Bradley, Gore Turn Up Heat as First Races Approach

In dueling speeches half a continent apart, Al Gore and Bill Bradley on Monday struck lofty, optimistic themes, but their words foreshadowed a month of heated campaigning before the upcoming Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary.

In Iowa, the vice president spoke of an agenda virtually without limit as he repeatedly criticized what he called Bradley’s narrow vision of what is possible in the new millennium.

“The vision of the American people should not be limited by those who lead us,” Gore told several hundred students at West High School in Davenport. “I have a different view. This is America. We don’t have to pit one essential goal against another,” the vice president declared.

At one point during his 30-minute speech, Gore repeatedly uttered the phrase: “We’re America.”

In Manchester, N.H., Bradley spoke of “a world of new possibilities” and challenged Americans to tap the current prosperity and technological advances to “lift up those who are struggling.”

Bradley did not mention Gore by name, but he issued several stinging lines that were unmistakably aimed at the vice president--most notably when he suggested that Gore is an out-of-touch Washingtonian.

“Only those who have embodied the ways of Washington have failed to see that Americans see Washington as a place that has nothing to do with their real lives,” said Bradley.

Both speeches were intended to lay out broad themes as the two Democratic candidates enter the final stretch to the first tests of the presidential nominating process. The Iowa caucuses will kick off the presidential competition on Jan. 24, followed on Feb. 1 by the nation’s first primary, in New Hampshire.

In an evening speech to several hundred women in Des Moines on Monday, Gore all but vowed to make abortion rights support a requirement for the judges he would appoint to the United States Supreme Court.

Noting that some are predicting that the next president may name as many as four justices, the vice president said: “A lot is at stake--not only for the right to choose, but civil rights, affirmative action. I will ensure that a woman’s right to choose is respected and protected. . . . You can count on it.”

Earlier Monday, Gore ticked off the priorities he would have as president: to clean up the environment; reduce the threat from weapons of mass destruction; bridge racial, ethnic and religious divides; improve education; expand health care coverage; raise the minimum wage; and reduce crime.

“We cannot afford to say that meeting one of these challenges is enough,” Gore said. “All of them are well within our reach--if we believe in the idea of America, if we trust one another and if we make good decisions with good leadership.”

The vice president has repeatedly charged that Bradley’s emphasis on a relatively few central issues--such as providing universal health care and revamping the nation’s campaign finance laws--suggest that Bradley’s agenda is too narrowly crafted.

As Gore said of Bradley here: “On many issues he has the wrong plans. And on some critical issues, he has no plan--no economic plan, no Medicare plan, no comprehensive education plan.”

Bradley’s aides dispute such charges, pointing to his specific proposals such as expanding Head Start and gun control plans.

But the vice president said there is a deeper, underlying difference between Bradley and himself regarding a fundamental question: What is this country capable of?

Gore portrayed himself as a political descendant of Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson--presidents who achieved grand and multiple goals, such as landing a man on the moon while fighting the Cold War or fighting poverty while creating Medicare.

Bradley aides agreed that the two Democratic candidates will offer a clear choice for voters. The former New Jersey senator’s speech Monday was designed to show that Bradley and Gore “would be very different presidents, and that will certainly come into focus more sharply as the election season unfolds,” said Kristen Leudecke, a Bradley campaign spokeswoman.

Like Gore, Bradley criticized his opponent for being insufficiently ambitious, saying that Gore’s health care proposal, which aims to provide universal coverage in a slower, more incremental process, is too “timid.”

At the same time, instead of focusing on his specific proposals, Bradley used his millenium-themed speech to embrace a “world of new possibilities.” He challenged Americans to use their prosperity and technological advances to “lift up those who are struggling.”

Bradley’s address, delivered at the FIRST Science Center in Manchester, hailed the nation’s optimism and sense of possibility as it enters the 21st century, depicting the United States as a “pluralistic society that’s the world’s greatest incubator of ideas. We lead the world economically, militarily and technologically,” he said.

But the former New Jersey senator warned of a growing “digital divide” between Americans who are benefiting from Wall Street’s computer-led financial boom and those “who don’t enjoy the benefit of health insurance or access to the Internet.”

To narrow that gap, Bradley returned to the social blueprint he stresses at every campaign stop--his sweeping proposal to overhaul health care delivery to poor and working families, programs to aid poor children, strict registration of handguns, a national drive to eliminate racism and campaign finance reform.

Bradley, who spent 18 years in the Senate and was reelected twice, gave only a bare-bones nod to the campaign schedule that looms before the Iowa caucuses and, the following week, the New Hampshire primary.

“In less than a month,” he noted, the “first votes in the first presidential election of the new century” will be cast--an election “about the challenge of making the 21st century even more of an American Century than the 20th.”