The Priest At The Party
He says he hasn't decided about running for President. But Bill Bradley--former Senator and NBA star--does want to be the Democrats' conscience
By Eric Pooley
(TIME, April 27) -- There is a power in giving up power," Bill Bradley is saying,
"and I didn't expect that." The former NBA star and three-term
Senator from New Jersey explains that after he left public
office in 1996, he kept right on talking about his signature
issues--race relations, global trade, economic stress,
campaign-finance reform--"and people would come up and say, 'So
you really believe the things you've always said? You weren't
just trying to manipulate us for our votes?' And I'd say, 'No,
this is what I feel.'" Bradley gives an impish grin, as if he
had just admitted to something wild and risky. He is luxuriating
in a new role: outsider, truth teller, incipient presidential
contender. "I'm still trying to figure out how to use this new
power," he says. "And I haven't ruled anything out for 2000."
And with that, a roomful of pols break into applause. It is a
perfect Bradley moment, because his Zen-like musings on the
power of no power are delivered at a proto-campaign stop in
Greensboro, N.C., where 100 local activists, officials and
campaign operatives have come to meet a not-quite-candidate who
looks like he wants the real kind of power back. It is Jan. 21;
the Lewinsky scandal has engulfed Washington this very day, and
the news is racing through the crowd. "This could be good for
Bradley," says an old friend of his, "but he'll wait to see how
Gore's doing before jumping in. If Gore has the money and
support locked up, he won't get in."
Those who know Bradley best say that's dead wrong. "The more
this race seems like a long shot, the more likely it is Bill
will get in," says a key Bradley adviser. "To Bill, the only
attractive presidential candidacy is the one where everything's
stacked against him." In a recent New Hampshire poll Bradley had
the lowest name recognition in the field--yet placed second,
well behind Gore. That delighted Bradley because it means that
those who know him tend to like him and those who don't can
learn about him on his terms. He plans to announce his decision
before the end of the year.
Though he has no organization and isn't yet raising money,
Bradley is laying the groundwork for a run. Last year he hired a
chief of staff, veteran Democratic operative Ed Turlington, who
operates out of Bradley's small office in Palo Alto, Calif.,
near the campus of Stanford University, where Bradley is a
visiting professor this year. And sources close to Bradley tell
TIME that their man has been in discussions with New Jersey
trial lawyer Ted Wells, a major Democratic fund raiser and
former Bradley finance chairman, to plan what a
clean-but-effective fund-raising operation might look like.
Campaign money is a ticklish subject for Bradley, who was
criticized for raising a Goliath-like $12 million before his
1990 Senate race against Christine Todd Whitman, which he just
barely won. This time he knows he must raise $25 million to
compete in the primary, but he has been a vociferous critic of
the campaign-finance system. He hoped the issue would launch a
tide of grass-roots reform--a tide he could ride--but that
didn't happen. He toyed with starting a third party but rejected
the idea as costly and impractical. So if he runs, he must raise
pots of cash without looking hypocritical. Asked whether he
would refuse soft money and PAC donations, he changed the
subject. "Too early," he said. "I'm not a candidate."
At least not yet. But some past obstacles are gone. In 1992 his
wife Ernestine had breast cancer diagnosed, but the disease is
in remission. His daughter Theresa Anne is at college, old
enough to handle a presidential race. And Bradley has been
tilling the soil carefully, working at an array of jobs with
built-in access to crucial constituencies: the Stanford
professorship, which gives him a platform for speeches and
contacts in academia and Silicon Valley; a senior adviser's
chair at J.P. Morgan & Co., which puts him in touch with Wall
Street; and a gig producing soft-focus, nonpolitical essays
about American life for the weekend CBS Evening News, which
keeps him in the public eye (but will end when his contract runs
out in May, a CBS executive says, because the news bosses found
his work pallid). To compete with the Vice President in the
high-tech arena, Bradley--who wrote his 1996 memoir, Time
Present, Time Past, using No. 2 pencils--maintains a Website and
is working with a technology-consulting firm to bone up on the
issues. Given the chance, he will talk at length about the Year
2000 computer-clock problem--just like Gore.
The two men have plenty in common. Both believe in tireless
practice and painstaking prep; both have compared themselves to
inanimate objects: Gore to wood, Bradley to a waxworks dummy.
And each is working to improve his speaking performance. While
Gore has been getting louder and more self-consciously Southern,
Bradley has been experimenting with spontaneity--scribbling
remarks on the back of an envelope moments before a speech,
gathering thoughts in a green room just before a flat-tax debate
with Steve Forbes. "Making music out of a speech is a special
skill," he writes in his memoir. "It comes from going out on the
road as if you were a musician, playing the small clubs until
you get it down." And that's what he has been doing. Since Jan.
1, he has traveled to Los Angeles; San Diego; Tucson and
Phoenix, Ariz.; Seattle; New York City; Greensboro; Springfield,
Mo.; New Orleans; Mobile, Ala.; and three cities in Florida. He
is working on his chops, talking, sometimes for pay, about this
prosperous but perplexing American moment, about race and the
pace of change, about how to fix our dysfunctional democracy.
Life on the run is familiar to Bradley; it happens to be the
title of his first book. At 54, he has been on the road for 30
years--as a Princeton basketball star for four, a New York Knick
for 10, a Senator for 18--but suddenly he's in charge of
himself. After so many years of schedules, he says, "I feel like
a bird released into the sky to fly."
Winging it seems to be paying off. At a volunteerism conference
in Greensboro early this year, Bradley drew a standing ovation
from a crowd of 1,500. Not with tub-thumping oratory--he'll
never be any good at that--but with a thoughtful approach that
trusted the intelligence of his audience. He was talking about
what's wrong with politics: too much special-interest money, too
many politicians relying on consultants instead of convictions,
too many reporters chasing "the lurid and the sensational"
instead of the issues--a fairly standard critique, and the
audience was polite, nothing more. Then he wandered into a
quiet, reflective place that political speeches seldom find. And
he drew the crowd in there with him.
"Everywhere I go, I sense that Americans are yearning for
something deeper than the material possessions in their lives,"
he began. To the doubters, he asked, "Why do you think there's a
perfume called Eternity?" Towering over the lectern, his
heavy-lidded eyes getting wider and brighter, he talked about
coming to terms with loss and disappointment, about frustrated
hopes and difficult children, about the unresolvable tension
between family and work. "Ever get to the point where you
realize that the best thing about being alive...is being
alive?" he asked in a low, intimate voice. "Being alive to the
smallest things: a child's question, the color of a turning
leaf, a sight you've never seen that you pass on your way to
work each day. These are not unimportant questions."
If it wasn't quite poetry--or politics--it was moving. With the
audience rapt, Bradley linked these questions to the simple idea
of getting involved--mentoring kids, caring for seniors, joining
community groups--and suggested that such work gives meaning to
the private daily struggle. And when he was through, the crowd
stood and cheered, not just because Bradley had been good but
also because he seemed to have faith in their goodness. It was
hard to imagine Bradley replicating the moment day after day on
the campaign trail, where amped-up phrases and shrink-wrapped
personae stand in for nuanced thought. But Bradley has neither
taste nor talent for mass marketing, and if he does run, he will
make a point of creating plenty of moments like that one. Even
if they don't play well on TV.
Bradley genuinely doesn't see himself as a conventional
politician. A sports hero before he could vote, he never had to
seek the spotlight. He complains that people have always tried
to pigeonhole him--as a Young Christian, a scholar-athlete, a
white man in a black man's sport, an ex-jock in the Senate
cloakroom. "They lock into who you were at a particular moment
and don't allow for your capacity for growth," he says. He
professes to hate so much of what politics has become, yet loves
the image of himself cutting through the noise, telling the
truth, offering more questions than answers. To hear Bradley
tell it, he is not so much setting up an outsider's bid for the
Oval Office as conducting a search for "the New American
Narrative," the storyline that crystallizes where the country is
and where it's going. When he lays out his vision of that in a
May 14 speech at Stanford, he won't want anyone to think he's
doing it for callow political reasons.
Some former Bradley aides, who remember how unfocused and adrift
he seemed during his last years in the Senate, have become
impatient with his to-run-or-not-to-run act. They don't believe
his intellectual quest is leading anywhere. "Is he doing this to
improve the nation," asks one, "or just to improve himself?" He
reminds them of another bigfoot Democrat who seemed to regard
himself as better than the process--Mario Cuomo, the longtime
New York Governor, now a lawyer in private practice. Plenty has
changed since Cuomo's big moment: Paul Tsongas and Ross Perot
have come and gone, and the political truth teller has become
just another available package--one that journalists may like
more than voters do. The public that twice elected Bill Clinton
seems to favor politicians who revel in the game, and Bradley
never has. He guards his privacy and prefers to float above the
fray--which could make him seem arrogant, unwilling to sully
himself in the free-for-all of a primary. "Bill wants very much
to be President," says a former aide, "But he doesn't
particularly want to run for President."
When Bradley was a Knick, his teammates used to call him "Mr.
President." During the team's first championship season, in
1969-70, he showed up one night at a wild party thrown by his
teammate Dave DeBusschere. Bradley, a teetotaler, was dressed as
a priest. As DeBusschere later wrote, "Every now and then our
future President tapped a guest on the back and said, 'Excuse
me, but I'm ready to take your confession.'" It was Bradley's
idea of a practical joke. Today, with his indictment of a
"paralyzed and polarized" system in the thrall of money and
pollsters, Bradley is again the priest at the party. But this
time he's not kidding, and the party is the Democratic one. Is
it ready for its confession?
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