Bradley Strikes Supportive Vein in Male Voters

Middle-aged men sidle up to Bill Bradley at nearly every stop he makes in his insurgent campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Some carry basketballs for him to autograph--so sheepish they get tongue-tied when they meet him. Some slap him on the back as if they have known him for years.

Restaurant owner Richard Ferrin found himself tagging along recently as Bradley led a small crowd of supporters on a walking tour down the main drag of this tiny Manchester suburb. Ferrin approached the candidate as he passed a tattoo parlor and joshed with Bradley about the candidate’s days as a New York Knicks basketball great--and as an enemy of Ferrin’s beloved Boston Celtics. When the crowd moved on, Ferrin hung back, watching in admiration.

“I just want someone who has a clear mind, no baggage, a straight shooter,” said Ferrin, 54, a Republican who recently registered as an independent. In February, he said, watching Bradley’s elongated frame lope down the street, he may vote Democrat. “I like this guy.”

It is a guy thing, this curious, low-key bond that connects the former New Jersey senator and male voters in the early stages of the Democratic primary season. Bradley’s sudden appeal among men, atypical among recent Democratic presidential hopefuls, has sharpened his threat to Vice President Al Gore’s hopes to succeed Bill Clinton and is emerging as one of the more surprising aspects of the still-unshaped campaign.

Bradley’s male appeal is both obvious and mysterious. He makes ample use of his basketball career and jock status, surrounding himself with hoop legends like Julius Erving and John Havlicek at fund-raisers and peppering his campaign speeches with well-timed references to his glory days. He talks almost wistfully about his “life on the road,” both as a politician and as an athlete.

But even the passionate American obsession with sports celebrity does not fully explain Bradley’s legion of male boosters. Friends and aides spin theories that range from the analytical--Gore’s clinging cloud of anti-Clinton fatigue--to the trivial--Bradley’s laid-back habit of sucking on throat lozenges, which onlookers sometimes mistake for gum-chomping machismo.

Sooner or later, they all come back to Bradley’s laconic and seemingly unvarnished campaign style. “I think what comes across is that he’s at home with himself,” said Don Roth, the managing partner in a Washington-based international investment firm and a former World Bank treasurer who has been tight with Bradley since their days as teammates on Princeton University’s basketball squad. “Maybe because he’s going for broke.”

Democratic Pollsters Voice Caution

A candidate who could broaden his appeal among men while retaining the Democratic Party’s recent inroads among women would seem a potent prospect for the millennial election. Yet despite Bradley’s refrain that he is more electable than Gore and polls that consistently show him outperforming Gore among men, Democratic campaign veterans are cautious about the meaning and endurance of his gender boomlet.

“If there’s something that’s appealing [to men] about Bradley as a

candidate, the question is if there’s a potential to broaden that appeal,” muses Democratic pollster Geoff Garin.

Bradley has no patience for instant analysis, shrugging off even a passing interest in how his support breaks down.

His staff is quick to downplay polling along gender lines, says campaign spokesman Eric Hauser, because “we don’t segment voters.”

But aides are paying attention. “Every place he goes, you hear men in the crowd saying they don’t agree with everything Bill Bradley says, but they like the way he speaks his mind. They think he’s leveling with them,” said Mark Longabaugh, Bradley’s New Hampshire campaign director.

At a recent backyard rally in Iowa City, the host, Michael Flaum, 45, waited with a still-unsigned basketball as Bradley chatted with supporters under a white tent.

When Flaum, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Iowa, was growing up a Knicks fan in New York, he said, Bradley meant “everything to me.” Flaum said his idol was a master at scoring “in clutch situations, and I think we should give him the ball now.”

Bradley ambled over, took the ball from his host and arced a shot over his shoulder toward a basketball hoop hanging from a nearby barn. He missed once, then again, finally swishing the third time. Bradley shrugged and grinned. The clutch shot was rusty, but Flaum’s doting smile showed the potency of Bradley’s political hook.

Bradley’s edge among male voters has remained strong even as his surprising early surge over Gore in New Hampshire has softened in recent weeks. A Times Poll conducted Nov. 13 to Nov. 18 in the state shows Bradley behind Gore by a single percentage point but running 10 points better than Gore among men than women. Similarly, the Connecticut-based Quinnipiac College Poll found Gore gaining on Bradley in New Hampshire but lagging 11 percentage points among men.

Bradley’s first campaign commercial, now playing in New Hampshire and Iowa, sends messages to both genders in its 60-second span. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) lauds Bradley for his role in the 1986 tax reform bill--”an issue that resounds well among men,” said former Republican vice presidential candidate Jack Kemp.

“Bill Bradley is hitting on some of the paternal issues that Republicans usually have a lock on,” Kemp said. The former Housing and Urban Development secretary in the Bush administration, who tossed around footballs at campaign rallies during the 1996 race to play up his own past as an NFL quarterback, predicts that Bradley’s “shaking up” of traditional party voting patterns is not a fleeting phenomenon.

Bradley’s first ad ends with a clear nod to feminine issues. Its tagline is a Philadelphia woman’s brief paean to Bradley for his role in protecting new mothers from being hurried out of hospitals in “drive-through births.” A second ad released last week is devoted entirely to the issue and Bradley’s sponsoring of the 1996 Newborns’ and Mothers’ Health and Protection Act.

Though he minimizes the importance of his backing among men, Bradley takes pains to depict himself as sensitive to women’s issues--an unstated acknowledgment that he feels pressed to broaden the male-dominated ranks of his primary supporters.

“I think women don’t know some of the things I’ve done in Congress, and some of the things I want to do,” Bradley conceded in an appearance this month before a women’s group in Dubuque, Iowa.

Barbara Norrander, a political scientist at the University of Arizona who has studied sex-based voting returns from the 1992 and 1996 presidential primaries, said Bradley’s yawning gender gap in support appears wider than any seen recently among candidates of either party in primary campaigns.

“Men and women tend to perceive differences in candidates, but the gap in the way they vote is closer than you would think,” Norrander said--rarely greater than 3 or 4 percentage points. The widest span arose in the 1992 Republican primary in New Hampshire, Norrander said, when GOP men deserted President Bush for the pitchfork rebellion of conservative commentator Patrick J. Buchanan. Bush lagged behind Buchanan among men by 6 percentage points, Norrander said.

But like Buchanan, she said, Bradley could see his early gains quickly peter out if he fails to stake out positions on topics that “do well with women.” Among those issues, Norrander says, are health care, education and the environment--all items Bradley now stresses in campaign speeches.

Former Reagan aide Michael K. Deaver believes style often trumps issues as primary voters first sort out their attitudes toward presidential candidates. Both Bradley and maverick Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona have bypassed the “flat impressions” that most voters have of career politicians because of their previous public lives as professional athlete and war hero.

Noting that a life before politics “helped Reagan in the early going,” Deaver said that Bradley may also benefit from “the feeling you get from him that his life doesn’t completely depend on winning the presidency--that he’s comfortable enough with himself that, if he doesn’t make it, it’s not the end of the world.”

But many Democratic Party regulars doubt male voters in key primary states will stay with Bradley as his liberal stances on social issues are highlighted. They suspect as well that his support among men will evaporate beyond the Northeast corridor states where his basketball past is best known.

“Basketball stardom doesn’t do much for women,” says Samuel Popkin, a UC San Diego political scientist who polled for Clinton in 1992 and now does work for the Gore campaign. Popkin says that the Democratic Party’s edge among women, which proved crucial to Clinton’s 1992 and 1996 electoral wins, is still the best base to exploit in trying to hold on to the presidency.

Even Democratic moderates who worry about the party’s over-reliance on female voters are skeptical about the durability of Bradley’s surge among men if he fails to develop issues that appeal to women.

The gender gap could become a “double-edged sword” if the Democratic presidential nominee is unable to bring more male voters back to the party, said Will Marshall, president of the centrist Progressive Policy Institute. But Marshall expects that Bradley’s “novelty as a sports star and an outsider will melt away” as men learn more about his plan to overhaul America’s health care system and its underlying “message of large, expansive government.”

Not Impressed With ‘Big Government’

Ferrin, the seafood cafe owner who approached Bradley in Derry, is a longtime Republican and has little faith in typical Democratic “big government” programs. For that reason, among others, Al Gore “leaves me cold,” he said. Unimpressed, too, with Texas Gov. George W. Bush, Ferrin has already narrowed his choices to Bradley and McCain, registering as an independent so he will have the luxury of voting in either party’s primary on Feb. 1 for his favorite.

Shivering in a hooded sweatshirt when he saw Bradley pass by on his town walk in Derry, Ferrin nudged the candidate in the ribs. The two men talked basketball for a few moments. When Bradley sized Ferrin up as a Celtics fan, he casually mentioned his recent $1.5-million Madison Square Garden fund-raising appearance with Celtics greats Havlicek, Bill Russell and Bob Cousy.

Ferrin was still grinning as Bradley loped away. “It’s not just because of the basketball,” Ferrin said, defending his interest in a candidate he admittedly knows little about.

“He isn’t for all the things I believe in, but sometimes you have to go with the guy you think is the best man.”

Times staff writer Matea Gold contributed to this story.