For Bradley It’s an Uphill Battle--and He’s Losing Elevation

Somewhere Calvin Coolidge must be smiling. Tom Bradley’s lengthy deliberation on the issue of Rose Bird’s reelection leading up to a forthright declaration that he’s not going to say anything at all would doubtless tickle Silent Cal’s sense of the absurd in American politics.

After all the time he took to reach his decision, it didn’t really matter any more what Bradley said about the chief justice so long as he said something. Any position he adopted would surely draw criticism from one quarter or another. And nothing he could say would dispose of the issue. But if he couldn’t get Bird off his back, at least he had to shift the weight a little.

The line that he finally settled on is certainly philosophically tenable, even high-minded. Fair play in judicial elections is hard enough to define without injecting partisan politics. But George Deukmejian makes a strong case, too, that the voters have a right to know how a gubernatorial candidate would approach the selection of judges. Bradley missed the point by failing to couple his announcement on Bird with a clear statement of his standards for judicial appointments.

Which candidate’s position will play best politically is a matter that editorial writers and public-opinion pollsters can debate and the voters will ultimately decide. Bird’s campaign may be a lost cause, but it remains to be seen how much damage she’ll do to Democratic candidates in general. The GOP’s endless harping on the issue is already beginning to grate, and Deukmejian’s description of Bradley’s decision as “gutless” is the kind of graceless bullyragging that could produce a backlash. Moreover, there remains at least the faint possibility that sometime between now and November the Bird campaign might actually do something right for once.

But if the substance of Bradley’s statement hasn’t sealed his doom, there’s no question that he has been losing elevation in what started out as an uphill battle. And it’s not Bird’s fault, or even Bradley’s. The mayor’s basic problem is that the Deukmejian campaign, with superior financing and organization, is simply doing a better job.

Bradley, for example, launched his campaign on a theme of leadership. Given Deukmejian’s record of failed initiatives and pandering to corporate contributors, that probably seemed like a good idea. After all, it worked for Jimmy Carter in 1976. But Deukmejian is not Gerald Ford. Unless your opponent has a tendency to fall down stairs and say stupid things a lot, a campaign that is based on the leadership theme runs the risk of coming across as both arrogant and an ad hominem attack.

More important, in a state where political campaigning relies heavily on the kind of television advertising that can make the village idiot look like one of the choice and master spirits of the age, no one is manifestly better qualified than anyone else. Deukmejian wasted no time in exercising the power of the video image. After a forceful State of the State address in January, which Bradley failed to answer, Deukmejian launched a series of TV ads projecting himself as a strong leader. Since then he has used Rose Bird and anything else that came to hand to contrast Bradley’s record with the image that the governor’s media masters have fashioned. As a result, leadership is a big issue in this campaign, all right, but it’s Deukmejian’s issue, not Bradley’s.

The mayor, in consequence, seems more concerned these days with his record than Deukmejian’s. In his campaign statements Bradley seems invariably to refer back to his own historic involvement in each issue--crossing t’s, dotting i’s and clarifying the finer points of his attitudes on questions from other elections that few people even remember. While Deukmejian speaks vaguely of an agenda for California’s future, Bradley seems to be running from an outline for his memoirs. Where Deukmejian has cast himself in the role of a dynamic exponent of a newly revitalized Republican Party, Bradley increasingly resembles Laocoon wrestling with the coils of his own past.

Deukmejian began this campaign on the assumption that he would have to come from behind. That is why he spent so much money on an early advertising campaign. The underdog’s approach to a campaign assumes that the election is not his to win but his opponent’s to lose. Deukmejian accordingly has been running an essentially reactive campaign that is light on substance but very quick to disparage anything that Bradley says.

The Bird issue has enabled the governor to settle into his favorite role, playing the tough cop campaigning against a rising tide of criminality. This is the same way Deukmejian ran for attorney general and for governor the first time. After eight years you might think that he would need to update his pitch a little. But so far he hasn’t had to.

Herein lies the first and most important test of the success of the mayor’s statement on Bird. Sidestepping the issue as he has won’t end the controversy. But Bradley hopes that it will give him the maneuvering room to recast this election into something more than debate over who is the top cop in California.