Bill Bradley : From Last Year’s Near Debacle, to This Year’s New Activism

These days, Sen. Bill Bradley acts like a man who has caught his second wind--and plans to make the most of it. Indeed, a national magazine recently dubbed him “Sen. Lazarus.”

In his first 12 years in the Senate, Bradley combined the star sheen of a former professional basketball player with a reputation as one of the chamber’s most thoughtful members--and was expected to seek the presidency one day. The big question was whether he could overcome his plodding style and lackluster speaking ability.

Then last November, New Jersey voters--infuriated by tax increases pushed through by Gov. Jim Florio, a fellow Democrat, and put off by Bradley’s refusal to address the issue--nearly turned the senator out of office. A shaken Bradley, 48, acknowledged that he appeared remote and out of touch with middle-class voters’ concerns.

Following some post-election introspection, Bradley is no longer playing it so safe. He has delivered two noted speeches attacking President Bush’s record on civil rights as divisive. He was one of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s chief inquisitors of Robert M. Gates, Bush’s nominee to head the CIA. And he has proposed new “self-reliance scholarships” for college students and will soon call for a $350-a-year child tax credit in his own revamped federal budget.

The lanky former Princeton All-American and Rhodes Scholar recently discussed new global realities, domestic politics and himself in his spacious Senate office, which is accented with modern art and photos of his wife, Ernestine Schlant, and their daughter, Theresa Anne, 14. In shirt sleeves and peering over papers piled high on his desk, he was relaxed and animated. He even self-consciously provided running commentary on his own comments.

Bradley, who has tackled such unglitzy issues as tax reform, Third World debt and the Soviet economy, occasionally lapses into arcane details of public policy. This is a double-edged sword--demonstrating his prodigious knowledge of a subject while exposing his inability to distill it for public consumption.

Nonetheless, Bradley comes across as more forceful and determined to speak out on the major issues. And he vows not only to say what’s on his mind but also “to address the heart.”

Question: What direction should U.S. intelligence take after the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union, which has been the CIA’s historic focus?

Answer: A new approach requires a bold concept. It deals with America’s role in the world in quite a different way than it has in the past. I think there are some basic things that any intelligence agency would have to do, and that’s continue to monitor the various military threats that might exist around the world. But then I think it will have to concentrate on terrorism, terrorist threats, and I then think it becomes a much broader-gauged agency than it has been in the past. I think broad trends in demography and ethnicity, broad changes in economic development in certain places of the world, environmental threats . . . .

The legitimate question is: What’s the nature of our leadership in the world? I think increasingly it will come from our ability to essentially lead by example, through example of the pluralistic society that takes all its citizens to the higher economic ground, and does so in a way that remains open to the rest of the world--both in terms of economics and in terms of changes around the world.

Q: How deeply would you cut the defense budget, and what would you do with the savings?

A: I think the end of communism in the Soviet Union is the most important event in my adult life. It essentially changes the nature of American politics, and the degree of our security in the world. . . . If you don’t recognize this changed reality, you’re putting your head in the sand and you’re also missing an enormous opportunity. I believe that at a minimum over the next five years we could cut the defense budget by $70 to $80 to $90 billion--or more than we have. And I believe that that money should be returned to American taxpayers first and primarily. And second, it could be used for a combination of deficit reduction and some pressing domestic needs. But primarily, it should be returned to taxpayers.

Q: Through what kind of tax cut?

A: I’d like to see a tax credit for each child. I’ll be announcing a plan that would provide about a $350 tax credit and cut the budget of defense and non-defense sufficient to pay for that.

Q: In your Senate floor speech on civil rights, you said you came to Washington as a student intern in 1964 as a Republican, and left as a Democrat because of the Civil Rights Act. What does the Democratic Party represent today that would make such an impression on a young person?

A: I got a couple of notes after those speeches, and one of them said, ‘Dear Senator, your speeches were my 1964 Civil Rights Act.’ So I guess what one might say is expressing candidly what one’s ideals are, and putting it out there as to why those ideals are in the best tradition of American thought is one way to begin to attract people. Another way is to level with them. So much of political rhetoric today is so full of cliche and stereotype that you begin to say, “Where’s the real behind the words?”

The real is not always there to a public, because people don’t take chances. People don’t say what’s on their mind. People don’t confront what the real issues are out there--whether it’s race in America, or whether it’s the true economic circumstance of America, or whether it’s middle-income families under financial pressure in such a way that they believe government is the problem as opposed to a help, or whether it is violence in our cities, or it’s facing up to the environmental threat that continues to accelerate.

Q: So you believe Democrats have to again be a forceful, organized opposition?

A: Yes. I think that for too long we’ve tried to be too many things to too many people. For too long we have not apparently said no to anyone. For too long we have not been the bearers of truth, and I frankly don’t think we have been true to the best of our Democratic heritage.

It begins by knowing where you are in that great American historical narrative. What you believe; where you stand. It also means thinking through how you address the real needs of real people who are sitting around a kitchen table even as we speak, trying to figure out how they’re going to make their payments on their mortgage, their property taxes, college costs for their kids, and how they’re going to retain the sense of togetherness that is, I think, essential to family life.

Q: Given the fiscal constraints, how does the party appeal to the middle class without turning its back on its traditional constituencies of poor and minorities?

A: One of the key entry points has got to be at the point of people’s optimism about the future. If you can give people something that . . . will allow them to make their life better tomorrow or in the future, then I think you have an entry point. I would say America’s always been about the future--whether it’s the frontier, people moving on to a new day; or whether it’s immigrants coming to the United States for a better life; or whether it’s what you teach your kids about hard work and the belief that you can get ahead if you get an education in advance. . . . I’ve tried to do a self-reliant scholarship that says you can get up to $33,000 in exchange for paying back a percent of your income into a trust fund, an education trust fund, and that that should be available to any American up to the age of 50. You then are beginning to give people some hope that they will be able to get the education they need to equip them to earn money that they will need in order to have a more prosperous life than their parents had.

Q: In your civil-rights speech at the National Press Club in July, you appealed to “replace the politics of violence with the politics of public safety and intervene directly and massively against poverty, drugs and violence.” What did you mean by massive intervention, where would it be directed and how would you pay for it?

A: First of all, you’ve got to be tough, which means death penalty for drug king pins who murder, which means long sentences for drug dealers who use a gun in the commission of a drug crime. Gun control in terms of a waiting period and in terms of registration, etc. . . . . In addition to that, you need community policing, where you engage the community to help secure safety for them. Right now, a lot of police departments basically patrol areas of our cities like an occupying army. That’s not the way it should be. Local residents should be a part of the process.

. . . If you start life with a low birth weight, your chances are already slim that you’ll be able to make it. So what you need is prenatal care. What you need is early childhood nutrition and education . . . . The Head Start program serves 25% of the eligible kids, and the WIC (Women, Infants and Children nutrition) program serves 40% of the eligible kids, and child-maternal health, that deals with not a whole lot. So we’ve got to spend a lot more money on those. . . .

How do you raise the money? I’ve actually introduced a bill, the Children’s Security Trust Fund, which says every year we spend $300 billion on pensions in America--the government does. Social Security, military, government pensions. Before we go out and cut other programs, or before we go out and raise anybody’s taxes to do this component of a program of massive intervention, what we should do is at least give anybody who receives a federal pension the opportunity to dedicate a portion or all of their check to one of these three programs. If you simply had 1% of the money that goes to pensions dedicated to these three programs, you would increase funding 60%.

Q: You mentioned Bush’s tactics on race in the same breath as George Wallace. Is that a fair association? Do you believe, as you suggested, that Bush’s convictions about issues of race and discrimination are no deeper than a water spider’s footprint?

A: That’s why I said it. It’s a rebuttable presumption, right? But the other side’s got to rebut it, and silence doesn’t rebut it. The record is there. When he was running for the Senate in Texas in 1964, he opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which desegregated public accommodations. That’s restaurants, restrooms, buses. He has said he wants full funding for the Head Start program, but only 25% of the funds are there. He did run the Willie Horton ad in 1988. So do I think President Bush is racist? No. But I don’t think he’s been above using race to get votes. That is what is reprehensible. A person running for President or a President should not divide America, he should unite America . . . .

Q: How does the Democratic Party champion civil rights without being tagged as the party of quotas by the GOP?

A: We begin to address the economic needs of the people who paid the freight for government for the longest time, and who have gotten the least from government, and that’s the middle income. We do that by addressing what are their real financial concerns, college being one of them, health care being another, needless spending being another. Cut some of these programs, eliminate some, show people you’re willing to say no.

Q: Let me ask about something closer to home, something with which you’re quite familiar, which is yourself--

A: That’s a debatable issue. (Laughter)

Q: Your near-defeat last November appears to have had an energizing, even liberating effect. You said it made you realize, “It might be over tomorrow. Forget about the next year or five years. What are you doing today?” What did you mean?

A: Precisely what I said. In a very real sense, I do think it had a very liberating effect. I no longer am the prisoner of other people’s expectations. I am simply whatever I am. I said also, to myself afterward, that for 12 years I only spoke about what I knew. Well, I’ll continue to do that, because that is one of the elements of my public service and something that I believe--don’t speak unless you know what you’re talking about.

But I also said I’m going to talk about what I feel, and I will do that increasingly. So that means that I might step out onto terrain that might be viewed as dangerous, because it’s not a certainty backed by data, but is very much in the flow of everybody’s daily life and things that everybody thinks about. Sharing my own feelings about things was one of my commitments to myself afterward. And following my own intuition more.

Q: With the dearth of front-line Democratic candidates, and now that you’re speaking out more forcefully on national issues, have you had any second thoughts about your decision not to run in 1992?

A: (pause) Not really, no. I said in 1990 that I’d serve my full term, and I couldn’t think of anything that would change that. That’s about as good an answer as you’re going to get.

Q: You’re likely to be on most Democratic presidential candidates’ short list as a potential running mate--

A: I’m not interested.