What Kind Of Democrats Are They?

Give Bill Bradley credit for this much: he has put a big idea on the table. Not the $65 billion plan to provide health insurance for just about everyone; not a social agenda extending full civil rights to gays; not even the plan he unveiled last week to devote $10 billion to address the "slow-motion national disaster" of child poverty. No, the big idea was the very idea of having a big idea.

In the twilight of Clintonism, amid the debris of divided government, the question Bradley boots up is this: Are we finally prosperous enough, generous enough, and above all trusting enough to ask the government to do anything that's big and important? And if not now, when? And if not government, working with churches and civic groups and businesses and individuals, then who? It is Bradley's challenge to every other candidate: Why should they not dare to dream heroic dreams? as Ronald Reagan once put it. And now it is their challenge to make the case that a big idea is not always a good idea. "Big and bold is fine," says an adviser to Al Gore. "Big and bold and unrealistic is not."

In an interview with TIME last week, Gore let fire: he charged that Bradley would destroy programs such as Medicaid, that he takes "an old-style approach [to poverty] that spends a lot of money but doesn't have any new ideas," and would bust the budget besides. "When people have the time to analyze what he is actually proposing," says Gore, "they're in for a real surprise."

At the dawn of Campaign 2000 it was the Republicans who were supposed to be host to a fight for the heart and soul of their party; and yet, as another candidate folded her bumper stickers last week, the G.O.P. has all but crowned a front runner who never misses a chance to be seen talking about compassion in a colorful sea of children. And even as George W. Bush drives in his big-tent poles all over the middle ground, it is Al Gore who finds himself locked in what looks like a real philosophical battle over the future of the Democratic Party with a challenger who casts a very long shadow.

A lot has changed since the last time the Democrats had a primary fight on their hands. In 1992 Bill Clinton challenged his party to scrap the philosophy that had lost five of the past six elections and get back in touch with mainstream values: work, family, personal responsibility, free markets, accountable government. When he tried to do something very big, like overhaul the entire health-care system, it yielded a fiery Republican Congress. By 1996, Bill Bradley had given up on politics and Bill Clinton had conceded that "the era of Big Government is over."

So now the budget is balanced, even running a surplus, and the welfare rolls are down and incomes are up and government spending represents a smaller share of GNP than at any time since 1974. And just when Al Gore finally gets his turn to bid for the job he has trained for his whole life, along comes Bradley as if to say, Thanks, Al, for this great economy, but I'm the only guy with the guts and imagination to know what to do with it.

The sizzling fight has every pundit arguing over who's really a liberal, who's a centrist, but a close look at their ideas suggests that the Bradley-Gore race is not a neat ideological battle. Virtually any proposal comes with a disclaimer, as Bradley's did last week. The principle that all families should have a chance for a better life, he said, "is not a liberal principle or a conservative one. It does not belong to any political party." So as Bradley and Gore prepare to meet this week for their first debate, voters will need to be listening very closely to figure out what kind of presidency these men are promising.

Both men have always defied pigeonholes. In the Senate, Gore was an environmentalist who knew everything about the MX missile; Bradley favored funding the Nicaraguan contras, but was against the Gulf War. These days, whether they are talking health care, education, crime or poverty, the instruments they use, for the most part, all come out of the New Democrat toolbox. Bradley has gone further left on gays, proposing that they should have all the legal and economic rights of marriage short of the title itself, and he's gone further on gun control, where he favors registering all handguns. But on most issues, he is mainly promising to spend more rather than spend differently. On health care, no one is proposing a government takeover of the system; Bradley's plan is more expensive, but it centers on giving people the money to buy private insurance. Likewise, his proposals to raise the minimum wage as well as funding for day-care and after-school programs and Head Start are all Clinton staples, proposed as far back as 1992 but never wrestled through a Republican Congress.

The similarity in their words, of course, helps explain the difference in their music. Bradley talks more about government responsibility and justice, Gore about personal responsibility and standards. Gore appeals to the party's sense of loyalty: Who was there to fight with you during the wars with the Gingrich Congress? Bradley appeals to the Democratic outsize dreams of the New Deal era: bigger is better. Both are trying to evoke a time when there were distinctions to be made because now there are so few.