How Al Came Back To Life

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Bradley didn't stand up--he regarded Gore's move as a transparent ploy, the kind of low gambit that was beneath him. Bradley's contempt for Gore--"He sees Al as a smaller guy," an adviser said at the time--blinded him to the seriousness of Gore's counterattack. He could see through Gore, so he assumed that voters would see through him as well. But there was more to Gore than Bradley believed; voters liked what they saw in the Vice President. He wasn't charming, but he worked hard and came to play. A Bradley strategist calls the Jefferson-Jackson dinner an early-warning sign that the campaign ignored. Bradley should have come roaring back, he says, because "there was absolutely a window open." But at the dinner, the window began to close. The same quality that had fueled Bradley's rise--his high-minded detachment from the game of politics--was now conspiring to ensure his defeat.

Bradley didn't have any cold-eyed operatives around him who could tell him he was wrong about Gore. No one in his small circle of longtime advisers--communications director Anita Dunn, campaign chairman Doug Berman, press secretary Eric Hauser--had ever run a presidential campaign, and they all saw Gore just the way Bradley did. In meetings they referred to him as a "joke." When Gore poached some of Bradley's best lines, talking about wanting "a different kind of campaign" that would "elevate our democracy," they thought everyone would realize that Gore was robbing them blind. Nor were they concerned when Gore started hitting Bradley's signature health-care-reform proposal. They thought that kind of attack was a vestige of the old order.

When Gore and his team drew up their health-care plan late last summer, the Vice President had said no to aides who wanted to make it more ambitious. Gore insisted on an incremental approach that would strike people as realistic and prove he had learned the lessons of 1994. He ended up with a modest proposal that focused on insuring children. But his advisers were troubled. Bradley had been talking about health care all summer; he was clearly going to promise coverage for all or nearly all Americans. Health care remained a huge problem for millions, and Gore's strategists were worried that the race might turn on the issue, with Bradley's plan outshining Gore's. They were right about the issue, wrong about the shine. When Bradley released his proposal on Sept. 28, it turned out to be a gift.

STUFFING BRADLEY'S BEST SHOT