The art of being BradleyHe's compassionate, prickly, introspective and shrewd--and his
high-minded pitch could grab the nomination from GoreBy Eric Pooley
September 27, 1999
Web posted at: 12:30 p.m. EDT (1630 GMT)
This is a good day to be Bill Bradley. It's a warm September
afternoon, the day Bradley presides over his campaign kickoff in
his boyhood hometown of Crystal City, Mo.--and the day the
chattering classes begin to realize what Bradley already knows:
he has maneuvered himself into position to wrest the Democratic
presidential nomination from Al Gore. The former basketball star
and three-term New Jersey Senator has just given what some are
calling the most effective speech of his career, a fuzzy,
conversational, unabashedly idealistic sermon that sells him as
the savior of politics itself ("The American people have a right
to be skeptical, but I have a right to try to change that
skepticism"). Polls in key states put him in a dead heat with
Gore. In the new TIME/CNN poll, he leads Gore in New Hampshire
for the first time. While the Vice President is suffering the
effects of Clinton fatigue, message confusion and a
consultant-heavy campaign that's hemorrhaging money, Bradley is
running a lean, focused operation. More and more it seems that
Bradley's inscrutable nature--high-mindedness, dogged integrity
and apparent indifference to the game of politics--might be
tailor-made for the post-Clinton era. And surely it doesn't hurt
that he had that wicked jump shot way back when.
So how does Bradley mark this euphoric moment? Half an hour after
his big speech--an act of enormous extroversion that required him
to brag about his athleticism, discipline and small-town
purity--he is visibly withdrawing, pulling back into himself.
Folded into a chair on the stage in the packed and jubilant
Crystal City High School gym, the scene of his earliest hoop
glory, he's listening to old friends extol his essential
goodness, but he's looking bored and distracted one minute,
uncomfortable the next: it's hard for him to cede control of his
own story. A black Little League teammate reminisces about the
11-year-old Bradley threatening to call the mayor of Joplin, Mo.,
if a local hotel didn't rent the black kid a room, and the
56-year-old Bradley chews his lip and looks at the floor. His
second grade music teacher sings his praises, and he gazes into
the distance, even forgetting to thank her as she goes by--until
his wife, Ernestine Schlant, elbows him and he hauls himself out
of the chair and gives the old lady a hug.
Finally it is Bradley's turn to speak. Back in control, he
relaxes; surrounded by supporters, relatives and old buddies, he
tells a story about being alone. "I cannot tell you how many
hours I spent in this space," he says, looking around the gym.
"After one night when we lost, early the next morning I was
back." He'd come by himself to work on his shooting. "The
bleachers were still pulled out, there were popcorn boxes on the
floor, and I felt I was home--in the place I spent more time than
any other."
At a moment that calls for an ode to community, Bradley offers a
parable of solitude. It's a revealing story, because what's most
fascinating about Bradley is the tension between his ambition and
his reserve, between where he wants to go and what it takes to
get there--the essential contradiction of an introspective man
forcing himself into that most outgoing of roles, the big-time
presidential candidate. "My problem is that my aspirations demand
that I create something that I cannot control completely."
Bradley wrote those words about basketball, but they ring equally
true about his presidential bid. Watching him bridge the distance
between himself and others, you see a man trying to overcome his
nature in order to achieve what he regards as his destiny. "The
thing that is most attractive to him is the thing that eludes
him," says his friend, the writer John Edgar Wideman. "It's the
thing he'll devote endless time, energy and concentration to."
And so Bradley taught himself how to meet and greet. "He seems to
want to prove that he finds other people interesting," wrote John
McPhee in his famous 1965 New Yorker profile of Bradley. Today
Bradley can interact warmly with strangers, flatter business
moguls with disarming questions about their lives, yet never
quite lose his proud reserve, a diffidence stoked by 40 years of
stardom in sport and politics--in high school, as a three-time
All-American at Princeton, as captain of the gold medal-winning
1964 Olympic team, as a Hall of Famer with the world champion New
York Knicks and in 18 years as a U.S. Senator. "Detachment became
his protection," says McPhee, who remains a friend. Bradley is
confident, watchful; when he left the Senate in 1996, he spent
two years traveling the country, talking and listening to people,
looking inside himself. And when he decided that he was ready and
that those who said the nomination belonged to Gore were wrong,
he committed himself to the race with a shrewd, methodical
relentlessness that harks back to his Scotch-Irish
forebears--members of the tough and lonely ethnic group that in
the 18th century emigrated from the British Isles, tamed the
Appalachian highlands and led the great push west to California.
"Being Scotch Irish," Bradley wrote in his 1996 memoir, Time
Present, Time Past, "is always to assess your chances before you
strike... Being Scotch Irish is to recognize that once or twice
or several times in your life defeat will seem certain, but
never to give up when faced with this moment, instead to
persevere, to advance... Being Scotch Irish is to
recognize...that only you, the solitary individual, will make
your own way in the world... Loneliness can be full of
existential angst, but it can also provide room to rest. "
Bradley believes Americans are lonelier than ever, and he talks
frequently about the need to become "less lonely, less isolated,
less fearful." When asked about this, he at first says his
feeling for the issue is based on surveys. Asked again, he says,
"There have been periods of my life where there was a loneliness.
Now, if you talk about that, please don't exaggerate it."
Bradley's friend Cornel West, the Harvard professor of
Afro-American studies, recalls deep conversations on the subject
in which Bradley drew from the works of Emily Dickinson, Sherwood
Anderson and Thornton Wilder, all of whom dealt searchingly with
themes of solitude and aloneness. "I think he recognizes the
personal and the political" dimensions of the issue, says West.
The heart of Bradley's appeal isn't his Senate record or
athletic prowess but what supporters see as his deep and abiding
virtue; detractors call it sanctimony. At Princeton, McPhee
reported, Bradley was such a straight arrow that classmates
called him the Martyr; he listened to Climb Every Mountain from
The Sound of Music before each game. "Basketball...is not an
ordeal," said his Princeton coach, Butch van Breda Kolff. "I
think Bradley's happiest whenever he can deny himself pleasure."
Today Bradley's "moral altitude," as McPhee called it, manifests
itself in a campaign devoted to liberal ideals: racial harmony,
justice for the poor, campaign-finance reform, health coverage
for the uninsured. (This week he is scheduled to present his
health-care-reform plan; aides say it will go well beyond Gore's
insure-the-children platform.)
To signal his own decency, Bradley makes a show of presenting
himself honestly, unhandled by handlers. "The idea," he told me
recently, "is to run a campaign that's not packaged." So he is
low-key and intelligent on the stump, refusing to indulge in some
of the sillier rituals of the trail and poking fun at the process
when he can. He means this to be wry and amusing, and sometimes
it is. When Sam Donaldson asked him about drug use on ABC's This
Week, Bradley was playful enough to turn the question around: "I
have used marijuana several times in my life, but never cocaine...
Have you?" Soon the pundits were engaged in a deliciously silly
round of what-I-did-and-didn't-do. But at other times, Bradley's
style just comes off as cranky. He doesn't want to name his
favorite books; he's mock-aghast when a TV reporter asks him to
pose for the camera on an X that's been duct-taped to the floor,
because it feels too show biz ("Have we already come to this?").
In other words, not packaging has become its own package.
Bradley likes to pretend that everything he says and does flows
naturally from who he is and what he believes. In fact, he is a
calculating man who approaches campaigning the way he approached
basketball: by analysis and repetition, breaking every shot and
move down to its component parts, then mastering them. He boasts
about taking no polls but has a pollster, Diane Feldman, who
will soon be conducting surveys. He doesn't mind reporters
knowing that he drives an '84 Oldsmobile or that his Iowa
headquarters rents for $500 a month, but he doesn't want them to
see the borrowed Gulfstream IV he sometimes flies in. High-end
corporate jets don't fit his insurgent image. In fact, nothing
about Bradley is as simple as he makes it sound. He exploits his
legend while maintaining an ironic distance from it ("He carries
his celebrity around like a little backpack," says McPhee) and
makes the most of his fame while fiercely guarding his privacy.
But when Bradley works hard to connect, when he really tries to
project himself to an audience, his ironic detachment vanishes.
He becomes earnest, a secular minister preaching a message that
has only the most tenuous relationship to conventional politics.
Bradley isn't comfortable delivering a tub thumper, and he isn't
any good at it. But he is good at drawing people into his verbal
world, creating a quiet space in which his ideals seem within
reach. "The Dow Jones is at record heights," he said in Crystal
City, but "such numbers are not the measure of all things. They
do not measure what is in our heads and our hearts. They do not
measure a young girl's smile or a little boy's first handshake
or a grandmother's pride... They tell us little about the magic
of a good marriage or the satisfaction of a life led true to its
own values." Such words tell us little about what he intends to
do as President, so pundits find them easy to ridicule, but
voters are responding to them.
At the end of the prosperous '90s, middle-class Americans seem
inclined to ruminate about matters of soul and spirit, about
doing good in addition to doing well, and politicians are
responding by wearing their religion on their sleeves and
offering slogans like George W. Bush's "Prosperity with a
Purpose." But Bradley's spiritual pitch differs from his rivals'
in two important respects. First, he was offering his brand of
cosmic humanism long before the political consultants realized
people might be receptive to it. Almost two years ago in
Greensboro, N.C., I watched him transfix 1,200 people at a
volunteerism conference with a riff about "being alive to the
smallest things: a child's question, the color of a turning leaf,
a sight you've never seen that you pass on your way to work each
day." Second, unlike Bush and Gore, Bradley doesn't mention God
during his poetic flights. He is a believer--he was raised a
Presbyterian, passed through a period of Christian Fundamentalism
while young, but then rejected what he has since called "the
narrowness of view" of evangelicals. He has written about being
"open" to the essential truth of all faiths, but today he
declines to discuss the subject. "That's one of the places where
I draw the line," he says, and that feels refreshing in a year
when other pols call press conferences to discuss their personal
relationships with the Lord. For Bradley, though, this doesn't
seem to be a tactical move so much as an ingrained character
trait. Even at his most revealing, part of him remains cloaked.
"The issue is, How well can anyone ever know another person,"
Bradley asks, "if they only know that person in a public
context?" We're sitting on the second floor of a cheerful
bookshop in North Conway, N.H., sparring about the politician's
obligation to reveal himself. Though Bradley's speeches trumpet
bits of his glittering biography, he hates surrendering his story
to others--especially to reporters who, he feels, take "snippets"
and use them to draw wild conclusions. I ask if people have a
right to learn about those who would be President. "That's more
so today than any other time in our history," Bradley replies.
"I'm not so sure they tried to figure out who Lincoln was or who
F.D.R. was."
"So you prefer the 19th century--"
He cuts me off. "That was the 20th century." Bradley likes to
challenge your question before it's out of your mouth; sometimes,
it seems, he treats political reporters with the same disdain
athletes routinely show sportswriters. In this case, we're both
right, but I let it go. "You prefer the model of a politician who
steps up, says his piece and then gets left in peace."
"Sure," he says. "You do have to share a certain amount. I think
I have. But certainly you don't have to share everything."
He is still learning to share. Asked why such a private man would
commit himself to public service, he at first replies with a
terse, "My mother was always helping other people; that was a
theme in the house," but becomes more expansive. "I always felt,
you know, I was taller, bigger; I always wanted to help the
smaller kid."
Bradley still owns the house where he grew up, across from the
Presbyterian church and around the corner from the bank his
father ran for three decades in Crystal City, on the west bank of
the Mississippi. The town is now a sleepy bedroom community a
half hour south of St. Louis, but when Bradley was growing up
there, it was a vibrant place with a huge plate-glass factory,
since closed. His father and mother were at the center of things.
William Warren Bradley, who never attended college yet became
majority stockholder of the Crystal City State Bank, suffered
from calcified arthritis of the spine but used his Scotch-Irish
stoicism to live with the pain. He couldn't bend at the waist or
dress himself, but he walked to work every morning and sat at his
desk so his customers would never see him as disabled. He was
devoted to propriety and privacy. "He's twirling in his grave
that we're telling you things," says the candidate's aunt,
Hardeman Bond, "and Bill has that same quality."
Warren was 39 when he married Susie Crowe, then 31, a
schoolteacher who was always volunteering to head a civic-club
committee, teach Sunday school, throw a pot-luck party or lead
choir rehearsal. She was the kind of woman, Warren once said
fondly, who'll "even try to breathe for you." Susie poured her
energy into her only child, structuring his time, fostering his
sense of duty, making sure her Fine Young Man never got a swelled
head. "She wouldn't let Bill win," says his high school teammate
Tom Haley. "She told him he had unfair advantages, because she
didn't want him to think he was special." Bond says, "Bill wasn't
permitted to be difficult. Susie expected him to be well
trained." When his mother held dances in her basement for the
kids, she made sure Bill asked the fat girls to dance.
Bill never rebelled, but he did tune Susie out. At age 9, he
withdrew into long, solitary hours on the basketball court,
walling himself off with the game. "For many years, basketball
was my only passion in life," he wrote in his first book, Life on
the Run. "I pressed my physical and emotional life into
basketball alone, and it made for a very intense feeling. I felt
about the court, the ball and playing the way people feel about
friends."
Since his father ran the bank in a factory town, Bill had to
deal with class resentments. He had toys the other kids
didn't--a TV in his bedroom, a pinball machine in the basement,
which became the unofficial neighborhood rec center. Once when
he was small, Susie went out looking for him, and saw bigger
boys beating his legs with switches and jeering, "Dance,
banker's son, dance!" ("I wasn't bloody or anything," Bradley
says.) Every winter Bill and his parents went to Palm Beach,
Fla., for six or so weeks because the warm weather soothed
Warren's arthritis. There, he was the low-status kid. "We lived
in a hotel," Bradley says. "Everybody else had mansions." After
school in Florida, Bradley would find a court and spend hours
alone practicing. "He was all by himself...communing with his
basketball and his thoughts," says McPhee. "It was a very lonely
scene. I've heard him speak a good bit about the absence of
siblings." When he was 13, he told his parents he wouldn't go to
Florida anymore.
Basketball was becoming his great connector: it turned him into
one of the guys in Crystal City, where he made the high school
varsity squad as a freshman, engendering further resentment until
his play took the team to the top. An extraordinary shooter, he
became famous for passing--another way to connect with his
teammates. He practiced three or four hours a day, with weights
in his sneakers to improve his jumping. It led to an acclaim that
as McPhee once said, made Bradley "a personality before becoming
a person." Known as the best high school ballplayer in Missouri
history, he had college recruiters and newspapermen coming around
all the time, but his parents weren't content to have their child
be a jock. The pressure was always on him to study harder, aim
higher, make something more of himself. And Bradley was willing
to stay up half the night after a big win--not partying but
studying. He seemed to enjoy the punishment. As his fame grew, he
found escape in what he calls "a deepening of my own private
world." He had to figure out who he was and what he
wanted--choosing Princeton over basketball powerhouse Duke, for
example, because Princeton graduated more Rhodes scholars and he
wanted to go to Oxford. After graduating from Princeton and
leading the U.S. Olympic basketball team in 1964, he won his
Rhodes scholarship and spent two years at Oxford, then turned
pro.
Playing for the Knicks was a standing invitation to the
round-the-clock bash that was Manhattan in the late 1960s and
early '70s, but Bradley did not partake. He kept his head in his
books. "If you asked him a direct question, he'd answer you,"
says former teammate Willis Reed. "But in terms of volunteering
information? That was not Bill." When he met Ernestine, in 1969,
the attraction sprang in part from the fact that she didn't care
what he did for a living. They were wed in a Palm Beach ceremony
that all but one of his teammates learned about in the newspaper.
"If you want to keep something quiet," he explains, "you keep it
quiet."
In the early 1970s, Bradley traveled to Missouri to test the
political waters. The state's Democratic machine offered to back
him for state treasurer, but he turned the offer down; he wasn't
interested in dues paying. As his Knicks career wound down in
1977, Bradley began preparing for a '78 Senate run from New
Jersey, where he and Ernestine had moved a few years before. He
was a celebrity, but he didn't have strong ties to the state's
Democratic Party. "Bill was always in the party but never of the
party," says Senator Robert Torricelli, who succeeded him in
1996. "He did not come from the ranks. There was always a little
distance." Instead, he built a network of outsiders--Princeton
alumni, basketball stars, business leaders who'd been courtside
at the Garden season after season. It's the same kind of network
he has put together for his presidential run. "Nobody else did it
before or since," says Torricelli. Bradley won his first race in
a romp, 55% to 43%.
As a fledgling politician, Bradley took his hunger for privacy to
extremes. In his first campaign, he met his driver at a gas
station in order to keep his address secret. His staff learned
not to ask even innocuous personal questions, and new hires often
didn't understand his attachment to silence in his car. They'd
try to chat and he'd respond briskly, barely looking up from his
book or paper, finally offering a sharp, "Can't you see I'm
trying to read?" When Ernestine was found to have breast cancer
in 1992, Bill leaned on no one. For weeks the staff watched as
medical texts were delivered to his office from the Library of
Congress. The books went into his chamber and the door shut. The
staff members knew someone was sick, but they didn't know who.
Since Ernestine's recovery, Bradley has often shown kindness to
other couples coping with the disease. He calls up the husbands
and empathizes. He likes to be leaned on.
Bradley often went his own way in the Senate, voting in favor of
aid to the Nicaraguan contras in 1986 and against the
welfare-reform bill of 1996. He made some friends among
free-thinking colleagues such as Bob Kerrey of Nebraska and Pat
Moynihan of New York (who endorsed him last week), but to most
colleagues he remained a cipher. He was capable of looking beyond
the horizon on complex issues--tax reform, Third World debt, the
breakup of the Soviet Union--but never cared for dealmaking, horse
trading or the care and feeding of colleagues, the dark arts that
are essential to legislative success. "He arrived here a
superstar," says Delaware Senator Joe Biden, who considers
Bradley a friend. "It was the John Glenn thing, a big star from a
big state. That automatically made him suspect to half his
colleagues." Bradley never bothered to woo them. "When you shake
hands with most politicians, they pull you toward them," Biden
says. "Bill would push you away. I think it was because people
were always in his face."
"When you look at him in politics," says Thomas Mann, a
congressional scholar with the Brookings Institution, "you are
disappointed because you know him to be an intelligent and good
man. You want him to lead the charge, and you don't see him doing
it. You expect so much and yet you usually come away having been
let down."
When it really mattered to him--when he had a major bill to
pass--Bradley was able to join the fray and get it done. To win
votes, he did what he had to do, whether playing pickup
basketball with other legislators (something he normally avoided)
or teaming up with pols who played the legislative game better
than he. For his landmark 1986 Tax Reform Act, he was the wonk
and Illinois Representative Dan Rostenkowski was the strategist.
And in his final term, when he championed the reform of water
rights in California--a typically unconventional issue for a New
Jersey pol--his guru became California Democrat George Miller,
then chairman of the House Resources Committee. Perhaps he was
thinking ahead to his presidential run and wanted an issue that
would raise his profile in a key primary state. In any event, he
plunged into this knotty local issue--well-connected California
ranchers, growers and developers had for a century been getting
far more than their fair share of the state's scarce water
supply--and after years of study and consultation, proposed a new
structure that helped small operators.
To get it passed, Miller proposed a delightfully diabolical
strategy. He had Bradley, subcommittee chairman of Water and
Power for the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, block every
federal water project that came across his desk. By the time he
and Miller were ready to move their bill, the demand for those
"water pork" projects was enormous. Next, Bradley and Miller
rolled their reform together with many of those projects in a
single piece of omnibus legislation, so that for other lawmakers,
the price of getting water pork was a vote in favor of reform.
For Bradley, the price was agreeing to pork projects he loathed.
"You bet he swallowed hard," says Thomas Jensen, then a top
subcommittee staff member. "Given his druthers, he never would
have supported them. But he knew what other Senators
know--logrolling works."
Bradley makes fun of Clinton-Gore policies as "baby steps" and
loves to tout his own "big ideas," but he knows the value of
legislative incrementalism. Each year between 1986 and 1990, for
example, he quietly passed legislation that extended Medicaid
benefits to a larger and larger pool of pregnant women and
children, lowering the eligibility requirements a little bit more
each year. He used the same strategy to expand the Earned Income
Tax Credit, which puts money in the pockets of low-income
workers, and he championed such modest but helpful measures as
the mandated 48-hr. maternity stay in hospitals. This is a
self-effacing leadership style; Bradley calls it being "the
leader that people didn't know was a leader." But that kind of
leadership isn't necessarily presidential. And it isn't clear
that Bradley, who had to rely on others to build the coalitions
that passed his important bills, would have the skill as
President to get his big ideas through Congress.
In his last race for the Senate, in 1990, Bradley got a
comeuppance. While pundits were writing about his presidential
ambitions, he was almost beaten by Republican Christine Todd
Whitman--then a political novice, now New Jersey's Governor. To
many, Bradley seemed out of touch with his state, and he refused
to denounce Governor Jim Florio for a series of tax increases
that had cost Florio his popularity. "It was a peculiar political
price for Bradley to pay," says Torricelli, "because loyalty to
local leaders was not his reputation. He didn't understand the
sensitivity to these taxes, and it almost ended a brilliant
career."
Bradley's close call changed him. "He came back a little angry,"
Biden says. "If he had won big, he would not have been so down on
politics, but he had to find an explanation of how the hell this
happened." Politics had almost rejected him--it must be broken. He
declared it so in 1995, saying he would not seek re-election. He
spent two years out of the spotlight and as happy as he'd ever
been--making money, giving speeches, getting to know Silicon
Valley and Wall Street, positioning himself for an outsider's run
at the White House.
He continued a habit he had taken up in college, asking strangers
about their life: Excuse me, are you happy? Tell me your story.
It was a way to learn about the world, a way to come out of his
shell, a way to build his network of elite supporters. "One of
the first things he did was ask me about my life," says John
Roos, a Bradley fund raiser and partner at a powerful Silicon
Valley law firm. "Who I was, what I thought was important. I was
extremely surprised."
And flattered. The Bradley network is full of the high-profile
people he has stroked and courted for decades: billionaire
moneyman Herb Allen, media moguls Barry Diller and Michael
Eisner, film director Sydney Pollack, Barnes & Noble chairman Len
Riggio. They build support and raise money for Bradley, and in
return he makes them feel good about themselves. Says Starbucks
CEO Howard Schultz: "I just feel better for knowing him." Bradley
likes to say, "This is not just a campaign, but something more"--a
high-minded mission. That sounds trite, until you see it in
action.
Wind chimes are tinkling in the warm night breeze, and on the
wraparound porch of an old Victorian house in Des Moines, Iowa,
50 Democrats--most of them early middle-aged, well-off and
politically progressive--have gathered to hear Bradley. It's
September, before the pundits notice Bradley's surge, so only a
few national reporters are on hand. Standing near a hanging
plant, Bradley's about to begin, but something's wrong. "Do we
have to have the TV on?" he asks. A crew has the camera rolling,
its lights in his eyes. "I'd kind of like to see the people," he
says. "Shine the light on the people!" He may be the only
candidate in Iowa who'd rather see his audience than make the
news.
The TV folks shut down their rig, and Bradley starts talking.
It's the best possible way to experience him. He draws the group
in, using the microphone expertly, letting a rich Midwestern
gruffness emerge in his voice--it's the political equivalent of a
Garrison Keillor radio monologue. "There's justice that this is
where the presidency begins," he says, "in a neighborhood, on a
front porch, on a summer night." He likes the line so much he
repeats it, rhapsodizing about "running for the highest office in
the land the same way you run for mayor," and never mind that
Bradley never ran for such a lowly post. He offers
well-modulated, impeccably timed, quasi-mystical stories about
his past and America's future, about his crusade to create "an
economy that takes everybody to higher ground," lifting 14
million children out of poverty, covering the 45 million
uninsured, helping people look beyond skin color and eye shape,
cleaning up the political money game, standing up to the N.R.A.,
protecting abortion rights, fixing welfare reform, "finding a
meaning in life that's deeper than the material."
He's not saying how he'd do this--when the details start coming
this month, the sledding gets rougher for Bradley--but his words
are thrilling to the chastened idealists on the porch, people who
feel betrayed by Clinton and want to believe again. Still, some
of them wonder if Bradley's ideas are a winning platform in the
America of 1999. During the Q&A period, someone praises him for
dreaming big dreams, then asks, "Why, sir, are you more electable
than Gore?"
In reply, Bradley talks about being tougher on handgun
registration and campaign-finance reform, then says, "There's a
set of differences that are a little deeper." He styles himself
an outsider, talks about trust and tells about the Independents
and Republicans who approach him in airports and hotel lobbies,
saying, "I'd vote for you, but I'll never vote for him." His
message: I can beat Bush; Gore, with all his baggage, never will.
Bradley doesn't say whether those Independents and Republicans
have heard about his unapologetically liberal platform. Maybe he
thinks his halo will keep them by his side.
Marketing one's virtue has its limitations. It magnifies each
compromise he makes: his opposition to taxing products on the
Internet, a big hit with Silicon Valley; his reversal on clemency
for Puerto Rican terrorists; his overtures to New York's black
power broker, the Rev. Al Sharpton; his sudden support for
ethanol subsidies (which he once called "highway robbery"). Then
he insists he isn't just another vote-grubbing pol. "When you're
a national candidate, you see things in a different context," he
says. "I'm being upfront and direct about it."
Riding across the plains in Bradley's van, I ask him if it
wouldn't be more honest--less packaged--to admit that he switched
positions on ethanol in order to stay alive in Iowa. He does his
best to seem offended. "What am I supposed to say," he sniffs,
"'All you family farms should go bankrupt?'" The van pulls into
the parking lot of Bradley's motel. "My little bit o' heaven," he
says, stepping out and gathering up his papers. His staff members
are staying at another motel. And so, with a little wave, he
escapes again into blessed solitude.
--With reporting by Ann
Blackman/ Washington and Tamala M. Edwards/New York
MORE TIME STORIES:
Cover Date: October 4, 1999
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