This is what passes for brutality in Bill Bradley’s world. While the McCain camp implies that George W. Bush hates Catholics, and Bush surrogates call voters to tell them McCain is a fraud, Bradley goes negative by charging that Gore’s rating on environmental issues is a full 20 points lower than his. Bradley had expected to spend this time in California and New York, daring Democrats to dream again. Instead, he parked himself last week in Puget Sound, repeating the same debate-club attacks to anyone who would listen. This was Bradley’s last stand, built on the tenuous hope that a win in Washington’s nonbinding primary this week might revive his faltering campaign. But having been too reticent to really define himself with voters, Bradley now finds that his attempt to define Gore isn’t sticking. And without the kind of ruthless, mercenary strategists who populate modern campaigns, Bradley’s loyalists seemed to lack the stomach or the savvy to be as nasty as they need to be.
Just a few months after he forced Gore to take his campaign back to Tennessee and start over, Bradley is at the lowest moment of his political life. Last week McCain drew overflow crowds in Seattle and led the evening news when his plane got stuck in the mud. On the same day Bradley aides corralled about 20 students to meet the candidate as he strolled the University of Washington campus, but most of them left to go bowling before he arrived. With McCain surging among disaffected Democrats and independents, Bradley’s outsider campaign seems to have lost its rationale.
So now Bradley has recast himself as the true heir to Clinton’s Democratic base. But while core Democrats may like what Bradley stands for, they’re still not sure just who he is. Bradley campaigns as if he completely missed the Clinton era and its boxers vs. briefs dynamic; he doesn’t understand why voters need to know anything personal about him. He talks passionately to black audiences about racial injustice, but rarely discusses his own experiences as a white man in a black sport. Some aides have urged Bradley to open up, and he’s trying. Last week, asked by a student to pick his favorite rock star, he even waxed eloquent about Bruce Springsteen. But Bradley is his own boss, and no one but his wife, Ernestine, tells him what to do. Most trusted advisers are longtime friends who’ve never run a presidential campaign, and their chief ambition is to serve Bradley rather than win the White House. Some insiders grumble that what Bradley needed was the kind of hired gun who’d rather get him elected than be his friend. A James Carville-type strategist would have known how to go after Gore–without trying to explain years of arcane voting records.
The campaign strategy in these crucial weeks has been puzzling. The Bradley forces held Michael Jordan’s endorsement in reserve for two months. Spike Lee has been shooting hip new ads for Bradley, but with the campaign on the line, they still weren’t airing. (While Bradley’s Washington ads were issue-based, Gore rolled out a new spot featuring him and his son climbing Mount Rainier.) Bradley’s gambit in Washington was characteristically offbeat; polls had him down 20 points before he arrived. But Bradley was strangely cheerful as he stumped the Evergreen State, and his buoyant crowds late in the week made a comeback in Washington seem at least plausible. Feeling more himself, he even stopped attacking Gore. “This campaign is based on the radical premise,” Bradley likes to say, “that you can go out and tell people what you believe, and win.” If only it were that easy.
