Bradley's Soft Sell

Several times daily, as Bill Bradley's wandering gaze carries him out of whatever room he happens to be in on the campaign trail, dark shadows cover his face, and he looks as though he might be considering how good it would feel to throttle Al Gore. It gets old going around telling audiences about the goodness in all of us and the untapped potential of human kindness, while at every turn Gore waits to beat on him like a birthday pinata.

In November, when the Gore people had been swinging from the heels, characterizing Bradley's health-care plan as a budget-busting debacle that would leave minorities dying in the streets, I asked Bradley if the thought of strangulation appealed. He dropped his eyes and said, "He crossed the line." But he went no further, except to say with typical restraint that if you have a "positive vision," you don't need to play dirty.

Restraint at the dessert cart can be a healthy thing. In politics, it can crush you. Even Bradley's campaign rally cry is subdued. "It Can Happen" would have been great for a Viagra ad, but it's a little flaccid as a campaign slogan.

It's time Bradley--who briefly left the campaign trail late last week to see a doctor about an irregular heartbeat--learned that there's a difference between playing dirty and just taping the other guy's mouth shut. When the Gore folks teased him for making hay of his basketball career, he might have said that if the Veep had been so much as an NBA water boy instead of the inventor of the Internet, he'd be wearing a jersey and doing the soul shake on the campaign trail. It would have rung true.

But Bradley has no appetite for following any script from the manual of conventional wisdom. At times you find yourself watching in amazement, if not admiration. Last week in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, he walked into a Rotary luncheon where the faces were paler than the chicken and urged people to find "the courage to stand up" to evils such as bigotry.

"Some got the heart; some got the head. Bill's got both," Libby Murphy, 45, said after flying last month to New York City from Jackson, Tenn., and ponying up $1,000 to attend Bradley's Madison Square Garden fund raiser. "When he talks, it doesn't sound like it came from a focus group."

Since the time of the first Neanderthal primary, rule No. 1 in politics has been to tell people what they want to hear. That's why, despite unprecedented prosperity, so many candidates are yammering about tax relief. Greed is in. People are driving to the store in $40,000 vehicles that look like panzers. But Bradley goes around talking about the shame of child poverty and the medically uninsured as if the TV show everyone's yapping about were called Who Wants to Be a Humanitarian?

"He seems to be pushing a message of love," said Darian Tarver, 21 and a senior, after hearing Bradley's stump speech at Atlanta's Morehouse College. "He's different from the traditional politician, but to me that's what we need."