Gore, Bradley Go Shoulder to Shoulder at Town Meeting

Appearing side by side for the first time, Al Gore and Bill Bradley engaged in a civil but intermittently pointed town meeting Wednesday night that highlighted differences of style as much as substance.

Taking the offensive, Gore repeatedly charged that Bradley’s recent proposal to provide health care for millions of uninsured Americans would consume the entire expected federal budget surplus--endangering the economic recovery and precluding efforts to strengthen Medicare.

“If you spend the entire surplus on the first campaign proposal,” Gore said, “then that does not leave money that should be allocated for Medicare.” Bradley held his ground, arguing that Gore was overestimating the long-term cost of his plan, and insisting that the problem of the uninsured demands a comprehensive response. “It is a big problem and it needs a big solution to that problem,” Bradley argued.

On a night that saw the two rivals answer 24 questions about education, the environment, gay rights, and other priorities of the predominantly liberal audience, the exchanges about the cost of Bradley’s health care plan were the most barbed and far-reaching. Partly because the evening’s format did not allow much direct exchange between the two men--it was billed as a town meeting, not a debate--the contrasts in their manner were as vivid as the differences on policy.

Bradley was calm, collected and confidently low-key, if sometimes a bit subdued, in sticking mostly to broad themes. Gore was much more intense--both in challenging Bradley over the specifics of his health care plan, and in doggedly trying to build a rapport with the audience by joking, bantering and even questioning them. “Tell me about your family,” he asked one woman.

Gore set a somewhat frenetic tone even before the event formally began: Stepping out with Bradley on stage 20 minutes before the scheduled starting time, he turned to the crowd and invited them to begin asking questions before the cameras went on--which they did. Ninety minutes after the broadcast ended, long after Bradley had gone, Gore was still on the stage, fielding questions.

After the event, Dartmouth College professor of government Dean Spiliotes said that “Gore seemed a bit overeager at the beginning [and] . . . a little bit over-aggressive” at the end. By contrast, he said, Bradley seemed “really relaxed. He doesn’t look premeditated.”

Jointly sponsored by CNN and WMUR-TV, of Manchester, N.H., the event’s format did not allow the two men to question each other, directly rebut the other’s comments or make opening or closing statements. Instead, they answered questions from an audience of 230 New Hampshire residents and another 96 students and faculty who assembled in a theater on the campus of Dartmouth here. The two networks chose the questions in advance, but did not inform the candidates of the subjects.

While the two men did not take any new positions, the event did produce some striking moments as they forcefully expressed their views only a few feet from each other.

Bradley, for instance, delivered an impassioned plea for allowing gays to serve openly in the military. “If a gay American can serve openly in the White House, in the Congress, in the courts . . . why can’t they serve openly in the U.S. military?” Bradley said.

Gore expressed opposition to legal recognition of homosexual marriages, but said that gay partners should receive the same health and other benefits as heterosexual couples. “The time has come for gays and lesbians to be recognized within the circle of human dignity,” he said.

In response to the very first question he faced--a question about public cynicism that never specifically cited President Clinton--Gore distanced himself from Clinton’s behavior during the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal. “I understand the disappointment and anger that you feel toward President Clinton and I felt it myself,” Gore said. “I also feel that the American people want to move on and turn the page and focus on the future and not the past.”

On foreign policy, the two men subtly differed. Gore emphasized America’s responsibility to intervene in cases like Kosovo and Bosnia where human rights are threatened. “We have to accept that mantle of leadership,” he said. Without directly disagreeing, Bradley said the U.S. should rely more on institutions like the United Nations and NATO where “we don’t take the full responsibility but we play a part.”

Gore was more aggressive throughout the evening. Repeatedly he referred to his challenge to Bradley to hold weekly debates; at one point, he squeezed in a reference to the former New Jersey senator’s support for school vouchers--an idea anathema to most Democrats. Bradley, by contrast, gently changed the subject toward broader reform issues when one questioner pointedly invited him to comment on the Clinton administration’s controversial 1996 campaign fund-raising.

Gore raised his sharpest questions about the cost of Bradley’s agenda, particularly his health care plan. Bradley recently proposed spending what he said would be $65 billion a year to guarantee health care for all children, and millions of uninsured working adults.

Citing a new study by an Emory University professor, Gore maintained Bradley’s plan would actually cost $1.2 trillion over the next decade, more than the anticipated federal surplus. Gore then argued that such spending could endanger the economic recovery.

“One of the reasons we have a strong economy now is because we’ve been able to keep interest rates low, balancing the budget and better, by having fiscal responsibility,” Gore said. “So spending more than the entire budget surplus, and then piling on top of that proposals that may sound great but for which there is no money, is something that ought to be looked at very carefully.”

Gore’s emphasis on the issue suggests that the cost of Bradley’s agenda--which also includes a series of steps to reduce child poverty--is likely to become an increasing focus in the days ahead. While Bradley said Gore’s estimate about the cost of his health care program was wrong, he never directly responded to the vice president’s charge that such a level of new spending could harm the economy. Earlier in the debate, in one of his few gibes, Bradley needled Gore for not offering more detailed estimates for the cost of his own agenda.

The event drew enormous attention as the first real head-to-head confrontation of the tightening Democratic race. Hundreds of print and television reporters crammed into a sprawling media filing center, and operatives from the two campaigns snaked through the aisles like sidewalk peddlers, hawking handouts on their candidate’s agenda--and self-serving analysis of the event.

The town meeting capped a carnival-like day at Dartmouth that captured the unique intensity of the primary season in New Hampshire--a state that for nearly five decades has zealously guarded its role as the site of the first presidential primary.

Under crisp fall skies, wandering bands of young Bradley and Gore supporters waved signs, stretched banners and chanted competing slogans at each other. At one intersection in midafternoon, a dozen Gore backers taunted Bradley backers with the vice president’s rallying cry in recent weeks: “Stay and fight.” From across the street, the Bradley contingent fired back with an even sharper three-word retort. “Eight is enough,” the Bradley backers answered--in a refrain that shouted their hopes of ending the Clinton era by denying the next Democratic nomination to Gore.

Times staff writers Ed Chen and Ann-Marie O’Connor contributed to this story.

*

EXCERPTS: A28