allusion, say, or inserting an obscure historical reference in the text of a speech, they suggested to their acolytes in the press and elsewhere the existence of a depthless inner life, an intellectual complexity unknown to lesser pols. Bradley is their heir: the thinking man’s thinking man.

By the time he came to politics in 1978, with his first successful campaign for the New Jersey Senate seat, the persona was fully developed. While still at Princeton, at the age of 21, he was the subject of a hagiographic profile in the New Yorker by the great journalist John McPhee, later published in 1965 as a bestselling book, A Sense of Where You Are. McPhee’s Bradley was a young athlete of preternatural goodness, modest, deliberate, and highly intelligent, a man on whom no natural gift was wasted. Following games on Saturday evening, McPhee wrote, Bradley would stay awake all night to study, then catch an hour’s sleep before rising early to teach Sunday school at a Presbyterian church. To quote a passage almost at random: “‘He is a source of inspiration to anyone who comes in contact with him,’ one of his classmates says. ‘You look at yourself and decide to do better.'”

Dick Cook, a childhood pal of Bradley from Crystal City, Missouri, where the two grew up, told me recently that their high school principal once announced to his students that Bradley would someday be president of the United States. “And no one ever doubted it,” Cook said. The principal was the first to have the idea but not the last. During the 1964 NCAA tournament, a sports columnist for the New York Post wrote: “In twenty-five years or so our presidents are going to have to be better than ever. It’s nice to know that Bill Bradley will be available.”

Bradley is a private man, and reading A Sense of Where You Are it’s not hard to see his reserve as a reaction against the incessant broadcasting of his own splendor from the time of his late adolescence onward. He seemed to delight in confounding expectations. After Princeton he rejected several lucrative offers from the NBA and chose instead to attend Oxford for two years on a Rhodes scholarship. Returning, he joined the Air Force Reserve. Only then did he consent to join the Knicks, for a hefty contract (he’s been a wealthy man ever since).

The Knicks soon became the thinking man’s basketball team, if you can imagine such a thing: a disciplined group of quick-witted play-makers who understood the essence of the game, forcing flashier opponents to fumble like uncerebral oafs. Their inflated reputation for higher thought inspired Joseph Epstein and Gerald Graff to write a timeless lampoon, published — treasonously! — in the New Yorker in the early ’70s. Here’s their description of a typical Knicks game: “Bill Bradley asked if anyone cared to join him in catching a double feature of Bergman’s Persona and Winter Light. Phil Jackson, glancing up from his copy of Cahiers du cinema, replied hell no, he’d seen his last Bergman film, and from now on he preferred to take his Kierkegaard straight.”

Bradley’s career in politics has provoked the same process of inflation — a mixture of his own real-enough intellectual gifts and his admirers’ wishful thinking. This was easier to see in his later years in the Senate; the first half of his career was marked by genuine accomplishment. Over a four-year period in the early 1980s, he lobbied relentlessly to lower tax rates and close loopholes. His efforts resulted in the Tax Reform Act of 1986, a legislative miracle that has since been largely undone by the Bush and Clinton tax-rate increases in 1991 and 1993 — both of which Bradley voted for. In the ’80s he wasn’t averse to ideological complication. He was, for example, far more skeptical of the Soviet Union’s intentions under Mikhail Gorbachev than was either President Reagan or President Bush, and on one occasion he even voted for aid to the Nicaraguan contras, prompting horror among his fellow Democrats.

After a near-upset in his 1990 reelection, however, Bradley went to ground, and the list of his accomplishments trails off. Like most politicians of the current era, he is a habitual self-dramatizer, either by inclination or by political necessity. In his retelling, the close 1990 race stands as a “transformational experience” in his life. “I knew I had led with my mind,” he said recently, “but you also have to lead through feeling. I became a politician much more willing to speak with my heart and more willing to lead with conviction — not that I hadn’t done that earlier, but I had been more involved with my head and less with my feelings.” It was not, to speak kindly, an improvement. From 1990 onward, he was much more likely to float into the airy abstractions that last week confounded the Iowans of Donut Land.

Abstractions and worse. The first significant act of the new, reborn Bradley was to take to the Senate floor in 1991 to deliver a long speech on American race relations.

Among the platitudes and the several self-testimonials to his own virtuous behavior in the matter of race, one passage stands out from the speech — Bradley’s challenge to President Bush.

“Mr. President, tell us how you have worked through the issue of race in your own life. I don’t mean speechwriter abstractions, but your own life experiences. When did you realize there was a difference between the lives of black people and the lives of white people in America? Where did you ever experience or see discrimination? How did you feel? What did you do? . . . Tell each of us what we can do, why you think we can do it, why we must do it. Tell us, Mr. President. Put yourself on the line.”

Unleashed from the tether of his head, Bradley’s heart tends to lead him into pure sanctimony. And the speech, of course, was widely praised. In hindsight, it seems a forerunner of Bill Clinton’s compulsively empathetic brand of politics, in which the soundness of ideas is a distant second in importance to the display of virtue, however artificial. But Bradley is much less promiscuous than the president in his displays, which suggests, of course, that the virtue is much less artificial too. Meeting with a group of students at an inner city junior high in Davenport last week, Bradley was expert and not at all condescending in drawing the children out for questions.

“If you were president,” asked a girl, “what would you do if some people just threw their baby out a window?”

Bradley blanched and then said, “One thing I’ve learned is, the president can’t do everything about everything bad that happens. If someone does something like that, then they have to be punished. And that’s all.”

Another girl asked, “What are you going to do about all these homeless when you’re president?”

“I suppose we could try to build more housing,” Bradley said. “But the government will never be able to build enough. We have to try to make the economy work better so more people have more money. That’s the only way we’ll fix that.”

One boy told him he thought the school doors should be locked during school hours. “‘Cause I get scared,” he said.

What are the things that make you scared? Bradley asked.

The boy thought for a moment. “Just,” he said, “just, you know, going outside. Walking down the street.”

Bradley looked crestfallen and then very sad. After the TV cameras had left he took the boy aside for a private word. Clinton would have smothered him in kisses and tears — when the cameras were rolling.

In the realm of policy, though, the difference between Bradley and Clinton — and between Bradley and Gore — is harder to discern. Both Gore and Bradley are free-traders, for example, though Bradley’s devotion to the free-trade faith seems more intense than the vice president’s. When a union member at a UAW union hall in Burlington complained that the United States was losing jobs because of the North American Free Trade Agreement, Bradley defended NAFTA and gave a mini-lecture on the instability of international capital flows. (The member looked unconvinced.) As a senator he opposed the administration’s welfare reform, which he worries will force mothers to abandon their children for the workplace, and on the campaign trial he dismisses Clinton’s recent request for a higher defense budget as a political dodge.

“We can have a politics that sings,” he likes to say. So far this is as programmatic as he is willing to get. A recent speech to Virginia Democrats was billed as his first major address of the campaign, and Bradley took the occasion to condemn cynics who say “the days of big ideas are over.” But his only fresh policy idea was to turn local Democratic parties into “clearinghouses for service.” “If you want to mentor a child, care for a senior, clean up your local environment, a citizen ought to be able to call Democratic headquarters and find out where he or she can go.”

The speech did suggest the outlines of a critique that Bradley might expand as the campaign proceeds. Despite its electoral successes, Bradley told the Virginia Democrats, their party was in danger of becoming “obsessed with the mechanics of winning.”

“We are not to be outdone in fund-raising or constant polling or effective ‘spin,’ and we have won some big elections,” he said. “Compromise that offends no one and gives everyone something might help us win in the short term. But our party will cease to have any long-term meaning or content at all. If holding power is our greatest aspiration, we’ll have broken a promise that we’ve made to ourselves and our country.”

This is a clever dig at the cynicism of the Clinton-Gore administration — at least I think it is. You can’t be sure, since even now Bradley scarcely condescends to mention either Clinton or Gore by name. “Political principle is tart in many mouths,” he said in Virginia, “but vagueness tastes like honey.” Yes, it does.

Bradley staffers point out that the campaign is still young — the Iowa caucuses, after all, are a year away — and that even now the candidate is busy writing detailed position papers, consulting advisers, taking soundings among the voters so their needs and desires can shape his platform’s bold ideas. At this early date, they say, there’s no point in meeting the press’s demand for specificity. “We’re working on it,” Bradley told me. “The campaign will build over time.”

This is all plausible, of course, but you can’t help but sense something else in Bradley’s quiet, passionless campaign. You see it in his two books of memoirs, Life on the Run and Time Present, Time Past, which are to a large extent self-told morality tales about a virtuous man trying to accommodate himself, not always successfully, to a fallen world. You see it, too, in the speech he gave when he left the Senate — another widely praised address that in retrospect is excruciating to read.

“We live in a time when, on a basic level, politics is broken,” Bradley said then. “Neither political party speaks to people where they live their lives. And both have moved away from my own concept of service and my own idea of what America can be.”

“The imperative to engage the world flows through many channels,” he went on. “The fight for justice occurs in many places. I will expand my dialogue with the American people.” And then he quit.

“He is cursed by his virtue,” Michael Lewis, one of Bradley’s journalistic idolaters, once wrote. A high school coach put it even better: “I think Bradley’s happiest whenever he can deny himself pleasure.”

For such a man, losing can be a kind of vindication. Al Gore can be beat, but it would require the drawing of sharp distinctions, a plunge (ye gads) into “negative campaigning,” a move away from the politics of the “collective whole” toward the politics of politics — all of which the thinking man’s thinking man may find beneath his dignity. For the moment, at least, he is content to be this decade’s heir to the tradition of Adlai and Gene and Gary — men of conviction and principle (we were told) who looked to create a new kind of politics, who embraced big ideas they could never quite express, who ran for president, and who lost.

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.