A Sense of Where He Is

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Bill Bradley has usually had the good fortune to be underestimated. As a basketball player, he was widely regarded as too short and too slow, yet he wound up in the Hall of Fame. As a politician, he is often dismissed as too plodding and too pure. Yet this week, if as expected the Senate passes a < radical and sweeping overhaul of the tax system, Bradley will be able to take pride in the fact that, as he laconically notes, "I kind of suggested the idea."

This week's scheduled vote is not the final hurdle the measure will have to clear. The Senate bill must still survive a conference to reconcile it with a version passed by the House. Though both plans aim to cut tax rates through closing loopholes, the devil is in the details; the conferees are likely to fall prey to much back-room maneuvering over breaks for various special interests. "The game ain't over till it's over," warns Bradley. But even opponents of tax reform expect to see a bill on the President's desk for signing by Labor Day.

It was back in 1982 that Bradley, then a first-term Democratic Senator from New Jersey, first put tax reform on the national agenda. The idea of lowering rates for the many by eliminating breaks for the few was seen as noble but a bit naive in the real world of Washington politics. Well-financed special- interest groups, went the conventional wisdom, would quash any attempt to take away their favorite loopholes. But Bradley kept plugging away in his dogged fashion; he even published a book on the subject (The Fair Tax) that forcefully laid out the case for reform. This week his persistence will be vindicated by the votes of many of the same Senators who only a few months before had written off tax reform as a hopeless dream.

Inevitably, the credit Bradley is reaping from this political near miracle makes him a presidential prospect. To the Democrats, desperate for new faces, the emergence of a 42-year-old Rhodes scholar and sports idol who can claim to be the father of tax reform may be an act of political deliverance. Bradley seems in no great hurry to jump into the presidential race, but he is nonetheless quietly preparing himself for this last and greatest competition --if not in 1988, then in 1992. "Bill has always had a sense of where he wants to go," says his old Princeton roommate Coleman Hicks, now a Washington lawyer, "and he is very patient about getting there."

Bradley's life has been one long self-improvement project. As a high school basketball player in Crystal City, Mo., he practiced 3 1/2 hours a day with lead weights in his sneakers. As a Princeton star, he awed classmates by pumping in 30 points a game and then hitting the library until midnight. As a Senator, he slightly unnerves some of his colleagues by relentlessly writing & in a small notebook that he keeps in his inside jacket pocket. "He watches you," says Senator David Pryor of Arkansas. "It's constant."