The levels of his game

The levels of his game
Bill Bradley says he's the real deal, but he's holding back a few parts of the story

It is late on a cold afternoon with the light beginning to fade and a few snowflakes beginning to fall when Don Benedict and David Buteau sit down to eat at Mary Ann's diner in Derry, N.H. It is an ordinary day, which means the door bursts open and a roiling mass of cameras, lights, boom mikes, and journalists spills into the place. Don and Dave barely look up from their eggs and pancakes. Every presidential election season the New Hampshire state motto becomes: "Come Trample Us." In the center of the swirl, above it all both physically and figuratively, is Bill Bradley. He works his way up and down the aisles until he comes to Don and Dave. Both are wearing dark work shirts that have bright patches saying in large letters: Heritage Plumbing and Heating.

"So what do you guys do?" Bradley asks.

Duh. Read much, senator? Which is exactly what Don and Dave do not say. Instead, Don replies: "We're in plumbing and heating."

Bradley reacts as if Don has just revealed the secret of the Rosetta stone to him. He ignores the minicam snouts peeking over his shoulder, the TV lights searing everything with a blue-white glare, the constant whir-clicks of the still-camera motor drives, and he concentrates utterly and completely on Don and Dave. To Bill Bradley, now, here, at this moment there are only three people on Earth and he is pleased–no, honored–to listen to two of them.

"How's business?" Bradley asks.

"Good, very good," Don says.

"You own the business?" Bradley continues. "How many guys work there? Do you have health insurance?" He goes on and on and Don and Dave make their replies and eventually Bradley sticks out a hand and says, "Good to meet you. Hope you can help me out with a vote." Which Bradley often forgets to do, as if running for president were secondary to his 30-year effort to collect people's "stories," which, he says, teach him about America and which, he believes, will make him a better, more connected president.

But how do Don and Dave feel about Bradley? Has he used them as props? Has he listened with the phony half-an-ear that politicians usually use when Election Day looms? Au contraire. "I like the fact he is down to earth and low-key," Don Benedict says. "To me, that's trustworthy. I know he's not real exciting, but that's not what we need. Bush, I don't trust the guy. He plays for the cameras. Bradley, he wouldn't be different if the cameras were not around."

Score that a 10 on Bradley's "Voters-I-Would-Like-to-Hug-If-I-Did-That-Kind- of-Thing" chart. It is exactly the reaction Bradley hopes for and exactly what his advisers, pollsters, focus-group managers, and Madison Avenue consultants hope to sell about Bradley: his authenticity.

Getting real. "The homeliness of the Bradley campaign–though packaged by campaign professionals earning a lot of money–is the anticampaign that many people desire," says David Birdsell, a professor of public affairs at Baruch College. Everything about Bradley reeks of authenticity, which is an especially useful attribute because it turns minuses into pluses. Is Bradley's speaking style somewhere between that of a dentist's drill and the hum of a refrigerator? That's authenticity. Are his clothes more easily deplored than described? That's genuineness. Is he sometimes so low-key that you wonder if he has painted eyeballs on his eyelids and is really sleeping? That's the real deal. "Authenticity is a repudiation of Bill Clinton, a reaction to what's gone on in the last eight years, a code word saying, you are not going to find us lying and waffling," says presidential historian and author Gil Troy. Essential to authenticity, however, is the belief we can actually discern how "real" the candidate is, and the question in Bradley's case is how well anyone actually knows him. "He's a mystery to me," a senior Bradley aide says. "I've known him for years and he's still mysterious." At Bradley's triumphant Madison Square Garden fund-raiser last week, his ex-teammate Willis Reed said, "When you walk away [from Bradley], he'll know more about you than you'll know about him."

And Bradley wants to keep it that way. He is a collector of other people's stories, not a revealer of his own. Not his private story, anyway. When U.S. News asked him what he was willing to give up to become president, Bradley replied: "Essentially, you have to be willing to give up your life." Bradley was speaking not of assassination but of something almost the same to him: the death of his privacy. "If you succeed [in becoming president] you've got six guys around you the rest of your life," Bradley said. It's not that Bradley refuses to speak about his public life or tell childhood anecdotes. But stray into his private life or beliefs, and you meet a No Trespassing sign. "Does a person's private life reflect on the ability to serve?" Bradley asks in his compelling memoir Time Present, Time Past. Only when it is "truly pathological," Bradley replies. "Individual quirks such as preferring Bach to blues, suffering from fear of heights, choosing certain kinds of sexual pleasures, having difficulty relaxing after a period of intense work, waging a vendetta, working at a messy desk, having nightmares about death, being unable to sleep for more than a few hours at a time, cannot be correlated to one's ability to perform public service," he writes. When U.S. News asked Bradley if he was describing himself with that list, he replied: "They're not all me."

"And we're left to guess which are yours and which aren't?" he was asked.

"Yes, right," he replied.

"There has always been a search for the true, the authentic in American politics," says Troy. "In the 18th and 19th century people talked about finding 'virtue' in their leaders, but it was public virtue. Now, we have an inversion: We want to look behind the screen to get to the essence of a person's soul rather than judging a person by his track record."

"L" words. Bradley would rather we stick to his track record. And this, too, has precedent. "If you look at the ultimate standard of authenticity and genuine character in American politics, it is George Wash- ington," Troy says. "But Washington said character was a role you played in your public life and your public life was a performance."

Bradley knows all about performance. He has studied his own stage fright, his speaking style (which he now is pleased with, which makes at least one person who is; Page 20), and while he attracts a load of "L" words from the press (laconic, languid, laid-back), this very much depends on how much Bradley decides to invest of himself in any given event. At St. Anselm College in Goffstown, N.H., recently, in front of a virtually all-white student crowd, Bradley was so low-key it was impossible to tell if he was being authentic or merely drowsy. But the next day, in front of a largely African-American student crowd at Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, Bradley was animated and involved. What had been a series of disconnected one-liners at St. Anselm took on a flow, a context, and a texture at Morehouse.

One thing had not changed, however: At St. Anselm, Bradley wore a red-checked, gray suit that looked like it had cost the lives of several polyesters, and he topped it off with a tie that featured gaudy red and gold outlines of the state of New Hampshire. In Atlanta, Bradley wore a dark blue-green checked shirt under a suit that was of a bluish hue not found in nature, making him look like a hit man for Kmart. (He wore the same shirt the next day, a habit of his. When U.S. News asked a staffer if Bradley at least washed his shirts in the hotel sink overnight, the staffer sighed and said, "Don't go there.") But there is a bright side: Bradley clearly is not paying anybody $15,000 a month to tell him how to dress.

Slash and burn. Anita Dunn, Bradley's communications director, says that while the campaign has never claimed that Bradley is more authentic than any other candidate, "Bill Bradley uses advisers and campaign staff and others to learn how he can communicate his vision more effectively. What he has not had is anyone telling him what that vision is."

The Gore campaign is openly contemptuous of all this. Knee deep in testosterone these days, staffers searching for the "authentic" Al Gore seem to have settled on the Gore of 1988, who ran for president as if he were on the Slash & Burn ticket. "Bradley has authenticity?" a Gore adviser said. "OK, so he's real, he's a great guy, he's the thinking man's candidate. But most voters don't vote that way. Everybody says negative ads are terrible and trashing somebody is terrible–but it works! People want a candidate with an edge. You've got to have heat. The brie-and-cheese set, the 'thinking' voters, will always be there, and they'll be for Bradley. But heat wins elections, and Gore is going to continue to put the heat on Bradley."

The Bradley campaign has its own game plan. It is not going to be rattled by Gore: Bradley will defend himself but won't descend to Gore's level of attack. He intends to win a majority of the caucuses and primaries, thereby persuading the party leaders who are verbally committed to Gore as "superdelegates" to abandon the vice president for a winner. Oh, and he also plans on being generous in victory: Dunn says Bradley has not ruled out Gore as his running mate. "We think he has been a very good vice president," she says.