Bradley ‘Traction’ Points to a New Game for Gore

“When you have played basketball for a while, you don’t need to look at the basket when you are in close like this,” [Bradley] said, throwing it over his shoulder again and right through the hoop. “You develop a sense of where you are.”

--From John McPhee’s 1965 profile of Bill Bradley, “A Sense of Where You Are.”

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Watching candidate Bill Bradley on the campaign trail, playing one-on-one against Vice President Al Gore, you realize he still has a sense of where he is.

“I don’t think we have momentum. I think we have a little traction,” he tells reporters, reacting cautiously to polls that show him gaining in some states and edging ahead in New Hampshire, site of the nation’s first presidential primary.

Momentum implies heightened expectations and impending victory, Bradley apparently thinks. Don’t get complacent. Traction connotes an effective strategy and steady progress. Keep working the ball toward the basket.

“The real time to have momentum is in January and February and March of next year.”

But isn’t he getting an adrenaline boost from all the polls, the Time cover story, the chaos in the Gore camp?

“You don’t get adrenaline boosts in the second quarter,” answers the All-American and NBA Hall of Famer. “You get the adrenaline boosts when you’re headed toward the final minutes of the game. And we’re far from that.”

For now, says the Rhodes scholar and former U.S. senator from New Jersey, he needs to retain a “clarity of focus” about himself and his goals. These include: extending health care coverage to the 45 million uninsured Americans, reducing childhood poverty, reforming campaign financing by banning “soft money” while using public funds in congressional general elections, registering handguns, “bridging the divide” of racial prejudice and “defining more clearly America’s role in the world.”

He’ll push “big programs,” Bradley promises; Gore’s an “incrementalist.”

Told that Gore has just likened their race to a choice between “Pepsi and Coke,” Bradley replies dryly: “Really? I always thought I was diet wild cherry.”

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[Bradley] dislikes flamboyance and, unlike some of basketball’s greatest stars, has apparently never made a move merely to attract attention.

--McPhee

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Besides a sense of where he is, Bradley clearly has a sense of who he is.

He definitely is not flamboyant. Nor a spellbinding orator. But at 6 feet 5, Bradley commands attention just by walking into a room. He exudes self-confidence. He’s calm, collected and in control, whether hosting a round-table discussion on health care or appearing on “Larry King Live.” He makes people comfortable and projects competence--both in small groups and before millions on TV.

On this day, he is at Oakland Children’s Hospital talking up his new $65-billion, cradle-to-grave health care plan. He talks briefly, easily, to several children with disabilities, then listens to the concerns of medical professionals, health care advocates and parents.

How would he use the nation’s new budget surplus, a parent asks. “Not for a tax cut. My priority would be to use it for health care. . . . Health care is a right, not something you get on occasion.”

He picks up one of his rare endorsements from a California politician: veteran, liberal state Sen. John Vasconcellos (D-Santa Clara). All the big-name state Democrats have signed up with Gore. But Vasconcellos says:

“Americans are looking for a president they can look up to--no pun intended--morally as well as intellectually. . . . Gore’s a good guy, but he’s got too much Clinton baggage and not enough charisma.”

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Bradley has Gore on the run--literally, away from Washington and out to a new campaign headquarters in Nashville. But, to paraphrase a former boxing champ’s comment about an opponent: Gore can run, but he can’t hide from the Clinton baggage.

Pollster Mark Baldassare of the Public Policy Institute recently found that 60% of California’s likely voters--including 36% of Democrats-- “dislike” Clinton personally, regardless of what they think of his policies. “Voters may want to turn a new page,” the pollster says.

They’re reminded of Clinton whenever they see Gore on TV. And it doesn’t help the vice president that, unlike Bradley, he often looks uncomfortable and unconfident--a man who may not have a sense of where or who he is.

Gore has visited California 59 times as VP and polls, pegged to the March 7 primary, show him with a big lead over Bradley. But there’s a growing sense this is a new ballgame and that it could get close in the fourth quarter.