The Branding of Bill Bradley

Bill Bradley is the uncola, the all-natural candidate so pure he would entertain no candidacy before its time. He still drives a battered '84 Oldsmobile, and a few weeks ago in New Hampshire he bought new dress shoes to replace a pair he'd owned for 25 years. He doesn't mall-test his ideas. He scolds anyone who presses him on an issue he hasn't thought through. He won't go negative; for that matter, he barely goes positive. The Anti-Clinton, he slicks himself up for no man.

Clinton has left us with a political world where any attempts by candidates to be the real thing are suspect. But the authenticity thing has worked well for Bradley. Thanks to his cranky moments and his rumpled suits, Bradley seems unteachable in the tricks of the imagemeisters. Two-thirds of likely Democratic primary voters find Bradley not your typical politician. So imagine how jarring it was to learn that, like a typical politician, Bradley sought help for his campaign from Madison Avenue, and did so secretly. The effort began 16 months ago, according to Adweek, when Bradley sat himself down before a group of outside-the-Beltway advertising executives to seek advice. The host, Mark DiMassimo, said the group took a hard look at how to improve "Bradley the Brand." Dubbed the Crystal Group, for Bradley's Missouri boyhood hometown, the ad men pushed the initially taciturn ex-Senator to articulate why he wanted to be President (before a Roger Mudd wannabe could) and to describe what he stood for in ways that wouldn't make voters' eyes glaze over. Some of the group's ideas for jazzing up Senator Sominex were deemed too creative. (That's always a hazard when you are culling advice from a world where adult diapers are hawked as a fashion statement.) The campaign reportedly rejected doing an aerial shot of a giant pair of shoes to conjure up the former Knick as tall and Lincolnesque. But Bradley and his team took other suggestions. The Crystal Group came up with the slogan IT CAN HAPPEN, which has appeared in print ads in New Hampshire and Iowa and is expected to show up in TV ads soon. And the Crystal Group takes credit for other "soaring riffs" that have turned up in speeches, including the one about "unleash[ing] the enormous potential of the American people."

Realizing that hiring high-end imagemakers was not the right image for their image-free candidate, the Bradley campaign gagged the Crystal Group last week. While not taking issue with the Adweek piece, campaign spokesman Eric Hauser tried to reclaim pride of authorship for the candidate, saying Bradley's announcement address was "a stew primarily prepared by Bradley."