Bradley Record: Tangled Trail of ‘Solo Operator’ : Candidate: The Democrat’s Senate swings lead to questions about his candidacy. Critics see failures to follow through.

In late 1993, then-Sen. Bill Bradley insisted in a major speech that every American “should be guaranteed access to quality health care”--a cause he’s embraced again in his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination formally announced last week.

But in 1994, when President Clinton launched the most serious effort to provide universal health coverage since the Truman administration, Bradley largely remained aloof from the legislative struggle--and, critics charge, ultimately contributed to the plan’s demise.

Such swings between impassioned advocacy and inscrutable disengagement defined Bradley’s 18 years as a Democratic senator from New Jersey.

Extensive interviews and an analysis of his three terms show that Bradley avoided entangling alliances with virtually any Washington power center and steered a solitary course whose direction was often apparent only to himself.

“He has consciously stood aloof from virtually any political movement or school,” says Will Marshall, director of the centrist Progressive Policy Institute. “He’s very much a solo operator in politics.”

Two large questions about Bradley’s presidential hopes emerge from his Senate career. One is whether his legislative record fits with his effort to position himself as a liberal alternative to Vice President Al Gore. The second is whether he exhibited the focus and toughness it takes to drive an agenda as president.

As a former Rhodes scholar and professional basketball star, Bradley arrived in Washington in 1979 as the object of great expectations. By the time he left in 1996--declaring that “politics is broken”--he had become the subject of considerable mystification.

In the Senate, Bradley was neither a doctrinaire liberal nor a member of the “New Democratic” movement, led by then-Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas, that challenged traditional liberalism, beginning in the 1980s. Bradley helped drive some important legislative achievements, including the major 1986 reform of the federal tax code, but he never emerged as a major legislative force with a long list of laws bearing his imprint.

His admirers saw a politician of unusual independence and intellectual integrity who, as his campaign literature now puts it, “always took the long view.” But critics, including many in his own party, saw a consistent underachiever who closeted himself in abstruse issues such as Third World debt and over time grew increasingly tangential to many of the key debates facing Congress and his party.

“Bill Bradley kind of answers to his own drummer,” says Democratic lobbyist Bob Chlopak, who directed the coalition of liberal groups that supported Clinton’s health care plan. “He did not, on a lot of issues . . . dig in with his colleagues and try to build a majority. He had his own ideas and he went his own ways.”

Brains, Energy and Question Marks

Almost everyone who dealt with him considered Bradley smart and hard-working. But after that, opinions about his effectiveness in the Senate and his potential skill as president scatter.

Some friends, such as former Sen. John C. Danforth (R-Mo.), believe Bradley, with his desire to set his own course, might be better suited for an executive rather than a legislative role. “He was a person who had definite ideas of how he thought legislation should go, and he was not . . . comfortable making a lot of compromises,” Danforth said. “That’s a better quality for a president, actually.”

But others worry that Bradley’s distaste for the sausage-like deal-making of practical politics would lead him to become a taller version of former President Carter, unable to translate his reformist impulses into successful programs. The most common criticism of Bradley is that while he can make powerful speeches--like a dramatic Senate floor statement on race relations in which he rapped a pencil 56 times to symbolize each time Los Angeles police struck Rodney G. King--he often failed to follow through with concrete proposals or action.

“I don’t know whether it was his personality or what, but he was just not a major factor on the floor of the Senate,” said one liberal former Democratic senator.

Even among liberal New Jersey groups, opinions divide about Bradley’s effectiveness.

Jeff Tittel, director of the New Jersey Sierra Club, found Bradley accessible and forceful, not only on national issues but also on local concerns, such as acquiring new forest lands for parks. “There were times when he did things where you didn’t even have to ask, and today in politics that’s pretty much a rarity.”

But leaders of New Jersey Citizen Action, a group that primarily focuses on low-income communities, considered him less consistently engaged. “I wouldn’t say he was as much a leader on some of these issues as a supporter,” said Vic DeLuca, the group’s longtime chairman. “He never closed the door to us . . . but his style was a little aloof from mixing it up with us. He was fascinating to talk to . . . but you got the sense you were talking to him on an intellectual level, as opposed to a gut level, on a lot of these issues.”

Bradley’s Senate record also sheds light on his efforts to establish contrasts in the campaign with Gore, a former senator from Tennessee.

In Congress, there was relatively little daylight between their overall voting records. An Associated Press computer analysis of 2,137 roll call votes the two men cast from 1985 to 1992, when their Senate tenures overlapped, found they voted alike 79% of the time. They compiled virtually identical pro-labor vote ratings from the AFL-CIO.

Another analysis of their voting records, this one by the weekly magazine National Journal, shows the two men took similar positions on economic issues, with Bradley slightly more liberal than Gore on both cultural and foreign policy concerns.

Some of Bradley’s campaign priorities today, such as his focus on racial reconciliation or reducing the number of children in poverty, flow directly from the issues he stressed as a senator. Bradley took a leading role, not only in expanding Medicaid for poor women and children during the 1980s, but also in enlarging the earned-income tax credit, which provides tax breaks for working poor families, and in toughening child support collection. He joined liberal critics in opposing the 1996 welfare reform law, which imposed time limits on aid.

Some Votes Veered From Liberal Track

But other aspects of Bradley’s voting record may complicate his efforts to consolidate liberal support against Gore.

In 1981, he voted for President Reagan’s sweeping budget cuts (while opposing the tax cuts the administration also pushed through); in 1986, he voted for military aid to the right-wing Nicaraguan Contras; in 1996, he voted for a centrist budget plan that included a reduction in cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security and other entitlement programs; and throughout his career, he was a staunch backer of free-trade policies.

All those positions are anathema to the left.

On some issues, Bradley is already reversing his congressional positions. In the Senate, he voted repeatedly to allow tests of school vouchers, which would provide federal money that parents could use to send their children to private schools, and also for the vouchers’ close cousin, tax credits, to offset the costs of private schools’ tuition. But as a candidate, he has renounced vouchers, which are staunchly opposed by powerful teacher groups.

As a senator, Bradley opposed subsidies for ethanol, a fuel additive made from corn. Now, saying he has to represent the whole country and not just New Jersey, he’s indicated support for ethanol, a priority for farmers in Iowa, site of the first presidential caucus.

At various points in his career, Bradley has indicated sympathy for means-testing social programs, such as Medicare, so that wealthier recipients receive smaller benefits. In a 1993 speech, he called for replacing the payroll tax that funds Social Security and Medicare with consumption taxes.

Record Inconsistent on Health Care

Even on expanding access to health care--one of the cornerstones of his presidential bid--Bradley may find himself tangled in his record.

In October 1993, Bradley delivered his speech to a Washington think tank calling for universal health coverage. But for most of 1994, he remained peripheral to the debate on Clinton’s plan for universal coverage--even though he sat on the Senate Finance Committee, which had principal jurisdiction over the proposal.

Then, in June 1994, as the plan faced its critical test in the committee, Bradley came out against Clinton’s main mechanism for universal coverage: the mandate that most employers insure their workers. Bradley called the idea politically impractical and damaging to small business.

Instead, Bradley offered his own plan: requiring individuals to purchase their own insurance. Low-income workers would buy the insurance through federal subsidies paid for by taxes on cigarettes, ammunition, handguns and existing health care plans that offered the most generous benefits.

Such taxes on the so-called high-value plans were favored by some health care reformers. But the plan outraged liberal groups working for universal coverage, particularly unions, which saw Bradley’s proposed tax on high-value plans as an arrow aimed at the benefits they had won in collective bargaining.

Under such criticism, Bradley shifted direction and signed on to a scaled-down Democratic health care plan that included a smaller employer mandate than Clinton’s measure. But by then, the health care effort was dead in all but name, and the plan expired without reaching the Senate floor.

Liberals saw Bradley’s original defection on the employer mandate as one critical step in the collapse of Clinton’s plan. But former Sen. Dave Durenberger, a Republican from Minnesota, says that Bradley’s proposal has to be seen as part of feverish efforts by centrists in both parties to reach a compromise that could have resolved the health care impasse.

“What I’ve always thought about [Bradley] is, if there was a chance to find a bridge between the two sides, he would like to help find that,” Durenberger said.

Overall, Bradley’s Senate career followed an unusual arc. He made his biggest impact in his first years, when he played a key role in the Democratic opposition to the 1981 Reagan tax cut and helped provide the intellectual foundation for the 1986 tax reform law.

But Bradley’s roles in both the Senate and the internal debates about the Democratic Party’s direction seemed to diminish over time. “There had been rumblings of change throughout the 1980s--but [former Sen.] Gary Hart drove a lot of that; Bradley was never in the forefront,” says Al From, chairman of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. “And in the 1990s, Bradley wasn’t really part of the debate at all.”

It’s a measure of Bradley’s independence--or diffidence--that he didn’t fit entirely into any major intellectual tradition in the party. Centrist “New Democrats,” such as Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute, describe Bradley as “a soft revisionist”--sympathetic on some issues but not aligned with their systematic critique of liberalism.

Organized labor and civil rights groups praise Bradley on most issues, but overall he was not seen as a champion of the traditional left either. “Except on tax simplification . . . all of his instincts were just very, very cautious and conventional,” says Roger Hickey, co-director of the left-leaning Campaign for America’s Future.

Bradley has more in common with the neoliberals of the early 1980s--cerebral reformers like Hart who combined traditionally liberal views on social issues with an emphasis on economic growth and efficiency.

But Bradley stopped short of identifying himself with neoliberalism; in an early 1980s interview with the author of a book on the movement, Bradley slammed his fist on his desk and insisted, “There is no new club!”

Bradley’s deepest ties, both emotionally and intellectually, may not be to any faction in the Democratic Party at all. In his 1996 memoir, “Time Present, Time Past,” the tradition Bradley identifies with most is not the assertive partisanship of Franklin D. Roosevelt or John F. Kennedy but the nonpartisan reform crusades of “the abolitionists, the progressives, the civil rights activists and even some of the early environmentalists who were willing to take a public policy stand that was rooted in a moral view of the world and based on individual conviction.”

That is a view subtly tinctured with disdain for the deal-making and flexible principles that legislative achievement in Washington often demands.

“Politicians of principle don’t always win,” Bradley wrote, “but they know who they are.”

He clearly sees himself as a politician of principle who places great stock in knowing who he is. And critics would say that his modest legislative accomplishments over 18 years validate the first half of his equation.

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Bradley’s Voting History

Here are some of the key votes Democratic presidential candidate Bill Bradley cast during his 18 years in the Senate:

* BUDGET: Helped lead Democratic opposition to President Reagan’s 1981 tax cut measure but was one of 31 Senate Democrats voting for Reagan’s sweeping budget cuts. After that, took a more mainstream Democratic position on budget issues--opposing a 1984 plan to freeze federal spending, a 1985 GOP-sponsored budget-cutting package and the Gramm-Rudman law requiring automatic spending reductions. Backed President Clinton’s deficit reduction plan in 1993.

* ENTITLEMENTS: Played key role in expansion of Medicaid coverage for poor women and children in 1980s. Voted against reductions in Social Security cost-of-living adjustments in 1981 and 1985, but for them in 1996. Voted for a “sense of the Senate” resolution in 1996 supporting a plan to partially privatize Social Security and raise the retirement age.

* FOREIGN POLICY: Supported Reagan’s request for military aid to Nicaraguan Contras in 1986 but then voted against it in 1988. In 1989, voted to impose sanctions on China after the Tiananmen Square massacre; later backed Clinton’s decision to provide most-favored-nation trading status to Beijing despite the Chinese government’s record of human rights violations. Was an early advocate of airstrikes against Serbian forces in Bosnia. Consistently argued that U.S. aid to Russia must be tied to military and economic reform, and opposed several economic aid packages to Russia proposed by President Bush.

* RACE: Opposed Reagan’s efforts to curtail school busing and roll back executive order requiring federal contractors to pursue affirmative action. Gave passionate speeches urging racial reconciliation in 1990s but played little role in the Civil Rights Act of 1991.

* SOCIAL POLICY: Supported abortion rights and opposed school prayer and a constitutional amendment to ban flag-burning. Expressed opposition to the death penalty during his first Senate campaign but consistently voted for it in the Senate. Backed gun control measures, such as the waiting period for handgun purchases. Voted against Supreme Court nominations of William H. Rehnquist, Robert H. Bork and Clarence Thomas. Opposed the welfare reform bill of 1996, saying it would “push 1.1 million children into poverty.”

* TRADE: A staunch free trader, backed the North American Free Trade Agreement and the world trade treaty known as GATT.

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* BAPTISM BY FIRE

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