Narrow Field Gives Boost to Bradley Presidential Bid

On the basketball court, Bill Bradley was known as the consummate team player, but as a presidential candidate it looks as if he may get to play a very different game this year: one on one.

Bradley, the former senator and professional basketball star, is the sole Democrat who has declared his intention to challenge Vice President Al Gore for the party’s presidential nomination in 2000.

And as several party leaders have taken themselves out of contention in the last few weeks, it increasingly appears that Bradley will be the only challenger. The other possibility is civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, who has not taken any steps toward running.

This unusually narrow field could help Bradley find an audience by providing him an unimpeded shot at the front-runner. Bradley will also face fewer competitors for the limited pool of campaign dollars.

“Usually the challenge is to become the alternative,” said Democratic consultant Tad Devine, who ran Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey’s 1992 presidential campaign. “But Bradley already starts as the alternative.”

The shrunken field also reflects Gore’s position within the party, which is so strong that other potential rivals concluded they had little chance.

“They didn’t all just have bad backs,” said former New Hampshire party chairman Jeff Woodburn, in a reference to Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone’s announcement that he would not run in part because of back trouble. “They looked at the reality and said this is a tough, tough race.”

It is not just that Gore, as the vice president, has locked up enormous financial and institutional support. It is that polls find little evidence Democratic voters are looking for an alternative to the “third-way” centrism of Clinton and Gore.

And in a candidacy that is very much marching to its own drummer, Bradley has made only limited progress in articulating an alternative agenda or defining a clear case for changing course.

“It is much too early to be specific on issue differences,” Bradley said in an interview. “I think it is very important to lay a base of who you are and what you believe and where you come from.”

A Gore advisor offered a more pointed evaluation of Bradley’s message to the party so far: “The guy has been all over the map.”

At least he is on the map. In the last two months, the Republican and Democratic presidential contests have begun to resemble escalators moving in different directions.

Republican contenders have been entering the race almost daily, even as leading Democrats have taken themselves out of contention--House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), liberal gadfly Wellstone, 1992 contender Kerrey and, just last week, Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry. That leaves Bradley, who announced his plan to run last December and now has assembled a national staff and begun to build a fund-raising base.

He has started burrowing into Iowa and New Hampshire, the two critical states at the front of the campaign calendar. Democratic operatives both inside and outside his campaign believe that one of Bradley’s best assets may be resistance in those two early states to a process that seems to be driving toward a preordained victory for the vice president.

“People in those states do not like being told from Washington, D.C., that the nomination has been decided,” said Anita Dunn, a senior advisor to Bradley.

Yet Bradley has received mixed reviews in those states. He always has been cerebral and somewhat reserved, but reporters have used adjectives such as “listless,” “vague” and “Zen-like” to describe his first meetings with voters.

In his initial appearances, Bradley has suggested a vision of national leadership focused on supporting the local initiative of “millions of Americans who shine every day.” He has emphasized personal rather than issue contrasts with Gore: his experience living outside Washington and his claim that he has taken bolder stands on polarizing issues such as race relations.

Bradley has not gone far to fill in those broad constructs, but Dunn said that he plans to deliver major policy addresses about once a month, the first late this month on children’s and family issues.

So far, to the extent that Bradley has signaled an alternative course, it mostly has been to criticize the administration from the left. Echoing a celebrated speech by Gephardt in late 1997, Bradley has suggested that Clinton and Gore were offering a shrunken agenda of “rhetorical flourishes followed by tiny demonstration projects.”

Bradley criticized Clinton’s decision to sign the 1996 welfare reform bill and the administration’s support this year for increased defense spending. His other issues also resonate particularly on the left: an offensive on child poverty, campaign finance reform and wider access to health care.

In the Senate, by contrast, Bradley was a staunch free-trader and deficit hawk. He opposed Clinton’s far-reaching national health insurance proposal and offered his own less-ambitious plan to cover the uninsured.

All those positions make him an unlikely figure to rally union leaders and others who believe Clinton and Gore have taken the party too far toward the center. “I don’t see any movement toward Bradley from any side on the left, from the unions or anybody else,” said one leading labor liberal.

Bradley responded that he is not looking to run as the champion of liberals discontented with Clinton. “Every campaign, and especially this one, is about the future and not the past,” Bradley said.

For Bradley, the bigger question is the size of the overall constituency among Democrats for an alternative to Gore. His aides point out that Gore sometimes has polled below 50% in early surveys of Democratic voters--though those surveys invariably have included several of the candidates who since have dropped out. By contrast, the most recent American Research Group poll in New Hampshire, which offered just four choices, put Gore at 61% and Bradley at 9%.

Perhaps more important, a recent survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that fully 83% of Democrats believe that the next president should follow policies similar to Clinton’s--as Gore implicitly offers.

After three months on the campaign trail, Bradley said that he is confident there is an audience for an alternative.

“I find people very open. I also find people are still a little insecure about their own economic circumstances . . . and they are very concerned about the time they spend with their family, and whether it’s enough, and they are concerned about some things in life that are deeper than the material. I find that everywhere I go.”

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Profile: Bill Bradley

* Born: July 28, 1943, in Crystal City, Mo.

* Education: Bachelor’s in history, 1965, Princeton University; earned master’s as Rhodes scholar at Oxford University in England.

* Sports: Basketball star at Princeton; gold medal as member of 1964 U.S. Olympic team; New York Knicks, 1967-77.

* Career highlights: Elected to U.S. Senate from New Jersey, 1978; reelected 1984 and 1990; author of four books.

* Family: Married, one child.