Bradley Makes Racial Unity Plea

Bill Bradley beat Vice President Al Gore out of the 2000 starting gate Sunday, offering voters “a world of new possibilities guided by goodness.”

Echoing the youthful idealism of the City Year public service corps that was his audience, Bradley cast his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in the words of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who once blamed “the silence of good people” for the prolonged civil rights struggle.

“My campaign is about asking good people to step forward and join us so that our voices can be heard,” Bradley said.

To white Americans unmoved by what he called the moral imperative of racial unity, Bradley also offered a more practical motivation. By 2010, he said, native-born white Americans will be a minority in this country.

“Increasingly, the future of white Americans will depend on the talents of nonwhite Americans--that is, if labor economics means anything. . . . And that is why it is the ultimate common-sense self-interest to get this racial division behind us,” he said.

The former senator and professional basketball player made his first 2000 campaign stop in Massachusetts, where news coverage crosses into neighboring New Hampshire. Bradley is running neck and neck with Gore in polls gauging the outcome of New Hampshire’s leadoff primary Feb. 1.

He needed a bit of warmup getting back into the game after the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. As young, red-coated volunteers demonstrated physical-training drills, Bradley joined their elbow thrusts and hand claps off-rhythm to the drill sergeant’s call.

Gore was resuming his campaign with a trip to Iowa today. Both Democratic presidential hopefuls--Gore in Davenport, Bradley in Manchester, N.H.--planned speeches today to restate campaign themes and kick off the sprint to Iowa’s Jan. 24 caucus.

Before heading to Concord, N.H., for a Sunday evening town hall meeting, Bradley heard from Robert Lewis Jr., City Year Boston’s executive director. Lewis, who is black, said he lost his grandfather “to the cause of the Ku Klux Klan” and was himself referred to with racial expletives as he grew up.

Bradley, who offered Lewis a handshake and an approving nod, used the occasion to highlight racial unity as a core theme of his uphill challenge to Gore for the Democratic Party’s nomination.

Acknowledging that it is premature to speculate on any presidential legacy--”Before you have a legacy, you’ve got to get nominated, you’ve got to get elected, you’ve got to serve with distinction, you have to die,” he noted--Bradley nonetheless said he would aim for this one: “That every child in America--and by that, I mean every child in America--has a chance to realize his or her potential.”

Bradley’s attempt to be seen as the non-politician of the Democratic race rang throughout his 30-minute speech to 200 people crowded into the stuffy City Year conference hall.

The 18-year Senate veteran, always a formidable political fund-raiser and aggressive campaigner, blamed Sunday’s low voter participation on the notion among young people that politics has become “nothing more than the mechanics of winning: Polling, fund-raising, spinning.”

He reiterated two other “big idea” pillars of his campaign--eliminating child poverty and providing universal health insurance--and tried to rally idealists behind him.

“I want to be president in order to use the power of that office to do good. If each of you and millions of other Americans realize that you have the power to do good--and a president is president in order to do good--then what we thought was never possible can happen,” Bradley said.

“In other words, we’ve created a world of new possibilities guided by goodness.”