Bradley’s Hit-and-Miss Crusade on Race Issues

The preacher inside Bill Bradley will not let up. As he stares out at unbroken ribbons of white faces in Iowa and New Hampshire, Bradley lectures again and again on the disquieting subject of race in America.

On the road from Des Moines to Indianola, Bradley stands before Iowa farmers and suburbanites, quoting the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. about the peril of the “silence of good people” and author Toni Morrison on society’s failure to reach a point “where race exists, but does not matter.” A cheering blue-collar crowd at a Lion’s Club in Hudson, N.H., falls into an awkward hush when he brings up the corrosive influence of “white-skin privilege.”

Civil rights matters to Bradley, so much so that he sees it as the moral core of every major proposal he has floated in the Democratic presidential primary campaign, from health care to gun control. Even when he presses the case for campaign finance reform in halls where the only black faces are his own aides, Bradley caustically depicts lobbyists who flock for billion-dollar tax bill hearings then disappear when social programs come up for debate, leaving “a few people trying to divide up too little to deal with the depth of poverty.”

Bradley’s blunt talk on race is both an extension of his inner code and the most compelling tactic he has been able to muster against the monolithic support that Vice President Al Gore has amassed among minority political leaders. The Democratic rivals’ appeals to ethnic voters are as contrary as their prickly debate stances. While Gore touts the benefits of a humming economy and basks in President Clinton’s enduring popularity among black voters, Bradley tugs at their emotions, holding out a vision of an America as “a better place” for minorities.

Focus on Race Yields Few Endorsements

But on the eve of a televised debate Monday with Gore on race--an “Iowa Brown and Black Presidential Forum” timed for the King holiday--Bradley’s racial altruism has reaped few dividends.

Gore’s minority endorsements dwarf the former New Jersey senator’s small band of loyalists, who include such iconoclastic figures as black Harvard professor Cornel West and firebrand Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez of Illinois. The Bradley campaign’s sluggish pace in Southern states has left sympathetic black leaders there baffled and vulnerable to feelers from Gore’s camp. Latino political organizers complain that Bradley’s often-oblique language on race rarely targets their concerns. And veteran observers of racial politics say that Bradley’s heartfelt evocation of a bigotry-free nation carries risks.

“He’s doing something few white politicians have done, talking courageously about race,” said Ronald Walters, director of the African-American Leadership Institute at the University of Maryland and a top advisor in the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential run. “The question is whether it’s just a bully pulpit issue for him or he has a specific agenda behind it. Either way, it’s still a dangerous thing for a candidate to do.”

Bradley backs affirmative action and tough enforcement of civil rights and hate crime laws. He makes a point of telling minority audiences that he deplores racial profiling by police. He stresses his sweeping health care plan as one way to help poor minority families.

But beyond those familiar themes, Bradley offers no new policy initiatives explicitly aimed at promoting racial harmony--only the broad promise of making racial progress the defining measure of his presidency.

“It would be kind of the air of my administration,” Bradley says. Likening his emphasis on race to Ronald Reagan’s use of anti-communism as a litmus test for aides, Bradley said his staff “would know that if they want to please the boss” they will have to find “ways to promote racial unity and understanding.”

For black intellectuals such as West, Bradley’s words are electric in acknowledging racial injustice and promising change. “Using a bully pulpit,” West says, “is a critical first step in getting things done.”

Bradley’s language is sometimes startling in its echoing of minority grievances. He tells newspaper editorial boards that white Americans need to understand how their “white-skin privilege” promotes unconscious racism. He cites the tear-choked fury of a Latina who was arrested in East Los Angeles for “driving while brown.”

Bradley’s candor on race may be well-timed, says David Bositis, a senior policy analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. Recent polls, he said, show that Americans are more receptive to racial understanding--a climate that makes it harder for Republicans to demonize Democrats as Michael S. Dukakis was tarred by race-baiting Willie Horton ads in the 1988 presidential race.

But Bositis argues that voters make their decisions “based on what they’ve seen, not prospectively on what they’re promised.” Bradley’s offer of a better racial climate, Bositis says, is trumped by Gore’s eight years of shepherding legislation, minority contacts and political appointments.

Like Bradley, Gore offers no dramatic measures to improve race relations and cites his health care and education proposals as ways of aiding minorities. But Gore leans on the Clinton administration’s record on race, touting his role in everything from increased funding for civil rights enforcement to helping rebuild black churches burned by arsonists.

“This administration is connected to the black community like no other administration before it,” said Rep. James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus and an early Gore supporter. “We don’t have Clinton fatigue. Al Gore’s been part of that for two solid terms.”

Where Bradley is opaque on how he would improve race relations, Gore’s campaign staff has crafted thick media kits detailing Gore’s “fighting” for every major minority group. At times, the accomplishments blur into a laundry list. The kit for “Vice President Al Gore--Fighting for Arab Americans” carries the same boilerplate on hate crime as the “Vice President Al Gore--Fighting for African-Americans” kit.

“This is a campaign that looks like America,” says Gore spokeswoman Kathleen Begala. She claimed that at least 25% of Gore’s paid staff are minority hires but was unable to provide a detailed breakdown. Bradley’s New Jersey staff is 19% black and 12% Latino--figures that campaign spokeswoman Kristen Ludecke insists will improve “as we keep hiring.”

In a show of muscle last month, Gore mobilized an army of influential black supporters--who range from senior Rep. Charles B. Rangel of New York to Los Angeles’ Rev. Cecil “Chip” Murray--in rallies across the country. Yet his media coverage paled compared to the publicity for Bradley’s $1.5-million fund-raiser weeks earlier at Madison Square Garden, which featured two dozen basketball legends, including Julius “Dr. J” Erving and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Surrounded by Black Sports Stars

More important, says Bradley aide Jacques De Graff, the former New York Knick showed up in footage surrounded by black sports stars he had befriended over his 10-year pro career. “These aren’t friendships of convenience,” De Graff says.

But just as Gore’s top black aide, campaign manager Donna Brazile, was ensnared by criticism recently by questioning whether Republicans used black figures such as retired Gen. Colin L. Powell and Rep. J.C. Watts Jr. (R-Okla.) as tokens, De Graff and West both run the risk of becoming GOP targets as well.

De Graff earned his spurs by running the New York mayoral campaign of the Rev. Al Sharpton, a clamorous street activist who has offended Jews and city officials over a long career of raw public protest. West, a philosopher and promoter of racial harmony who brought Bradley and Sharpton together in a controversial meeting last year, has been savaged recently by liberal and neoconservative writers for his acknowledged socialist leanings.

West has turned out for Bradley at every Democratic debate, a striking figure in retro Afro and pinstriped suits. Last week, he made rousing speeches for Bradley and startled Iowa farmers by calling them “brother.” And his prominent campaign role led Gore to recently press West’s Harvard faculty colleague, Henry Louis Gates, to join his campaign team.

“Dueling black intellectuals,” West says, laughing.

Bradley has had less success in attracting black political figures who could motivate African American voters. On Sunday, even as he spoke before a black audience in Waterloo, Iowa, Bradley was shadowed by Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater, a prominent African American Gore backer.

Bradley’s failure is most glaring in southern states, where he desperately needs rank-and-file black support to offset Gore’s huge edge among African American officials.

In South Carolina, several state legislators who were impressed by a Bradley speech on race last month in Baltimore say they received little or no follow-up from Bradley’s people afterward.

“Evidently he’s not too well organized down here,” said state Rep. Kenneth Kennedy. Leaning toward Gore when he went north to Baltimore for a national convention of black legislators, Kennedy was swayed by Bradley’s warning that everyday bigotry “kills something inside us all.” But Kennedy has stayed neutral. If there is a Bradley organization in the state, he said, “I haven’t heard from them.” State House Democratic Leader Gilda Cobb-Hunter, who had tilted toward Bradley after his Baltimore speech but now endorses the vice president, said that “Bradley’s people could have had me if they had been as persistent as Gore’s were.”

While black support founders in the South, Bradley has repeatedly interrupted his Iowa and New Hampshire swings to speak to African American audiences in Atlanta, Los Angeles and New York. He draws on years of personal history--recounting how he sadly watched black Little League teammates slighted by white adults, how he was transfixed watching the Senate approve the 1964 Civil Rights Act, how he turned his angst about the racial abuse suffered by Knick teammates into volunteer work at a Harlem basketball clinic.

“I think it’s important that people understand,” Bradley says, “what it’s like to walk in somebody else’s shoes. That’s why I talk about white-skin privilege” to largely white audiences.

Gore similarly talks of his childhood disgust at seeing slave harnesses on the basement wall of an old house he visited in Nashville. Gore also practices his mangled Spanish on Latino audiences, working at a bond that Bradley has yet to develop, say veteran Latino activists.

Raul Yzaguirre, head of the National Council of La Raza, credits Bradley with “being an original thinker and showing eloquence on race.” But Bradley’s language, he adds, “is strictly on a black-white paradigm.”

Without specific references to immigration and other Latino concerns, Yzaguirre says, Bradley’s talk on race echoes the single-mindedness of former President Carter. “Latinos were always an afterthought with Carter. Every major policy consideration was made on a black-white axis.”

Bradley scored a minor coup recently with his endorsement by Gutierrez of Chicago. The Puerto Rican congressman cited Bradley’s fight against the 1996 Welfare Reform bill, which, he said, cut off “immigrant kids from food stamps.” In contrast, Gutierrez noted, Latino activists “had to push Gore and Clinton to roll back those cuts.”

Leadership institute director Walters says some of Bradley’s difficulties on race relations may stem from his “failure to get beyond good intentions.” Walters said he detected that weakness two years ago, when Bradley was still mulling a presidential run while serving as distinguished scholar at the University of Maryland’s Academy of Leadership.

Over a long day on April 23, 1998, Walters watched as Bradley brought in a group of scholars and minority speakers to talk to students and faculty about race.

Walters left the “talkfest” unimpressed. Bradley, he said, seemed to be “struggling to develop language on race he could use for a presidential run. He was doing a lot of listening, but he offered no real resolution.”

Two years on, Walters says, Bradley has still not moved beyond his broad candor on race. While crediting Bradley’s health care plan for targeting uncovered minorities, Walters says, “there is nothing that addresses racial disparities in health care.” Bradley also ignores crucial issues such as the “frenzy of incarceration of black men” in U.S. prisons and the mandatory drug sentences that put many of them there.

Bradley is aware of the criticism. But he insists that blunt talk is an essential first step in a nation that still “wastes so much energy” on racial tensions.

“The premise of my campaign is that the majority of the population in this country wants to get to a deeper level of racial unity and harmony,” Bradley said. “If I’m wrong, I’m toast. But if I’m right, you have the possibility of transformation, which is what I think the country yearns for.”

Times staff writers James Gerstenzang and Matea Gold contributed to this story.