Bradley Comes Out Shooting as He Hunts for N.H. Votes

DOVER, N.H. — A newly minted Bill Bradley, throwing elbows and bagging groceries, careened across the wintry landscape of New Hampshire on Thursday, doffing his professorial style and high-road presentation in an effort to resurrect his presidential campaign.

He chatted with customers at an Epping doughnut shop. He popped into a Portsmouth high school to shoot some baskets. He swung through a Stratham grocery store, racing from the produce section to the deli in a mad dash for votes that culminated with a stint as bagger at the check-out line.

And he strafed, whenever he could, the Democratic front-runner here, Vice President Al Gore.

Bradley’s shift out of his self-imposed stylistic and rhetorical constraints began with a blistering assault on Gore’s honesty in Wednesday night’s debate. And it continued unabated Thursday.

“If you don’t trust the people to tell the truth in the campaign, then how can people trust that you’re going to tell them the truth as president of the United States?” Bradley asked at a morning rally in Concord, N.H., referring to what he considers Gore’s mischaracterization of his proposals and record.

The line, with which Bradley had jabbed Gore in the debate, underscored his new strategy, far removed from the “different kind of campaign” that Bradley had pledged to run, one absent the ritual back-and-forth of negativity.

Gore, who has criticized Bradley almost unrelentingly, turned Bradley’s words back on him Thursday on a campaign day shortened by his return to Washington for President Clinton’s State of the Union address.

“I don’t quite understand how someone can condemn so-called negative attacks while in the next breath launching real negative attacks,” the vice president told employees at a Manchester business.

Affecting puzzlement, he added: “I’m not sure Sen. Bradley really wants a real debate on the issues.”

Gore, with a win in Monday’s Iowa caucuses, has bounced around New Hampshire this week, his verbal fire aimed at both Bradley and the Republicans he hopes to face in November. Bradley, maintaining his aggressive tone along New Hampshire’s frosty seacoast, himself seemed freer and certainly more spontaneous as he took after Gore.

As he reaped endorsements from a group of environmentalists, spoke to employees at the Timberland headquarters and led a town hall meeting in Dover, he told audiences that he had waited a long time to speak up, but finally decided he had to defend his record.

“How you conduct the campaign is very important,” he told about 350 employees of Timberland during an afternoon address at the company’s headquarters in Stratham. “That’s the point I tried to make last night in the debate after absorbing months of misleading statements and misrepresentations. Last night, I decided, well, it’s my turn, and I threw a little elbow.”

In a radio interview with a Manchester station, Bradley said he wanted to send a message that Gore’s negative campaigning would, if he is elected president, damage his ability to govern.

“I think that making that point several times last night struck a positive chord with a lot of people who’d just been waiting for, essentially, him to be called out,” he said, during a call-in interview with WGIR.

The open question, however, was whether the new approach would help or hurt Bradley, given that it threatens to at least raise the specter of hypocrisy as well as desperation. Adding fuel to that perception were new polls showing Gore opening up a larger lead on the former New Jersey senator.

“It’s the only strategy for him,” said New Hampshire pollster Dick Bennett. He added this caveat: “He has to do it skillfully enough that he doesn’t end up just looking like another run-of-the-mill dirty politician.”

Voters on Thursday offered mixed reactions about Bradley’s change of tactics.

“You looked great last night,” Sherry Taylor, 76, told him in the parking lot of the Stratham grocery store. “You’ve got my vote.”

Taylor said she had been leaning toward supporting Gore until the debate, when she was impressed that Bradley took on the vice president.

“I thought he showed a lot more vitality,” she said. “I thought he had been sort of placid in the past.”

But Warner resident Sherry Brink, 44, said she had mixed feelings about Bradley’s new tone.

“I actually like him because he’s not as aggressive, he wasn’t playing some of the routine political games,” she said during the Concord rally. “But I also know he needed to get out the information that was being distorted.”

Gore’s advisors insisted that Bradley’s accusations would backfire. “A clear sign of desperation,” said Gore spokesman Chris Lehane.

Gore himself renewed his call for twice-weekly, single-issue debates and said that if he wins the Democratic nomination he would extend that challenge to his GOP counterpart. He also defended his withering assaults on Bradley’s health care plan, which contributed hugely to the former senator’s new aggressiveness.

“Let me just say that I’m going to fight to protect Medicaid,” Gore told the workers in Manchester. “And Sen. Bradley would eliminate Medicaid and replace it with an inadequate substitute. That’s a fact; not a negative attack.”

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Times staff writers Edwin Chen and Janet Wilson, and Times political writer Cathleen Decker contributed to this story.