Bradley, Behind in Iowa Polls, Still Forges Ahead

Hopscotching across Iowa on Saturday in their last-weekend blitz to press for turnout before Monday’s presidential caucus voting, Democratic challenger Bill Bradley stayed defiantly upbeat in the face of dispiriting polls while a confident Al Gore turned his attention to Republican rivals.

As the vice president made campaign hops by plane through the center of the state and the former New Jersey senator pressed on in a grueling four-day bus odyssey through snow-caked landscape in eastern Iowa, a final flurry of opinion surveys all showed Gore with a solid grip on the loyalty of the state’s Democratic regulars.

As he appeared before crowds from Fort Dodge to Dubuque, Gore flexed the muscle of long-cultivated endorsements, appearing with Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa and a New England import, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts.

Gore was already looking past Monday’s results, casting a critical eye at Republican George W. Bush for “a risky tax scheme” that would erode the ballooning budget surplus. But he also leveled a final caustic blast at Bradley, warning that his rival would “do exactly as he said he’d do,” concentrating on health care while letting other issues fade.

Bradley, meanwhile, rolled on by bus caravan through the icy countryside of eastern Iowa, encouraging growing crowds to tilt against Gore on Monday night.

“The campaign is making progress,” he said in a packed hall in Maquoketa Middle School, where 270 people, many waving “Bradley for president” signs, chanted his name.

“It’s two days to the caucus. The polls say we’re not in front, but I think we’re going to surprise a lot of people.”

In an unexpected move, the Des Moines Register gave its coveted endorsment to Bradley in today’s editions. There was intense competition for the endorsement from both Democrats, who each paid two visits to the newspaper’s editorial board.

The Register called Bradley’s vision “compelling,” saying that he presents a better choice than Gore for leadership in a changing world.

From Mount Pleasant to Muscatine, Bradley struck the familiar pose of the underdog who will not quit in the late going. His optimism ignored not only the mounting weight of polls that show him trailing Gore in Iowa by more than 20 percentage points but also the interruptions to his campaign caused by his disclosure of a recent spate of heart palpitations.

Bradley’s crowds were sparse a week ago, but as the caucus approaches, they have swelled, punctuated by repeated standing ovations. One local volunteer in Burlington choked up when she introduced Bradley on Friday. Another man said he’d driven around the state a half-dozen times to hear his speeches.

At a news conference, Bradley gamely insisted he had succeeded in getting out his message and running a different kind of campaign than Gore’s mainstream Democratic Party operation.

“I’m having a great time out here,” Bradley said, adding that Iowa is a difficult state to organize as an insurgent candidate. Gore has tried in recent days to suggest that Bradley had demeaned the state’s caucus system by claiming that it only rewards candidates who are part of the “entrenched” system.

“The question is, is this different?” Bradley said during one bus tour stop. “Can you organize people who have never been to caucus before, can you reach out to young people? Can you get people who participated in caucuses . . . to come back because they believe what you believe about the possibility of America? . . . That’s the challenge of the Iowa caucus.”

Across the state, Gore was careful not to coast, telling crowds in Fort Dodge and Waterloo that “people focus on expectations.” So Gore asked Democrats at a rally in Fort Dodge to imagine two scenarios for the morning after the election in November:

“You wake up, sleepy, tired, you went to bed early with a headache. The weather is cold, gray, drizzly, and the newspaper headline, barely legible from the soaking on the doorstep, reads: “Republicans Back in Power.”

In the alternate scenario, “You wake up the morning after the election bright and early. You hear a little bird chirping. . . . You smell the aroma of fresh-brewed coffee.” The headline? “Democrats Win!”

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Times staff writer James Gerstenzang with the Gore campaign contributed to this story.