This is vintage Bradley. He’s respected and curious about other people’s life stories, but also eccentric and a little monastic. He’s playful but can sometimes seem holier than thou. The combination renders him appealing on a level beyond politics, but it also makes him an odd fit.
And now the collar could be starting to fray. Bradley has enough money to preserve his candidacy for months and wait for the momentum to change. But the short-term trend line is unfavorable. Iowa looks like Gore country, thanks largely to organized labor’s ability to get voters to the caucuses. While surveys vary, and some show Bradley doing well, last week’s NEWSWEEK Poll shows Bradley slipping behind Al Gore in New Hampshire for the first time since Thanksgiving, 50 to 36 percent.
Gore is mechanical, but politics is a mechanical process. The same thing that makes Bradley attractive to some–his air of non-conformity–hurts him in a game with its own time-honored rules of how to win. The first rule is that you break the rules: when the teacher’s not looking, you bop your opponent over the head. If he doesn’t bop you back, he’ll get Dukakicked or Tsongassed–turned into a weenie. As Douglas Berman, Bradley’s campaign chairman, says, “Anyone who’s been around Democratic politics knows how to do that.” But Berman admits that the higher-minded approach Bradley favors, with voters making a side-by-side comparison free of distortions, is “not as clear a playbook.”
So Bradley’s trapped at half court. If he stays positive, Gore will continue to foul him without getting called much for it. (The press is a lousy referee.) But when Bradley goes negative–or sarcastic–he’s off his game plan. An asphalt playground gives the vice president the home-court advantage. He’s rougher under the boards and knows how to block Bradley’s shots. (OK, that’s the final buzzer on my basketball metaphors.)
Last week, for instance, Bradley accused Gore of introducing Willie Horton into American politics, because it was Gore who first raised the Massachusetts furlough policy against Michael Dukakis during the 1988 primaries. But the veep was ready for that one. He dispatched none other than Dukakis himself to Iowa to say it was George Bush (the elder), not Gore, who had introduced Horton and the odious racial theme. (Actually, this wasn’t strictly true either; it was a freelance GOP hitman named Floyd Brown.) In any event, that Bradley attack–and another on Gore for arriving late to the Democrats’ anti-tobacco efforts–was clumsy. Bradley is no pantywaist in debates; he’s trying to be combative. But the “sharp elbows” he promised supporters last year are not finding Gore’s rib cage.
The vice president, by contrast, is a political Soprano–unsure of his identity but deft with a weapon. To listen to Gore, you would think that Bradley’s plan to extend health-care coverage to the uninsured was a federal sting operation instead of the expression of a fundamental Democratic tenet.
First, the vice president used funny numbers to nail Bradley’s plan for being too costly. Then, zooming in from the opposite direction, he hammered the plan for scrapping Medicaid and even made the malicious suggestion that Bradley–a bleeding heart in this campaign–was out to hurt the poor blacks and Hispanics covered by it. This ignored the inconvenient fact that the original 1993 Clinton-Gore plan also scrapped Medicaid, which is deeply flawed. Bradley’s plan hurts the poor only if it’s twisted beyond recognition.
Gore’s a funny mix. Some days he has pathetic political instincts. (He ducked a question from Katie Couric last week about whether Elian Gonzalez should be called to testify before Congress instead of giving the obvious human answer: Testify? The kid’s only 6 years old!) At the same time, his campaign pounces brilliantly. When an expert made the mistake of using the word “voucher” to describe an element of Bradley’s health-care plan, Gore seized on it. The V word is anathema to Democrats in education. Gore simply applied the stigma to an unrelated issue. The vice president flew a New Jersey farmer to Iowa last week to join the gimmicky “Corn Man” mascot in trashing Bradley’s agricultural record. Then Gore again wrenched Bradley’s flood-relief votes out of context. Neighboring Sens. Bob Kerrey and Paul Wellstone, Bradley supporters, have yelled “baloney” and “unconscionable,” but it’s not getting through yet.
It might eventually. Voters are plenty tired of negativity, as Gore himself understands. (He was moving temporarily into a sweetness-and-light mode last week.) The natural contrarian rhythms of the campaign mean that a Bradley recovery should begin just about the time the media say he’s finished. He may even end up rewriting some political rules along the high road. But one truth remains self-evident. Whatever their view of campaign squabbling, Democratic voters insist on someone battling for their interests. They will always favor a fighter over a thinker. Or a priest.
