Bradley Takes Measured Response to Barbs

Bill Bradley detoured from the high road after weeks of absorbing barbs from Vice President Al Gore, poking in recent days at his rival’s health care estimates and political ads just as new polls showed a tightened race in the pivotal New Hampshire primary.

If the former New Jersey senator needed reasons to toughen his stance against Gore, they were apparent in three New Hampshire polls this week that showed the vice president erasing slim leads that Bradley had opened up a month earlier. The state’s growing ranks of independent-aligned voters are seen as his best hope to provide an early shock to Gore’s campaign, and any signs of stall there for Bradley could prove deadly.

Yet, even when he goes on the attack, Bradley appears to hew to his own sense of timing. Intent on talking trash only when he finds it necessary, Bradley has purposely distanced his campaign from the frenetic 24-hour attack-and-respond pace pioneered in 1992 and 1996 by President Clinton’s “war room” operatives and echoed this fall by Gore’s campaign staff. Bradley’s style, aides and analysts say, fits the candidate as naturally as his rumpled suits and should play well among New Hampshire’s free thinkers.

“The issue is, can you run for office in a way that helps to transform the process,” Bradley explained en route to a Boston campaign stop late last week. “And the only way you can test that hypothesis is by doing it. That’s what I’m trying to do.”

Some political observers wonder if the process has instead begun to transform Bradley. His willingness to shed his “positive vision,” even briefly, is taken by some as a sign that the onrushing pressures of a compressed primary season will eventually force him to succumb to a more aggressive approach.

“At some point the philosopher king has got to meet his subjects,” said Tom Rath, a Concord, N.H., lawyer and veteran Republican activist.

Bradley showed his spikiness Monday when he used a speech before a public health providers group in Chicago to belittle Gore’s plans to provide medical coverage for uninsured Americans as “small, symbolic things.” Three days later, Bradley’s staff wheeled quickly into action within hours of the release of a Gore television spot on health care, mocking it as intellectual theft of Bradley’s ambitious ideas.

Bradley’s disciplined absorbing of Gore’s sniping in an Oct. 27 town hall debate at Dartmouth College may have appeared admirable to some primary voters, Rath said. But “it only works a couple of times. Sooner or later, you can’t let [Gore] plant all these bombs.”

Democratic Party consultant David Doak, an advisor in California Gov. Gray Davis’ 1998 campaign victory, described Bradley’s dilemma as “a classic scenario of modern politics. You can have the finest positive campaign going until someone attacks you and you have to deal with it. The question is, do you dictate the timing or does your opponent.”

Privately, Bradley has told intimates that he consciously did not want his campaign operation to replicate the perpetual alert style of political combat perfected by Clinton aides in 1992 and now replicated by presidential aspirants in both parties.

“Ultimately, voters aren’t swayed by a flurry of tactical attacks,” said Eric Hauser, Bradley’s press spokesman. “Decisions are based on core perceptions of the candidate.”

But Bradley has been careful not to foreclose his ability to lash back. He has talked about “throwing elbows,” his basketball metaphor for clearing foes out of the way. And although he talked of conducting a general election campaign free of the taint of soft money, he also noted ominously that if there were no rules, he would pursue the same financing sources Republicans sought.

After Gore’s campaign began playing its latest television ad on health care Thursday--one of a series of spots that the vice president’s organization bought for $76,500 in recent weeks--Bradley’s staff responded in three hours like grizzled veterans from Little Rock, Ark.

“Does this sound familiar?” they asked repeatedly, jabbing at Gore for parroting Bradley’s lines.

Senior Gore advisors insist that Bradley undercuts his own image by counterattacking after he had repeatedly stressed he would stay positive. When he returns fire, they said, Bradley comes off looking like a standard-issue politician.

After taping a television talk show in Iowa on Thursday night, Gore noted of Bradley: “Instead of lobbing rhetorical grenades at me, why doesn’t he just say, ‘OK, I will accept your challenge and then let’s debate every week and pick a different issue every week’?”

With New Hampshire’s Feb. 1 presidential primary scheduled three weeks earlier than in past election cycles, some Democratic Party operatives said, candidates’ impressions may be solidifying sooner in voters’ minds.

“The fact is,” said Jeff Woodburn, a former New Hampshire state political chairman and a Gore loyalist, that until recent days, Bradley “had the luxury of being ignored. That luxury is over.”

Yet even pollsters whose surveys showed Gore benefiting from the most recent bounce in New Hampshire were quick to note that public perceptions of both campaigns have yet to show indications of gelling. The two candidates will likely exchange leads several times in the months to come, said Dartmouth government professor Dean Spiliotes.

The Dartmouth College/Associated Press poll, which found Gore with a 48%-to-41% lead over Bradley as of Nov. 9, shows little evidence that either candidate “is peaking early or cementing their position,” Spiliotes said. “Not much has changed except that Gore has engaged a little more directly. It’s not clear yet that Bradley’s doing anything wrong.” The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 5 percentage points.

Still, Bradley’s supporters in New Hampshire expressed relief that their man had finally taken on Gore. An insurgent who is in it to win, they said, has to know when to play the saint and when to mix it up.

“Gore needed a response to some extent,” said Clifton Below, a state senator and Bradley backer from Lebanon, N.H. “But Bradley’s attraction is that he doesn’t respond willy-nilly to everything out there.”

Below said he worries less about how Bradley handles attacks than he does about how New Hampshire’s growing bloc of independent-registered voters will vote. The state’s 270,000-odd independents have, for the first time, outstripped either party, state elections officials said last week. And their loyalties appear divided between Bradley and Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona. Because independents can vote in either primary, a vote for McCain could be one less vote for Bradley, Below said.

*

Times staff writers Mark Z. Barabak, Ronald Brownstein and Edwin Chen contributed to this story.