The Art of Being Bradley

This is a good day to be Bill Bradley. It's a warm September afternoon, the day Bradley presides over his campaign kickoff in his boyhood hometown of Crystal City, Mo.--and the day the chattering classes begin to realize what Bradley already knows: he has maneuvered himself into position to wrest the Democratic presidential nomination from Al Gore. The former basketball star and three-term New Jersey Senator has just given what some are calling the most effective speech of his career, a fuzzy, conversational, unabashedly idealistic sermon that sells him as the savior of politics itself ("The American people have a right to be skeptical, but I have a right to try to change that skepticism"). Polls in key states put him in a dead heat with Gore. In the new TIME/CNN poll, he leads Gore in New Hampshire for the first time. While the Vice President is suffering the effects of Clinton fatigue, message confusion and a consultant-heavy campaign that's hemorrhaging money, Bradley is running a lean, focused operation. More and more it seems that Bradley's inscrutable nature--high-mindedness, dogged integrity and apparent indifference to the game of politics--might be tailor-made for the post-Clinton era. And surely it doesn't hurt that he had that wicked jump shot way back when.

So how does Bradley mark this euphoric moment? Half an hour after his big speech--an act of enormous extroversion that required him to brag about his athleticism, discipline and small-town purity--he is visibly withdrawing, pulling back into himself. Folded into a chair on the stage in the packed and jubilant Crystal City High School gym, the scene of his earliest hoop glory, he's listening to old friends extol his essential goodness, but he's looking bored and distracted one minute, uncomfortable the next: it's hard for him to cede control of his own story. A black Little League teammate reminisces about the 11-year-old Bradley threatening to call the mayor of Joplin, Mo., if a local hotel didn't rent the black kid a room, and the 56-year-old Bradley chews his lip and looks at the floor. His second grade music teacher sings his praises, and he gazes into the distance, even forgetting to thank her as she goes by--until his wife, Ernestine Schlant, elbows him and he hauls himself out of the chair and gives the old lady a hug.

Finally it is Bradley's turn to speak. Back in control, he relaxes; surrounded by supporters, relatives and old buddies, he tells a story about being alone. "I cannot tell you how many hours I spent in this space," he says, looking around the gym. "After one night when we lost, early the next morning I was back." He'd come by himself to work on his shooting. "The bleachers were still pulled out, there were popcorn boxes on the floor, and I felt I was home--in the place I spent more time than any other."