This April Bill Bradley add-a new introduction to his thoughtful 1970 basketball memoir, “Life on the Run.” Of the U.S. Senate, he writes: “It is an honor, but it is not a thrill. It is nothing at all like standing on the floor of the Garden as world champion, with your fists raised, with the chills coursing up and down your spine, with your face aching from smiling, secure in the knowledge that all the work for all the years was worth it, and that on this night and for this season you are the best in the world.”
There is, of course, another way to have that feeling, and Bradley is honest enough to admit that he would like to be president of the United States. But for him–and this is the part that the cynics can’t quite get their minds around–it would feel championship-sweet only if he became president of a different United States, a country where angry, alienated and scared people are re-connected to politics. “This is not about candidacies,” he told NEWSWEEK last week. “It’s about whether we can change and reinvigorate the democratic process” (page 36).
Well, maybe it’s about both. Bradley shocked the political world last week by refusing to “rule out” entering the 1996 presidential race as an independent. This is more than a way of hawking his new book, to be published early next year (which he describes as “a journey.into America and a journey into myself”). And it is more than a way to stay relevant after announcing he would not seek a fourth Senate term. Even as he tries to have it both ways by insisting he’s still a good Democrat, this unusual, searching senator has reopened the larger question of the two-party system.
In the new media age, the monopoly of that system is beginning to break apart. Ross Perot’s 19 percent in 1992 was the highest independent vote since Theodore Roosevelt’s 27 percent in 1912, and the Texas billionaire’s August lovefest in Dallas suggested he may try again this time. Jesse Jackson’s sounding independent, and former Connecticut governor Lowell Weieker could jump in. Colin Powell’s mega book tour begins next month. There’s no indication of a campaign yet (or of anything beyond casual conversation with Bradley), but Powell still has plenty of time to raise money and gain ballot access. The conventional wisdom that an independent candidate can’t win is weakening.
In the old days, independent challenges required third parties. Americans owed allegiance to political parties almost as they did to religions. For better or worse (usually the latter), today’s politics revolves more around individuals. Men on horseback can gallop right onto “Larry King Live” and into the fervid rescue fantasies of an anxious public. Ballot requirements are still daunting; Richard Winger, editor of Ballot Access News, estimates that an independent presidential candidate needs 680,000 valid signatures to get on ballots in all 50 states. In Texas, you can’t sign a petition for an independent if you voted in the last pri-mary-and the deadline for signatures is ridiculously early (May 9, 1996). But as Perot proved, enough money and enthusiasm can overcome those obstacles.
Bradley’s prosaic speaking style and lack of a populist message–he’s a fierce free trader, for instance–would make it hard to build an insurgency. But his total integrity would help, and the money would probably be there. If he were serious about a presidential bid, he could simply ask 20 or 30 powerful friends to raise a million each–and they might well do it.
A bigger problem for Bradley in 1996-though not in the year 2000–is that he’s what White House aide Rahm Emanuel calls a “100-percenter” with Clinton on major issues, from Head Start to student loans to the Brady bill to job training. Bradley refuses to identify yet where they differ, but it’s clear that any campaign against the president would have to rely much more on contrasts in character and credibility than on ideology. Even if Clinton stumbles badly again or finds himself drowning in Whitewater, that’s an awkward platform from which to mount a challenge.
All such speculation is miles ahead of Bradley’s own pace, and he succeeds in making it sound almost obnoxiously premature. In the short term, his flirtation makes perfect sense. “Anybody in their right mind would do that,” says one senior’ White House aide. “Otherwise you guys would be writing obituaries about Bill Bradley, instead of stories about what kind of role he might play in the future.” But that Clinton-itc faith that he’s really looking down the road to the election of 2000 may be wishful thinking. Since his playing days with the New York Knicks, Bradley has always had his own sense of timing, and it’s usually at odds with what the political wise guys say. The hint of a ‘96 campaign may simply be a ruse to stay in the limelight–but don’t count on it.
Whatever he decides, Bradley’s retirement from the Senate was like a stick in the eye of already demoralized Democrats. Even if the party holds his New Jersey seat, he joins five other retiring incumbents, with Georgia’s Sam Nunn possibly on the way. That means virtually no chance of regaining control of the Senate until the beginning of the 21st century. It might also eventually mean that the Republicans have at least 60 seats, which would give them enough votes to shut down filibusters without any Democratic help.
Friends say that serving in the minority bored Bradley, and the prospect of spending hundreds of hours cajoling people for money for a bruising re-election fight depressed him. As the culture of the Senate grew more coarse and partisan, some colleagues could see Bradley’s restlessness. “He didn’t seem particularly at peace with himself recently,” says Nebraska Sen. Jim Exon, who will also retire next year. Exon, who turned 74 this month, adds: “If he would have asked me, I would have said, ‘I know your frustrations, but I think you have an obligation at 52 [Bradley’s age] to stay hitched’.”
In his retirement announcement, Bradley crystallized a central problem of American politics. “The political debate has settled into two familiar ruts,” he said. “The Republicans are infatuated with the ‘magic’ of the market and reflexively criticize government as the enemy of freedom, and the Democrats distrust the market, preach government as the answer to our problems and prefer the bureaucrat they know to the consumer they can’t control.” Centrist Democrats who don’t distrust the market felt disappointed by Bradley because they share his analysis and were hoping he would work to strengthen their wing of the party. “I wish he had fought alongside some of the rest of us,” says Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieherman, a member of the Democratic Leadership Council.
Other Democrats are deeply wounded by his departure–and angry. “We are in a war now,” says one key Democratic staffer in the Senate. “We are fighting to save things he supposedly believes in, like help for the underclass. Where is he? Does he think it’s beneath him to get in the trenches and fight?”
Bradley’s answer-that he will find other venues in which to fight–was driven home to him one day during a vote on a public-lands issue in the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources: “We [environmentalists] had two or three votes on the whole committee, so we could never win. The idea was that you would delay for a while, so I was delaying. And everyone knew I was delaying, but there was a rule [permitting it]. I thought to myself, ‘Look, I know how to do this. This is a skill, and it is one that I have acquired.’ I cotfid delay, but because there aren’t the votes, I couldn’t delay forever. And that’s the story of the Senate. If you don’t have the votes, you can’t stop something ultimately.”
So Bradley has decided to go back out into America and change the “context.” But in his case, thinking bigger may actually mean thinking smaller. He has been fascinated in recent months by the challenge of restoring American “civic society”–the conversations neighbors have with each other, ideally across racial lines, in local restaurants, school boards, living rooms. He’s fond of quoting a scene from Bertolt Brecht’s play about Galileo. “One character in the play says, ‘Pity the nation that has no heroes.’ And the other character, Galileo, says, ‘Pity the nation that needs them.’ Meaning, it’s up to each of us to assume our responsibility. [It] we focus on elections as contests between two stars who have all the answers to all of our problems, then we have a fundamental misunderstanding of what we need to do to get hold of our future.”
Any article about Bill Bradley must, by law, include a reference to John MePhee’s famous profile of the Princeton star, “A Sense of Where You Are.” But this time the you isn’t Bradley so much as the public. It’s as if the man is saying, “You, up there in the stands, come down on the floor. If you play together as real American teammates, I’ll be captain.” Or maybe, in an idealized world–a world Bill Bradley knows he does not inhabit–he won’t even need to be.
Still mum on plans–or even plans to make plans. But he’s keeping his options open, and the hoopla surrounding his September book tour will keep him at the center of the parade.
The Texan pulled 19 percent of the vote in 1992 and revved his independent followers at a recent Dallas convention. Still coy about his intentions, his entry would probably help Clinton.
The Rainbow independent? The further to the center President Clinton moves, the more likely Jackson is to run–and hurt Clinton. His agenda, he says, transcends party labels.
The former GOP senator was elected Connecticut governor in 1990 after forming a third party. Now this out-of-office political maverick is said to be studying how to go national.
