Bill Bradley has always scorned the theatrics of a campaign. Until this month, though, he’d never lost one. Now, after suffering the first two defeats of his political life in a span of 10 days, the professorial Bradley is realizing that if he wants to beat Al Gore, he will have to be more the kind of candidate he abhors. He lost Iowa and New Hampshire in part because of Gore’s unanswered attacks. He also lost because he didn’t “close the deal” with many of the undecided voters who heard him speak. Now, with Super Tuesday just three weeks away, Bradley is calling Gore a liar daily and trying to sound more inspiring. There is a danger in all this, of course: in trying to beat what he calls a “typical politician,” the Authentic Bill Bradley might just become one.
Some advisers had been urging Bradley to be more aggressive in defending himself against Gore’s relentless pounding for months. Bradley ignored the attacks, assuming his nobility would carry the day. It didn’t. The hard-liners around him included his wife, Ernestine; friends say she takes the negative campaigning more personally than her husband. Bradley laughs when he hears that. “I listen to her,” he said in a late-night interview on his chartered plane. “I give people the benefit of the doubt. But as I said from the beginning, you can only take elbows for so long.”
Hitting Gore will go only so far. Bradley’s troubles have at least as much to do with his offbeat way of selling himself. Last fall, as he talked to small groups, Bradley’s low-key and quirky style seemed to resonate. But then the voters began to pay close attention and the venues got less intimate. Bradley supporters were still enamored, but too many undecided voters found him underwhelming. Bradley can be cold; he often turns away from a handshake a beat too soon, without so much as a word, and he barely disguises his impatience. He rarely asks for a vote. At one gathering in Exeter, N.H., Bradley was a few minutes into his usual anecdotes when a woman shouted: “Tell us why you should be president!” Bradley says he’s trying to connect with audiences in a more visceral way, but “you’ve got to be who you are.”
There’s some good news for Bradley: the Super Tuesday contests should play more to his strengths if he can get momentum. California and New York rely heavily on TV ads, and Bradley’s campaign has more money than Gore’s. Campaign strategists were meeting last weekend to decide, among other things, how much of the advertising would be given to fresh attacks on Gore. They are gambling that in the end voters will see Bradley as the high-minded reformer he wants to be–and not just another pol bludgeoning his opponent.
