When the Personal Becomes Political--or Maybe Not

George W. Bush won’t talk about aspects of his distant past but lets it be known he has just 19.11% body fat.

Bill Bradley keeps his religion and choice of books to himself; his wife bristles when asked when they got married. But Al Gore shares, even flaunts, his inner self. John McCain lays out his bumpy life in a book and swamps the public with 1,500 pages of health records going back 45 years.

All the presidential candidates are forming a zone of privacy in the campaign and coming to very different conclusions on what’s in and what’s out.

“I think that every politician has to decide how much of themselves are they going to share,” says Bradley, miserly in that regard.

The Clinton presidency shook up notions on when the personal should become political. President Clinton struggled with questions about other women from the start, spoke often and with feeling about his difficult childhood, and answered a question about his choice of underwear.

Vice President Gore, who released his health records last week, introduces himself to religious audiences as “a child of the Kingdom.” He has used his son’s brush with death after being hit by a car in 1989 and his sister’s death from cancer in 1984 to bring audiences to tears.

Against that backdrop, Democratic rival Bradley is reticent, almost aloof.

“In some cases they are willing to talk about themselves in candid ways,” said Robert Schmuhl, a Notre Dame political scientist who wrote the book “Statecraft and Stagecraft: American Political Life in the Age of Personality.”

“In other cases a wall descends and it becomes up to others to try to penetrate it.”

Bradley released a two-page letter from his doctor giving him a clean bill of health--apart from the previously undisclosed irregular heartbeat that forced him to cancel a day’s campaign events after he forgot his twice-daily pills.

When asked earlier this year to name his favorite book, he demurred, saying: “I’d rather not go down that road.” He would not tell the New York Daily News if he’d ever had psychotherapy, saying, “That’s way too personal.”

And he has steadfastly refused to discuss his religion--he grew up Presbyterian--except to say he believes in God. “I think that that is an extremely private matter for people,” he said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

To hear Bradley and his wife, Ernestine, on the stump, voters wouldn’t know they had a daughter--Theresa Anne, 22, who is studying abroad. And when a reporter recently asked Ernestine Bradley when she and her husband were married, she shook her head in disgust and said sharply: “Please let us have some privacy.”

They were married in January 1974.

“Just as you can go too far in the revelation of private material, you can go too far in not answering what to many people are legitimate questions,” Schmuhl said.

Robert J. Bies, a Georgetown University scholar whose expertise includes political leadership and workplace privacy, said Bradley’s chances of holding the beachhead on privacy are “small, slim, none.”

“It looks like you’re hiding something,” he said. Besides, the nation has seen “the Oprahfication of the political process--’I’ll share and bare my soul.’ People connect with the personal. The consequence is, now everybody is expected to do it.”

Texas Gov. Bush admits he used to drink too much before swearing off alcohol 13 years ago, but he won’t say whether he ever used drugs as a youth. His campaign released a three-page doctor’s statement in late September about his medical history.

His Republican rival McCain, a former Vietnam prisoner of war, made his medical document dump when questions began quietly circulating from congressional critics about his mental stability. The Arizona senator’s campaign staff said the questions hastened their plans to release the records anyway.

McCain’s records declared him to be mentally stable while disclosing he had a dangerous form of skin cancer removed from his shoulder in December 1993, with no recurrence.

“To the degree it may affect us, we want to know about it,” said Bies. Possible drug use more than 25 years ago may not qualify, he said, but a candidate’s health does.

“If there is any doubt about the physical fitness of a candidate the public deserves that information,” agreed Schmuhl.