Going For Broke

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B

y last week the coordination seemed to the Bradley campaign almost spiritual, as if Gore had truly channeled Clinton when he stared Bradley down in the debate and declared, "There has never been a time during this campaign when I have said something that I know to be untrue." That statement, by Clinton's definitions of truth, may be fair enough, but it left Bradley virtually speechless at the daring of it; by the next day his campaign was madly e-mailing examples of what it considered Gore's distortions on everything from health care to welfare to how many openly gay people Bradley has on his slate of delegates in New York. By Friday Bradley was all but making the connection himself, evoking both Clinton and Richard Nixon when he talked about Gore's "tricky" way with words: "When you listen to Al Gore speak, you have to listen very carefully; you have to look at every word and every clause," Bradley said. "Words can be used in a tricky manner."

But words can be wasted too, and until last week, just about every time reporters were told they were going to see sharpness, Bradley showed up instead with a butter knife. "He didn't do it. What do you want me to say?" a frustrated aide said after a disastrous January debate--a response typical for every encounter in which Gore drew blood.

Bradley was also forced once again to deal with questions about his heart. In a generally positive story last Sunday about his health, the New York Times asked Bradley about his irregular heartbeat and whether, if elected President, he would invoke the 25th Amendment and temporarily hand over power to the Vice President if forced to undergo a cardioversion. In the procedure, which uses electricity to jolt the heart back into its rhythm, the patient is given anesthesia and is briefly unconscious; Bradley has undergone the procedure three times. "The 25th Amendment sounds a reasonable way to go," said the candidate.

What really set Bradley on edge last week was Gore. In part it was fury and frustration that Gore's attacks seemed to be working, defining Bradley as the airy professor who didn't know how the real world worked. But perhaps sensing that a sudden turn to slash-and-burn might not gladden the hearts of his supporters, his aides looked around and found another explanation: Bradley "owed" his backers something better than defeat. He didn't want to go negative, but after listening to the voters and seeing the college kids jam room after room, the idealism shining on their faces, well, "He just said enough is enough," says a top aide. Bradley's slogan, "It Can Happen," now applies to the old-fashioned politics he has spent months deriding.

But deciding he had to respond didn't mean he necessarily knew how. Gore has had a lot more practice at this, in the years of private battle against a bitter Republican Congress. Some aides claimed that Bradley waited until the debate to get maximum attention; others had a more gentlemanly spin: "He wanted to look Gore in the eye when he did it," says an adviser. So Bradley did, and said this, "I wonder...if you're running a campaign that is saying untrue things, whether you'll be able to be a President that gets people's trust." Gore hit back again and again, and the underlying message was clear: I'm just tougher than you are.

The Republican National Committee, as it happens, was busy underscoring that point. It launched an ad that shows Gore's awkward flip-flops over litmus tests involving gays in the military, which suggests that Republicans have already decided where the threat lies in the fall, and it's not with Bradley. Gore is mounting a two-front war, against both Bradley and Bush. At a Manchester software firm called Silknet, housed in a reborn brick factory, Gore argued that "if you squander the surplus, either on a tax [cut] scheme or on a spending scheme, it's gone either way."

But that general-election showdown won't really start for more than five weeks, after the next round of primaries on March 7. So both Democrats are weighing where to fight through the month-long lull. Gore expects to contest New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts, to squash Bradley where he is strongest. For their part, Bradley aides were saying last week that if they did well enough in New Hampshire to get some good free media, they could afford to challenge Gore in more places. A bad showing would force Bradley to focus more on New York and California, but the terrain would suddenly be much rougher. For one thing, a senior Bradley aide admits, "you are responding to 110 questions of 'Why are you in the race?' and 'Are you hurting the party?'"