BILL BRADLEY DOES LOS ANGELES
Carlson, Tucker
BILL BRADLEY DOES LOS ANGELES by Tucker Carlson Los Angeles IF THERE WAS EVER A DOUBT THAT BILL BRADLEY is the ultimate anti-pander presidential candidate, it has just disappeared. It's a little...
...Bradley never explained how limiting contributions to political candidates would feed kids in Comp-ton...
...Bradley seems press-averse even when he holds press conferences...
...A television reporter tries to change the subject...
...It's natural for a friend of the gay community to vote with Bob Barr on social policy...
...Bradley is in mid-sentence when a producer walks to the table in front of him and collects the microphones...
...And he has taken his message to the party's liberal base...
...I always knew he was destined for greatness," Dent said...
...Eliminate junk guns, and America will be a much safer country...
...And he may be a better, deeper person for it...
...At the Gay and Lesbian Center, I wound up sitting next to a middle-aged man with thick glasses and an English accent...
...Cheap, shoddily constructed "junk guns" like this, he says, are used in the "vast majority" of crimes...
...Bradley's reply should cause howls of protest, or at least snorts of contempt...
...Ten minutes into the gay-center event, the four TV crews on the scene decide to leave...
...Dent watched for a moment, then whispered a reluctant assessment: "He is a bit like a warmed-over Paul Tsongas...
...He's bugged...
...I have difficulty seeing myself as demure," he says as he takes the microphone...
...He may be all over the map, but Bradley is no ideologue...
...She wants to know how Bradley intends to help...
...What can we do to prevent school children from using the word "gay" as a slur...
...He has begun criticizing the Democratic party for THE CAMPAIGN DOESN'T MAKE FOR COMPELLING TELEVISION...
...Unfortunately, Bradley has decided to be so true to who he is that he has neglected to put on stage makeup...
...A radio reporter asked Bradley if he would mind answering a few quick questions before beginning his colloquy with the audience...
...It's obvious he means it...
...By happy coincidence, Jackson and Bradley had been scheduled to meet the same day the deal was settled, and Bradley was swept up in the surrounding hype...
...These days, Bradley explained, it's not just the poor who are poor...
...TEN MINUTES INTO THE GAY-CENTER EVENT, FOUR TV CREWS DECIDE TO LEAVE...
...Bradley pauses thoughtfully...
...He certainly didn't seem destined for greatness...
...Tucker Carlson is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...With a little more alliteration, it could have been Jesse Jackson speaking...
...Then, without warning, Bradley pulls out a gun...
...Until this moment it would have seemed impossible that a man as tall as Bradley could come off as bitchy...
...A lot of people who knew Bradley when he was young say things like this, and for the most part they've been proved right...
...The television reporters only showed up at all because Bradley appears to be pursuing an unexpected campaign strategy...
...He simply shows up, walks to the front of the room, and begins speaking...
...She describes her husband as strong but gentle, someone who "sits there so demurely, so sweetly...
...In other words: I supported a bill almost identical to the one you're so upset about...
...At one point, he talks about the importance in politics of being "true to who you are...
...Bradley called for campaign-finance reform...
...The con-sens us: weird...
...He's getting an opportunity to do that right now...
...Schlant has her arms folded across her chest and looks unusually severe (perhaps because her husband has neglected to introduce her...
...The day before, for instance, Bradley did an afternoon event at a Planned Parenthood clinic...
...Bradley begins by explaining that nothing he says about gun control should be construed as an attack on "the rights of sportsmen and sportswomen...
...He looks like a lighthouse...
...It's a question any normal presidential candidate would be prepared for—the vote is less than a day old...
...Whatever it is, it doesn't make for compelling television...
...For one thing, he does absolutely nothing to call attention to himself (or to his poor wife, whom, again, he neglects to introduce...
...Rhodes Scholar, Hall of Fame basketball player, three-term U.S...
...No one stops him to ask, and he's off into boilerplate: "I believe a national discussion and dialogue must begin on guns," "I think it's time to stand up to the National Rifle Association," etc., etc., blah, blah, blah...
...He bemoaned the lack of health care for the poor, attacked The Powers That Be for ignoring the underclass, and expressed general outrage over the country's unequal distribution of wealth...
...lacking compassion...
...Bradley was explaining to the audience how he wants "to get people to appreciate the unique contributions of the gay and lesbian community to America...
...Consider the speech on child poverty he gave at a Los Angeles day care center called Para los Ninos...
...He arrived an hour behind schedule, and by the time he got there, the reporters facing a 5:00 filing deadline were anxious to finish their stories...
...As a theory it makes sense...
...Shooting things in the river...
...As it turns out, Bradley has no idea what he's talking about...
...He doesn't disappoint...
...As the press van pulls away from the Gay and Lesbian Center, the reporters inside mull over what it has been like to follow Bradley through California...
...The face of children's poverty in America today," Bradley said, "is a mournful mosaic...
...Bradley quickly recovers and gives what for him is a pretty good speech...
...Voters in California, she is saying, may soon face a ballot initiative designed to make homosexual marriage illegal in the state...
...Bradley's staff seems cheery, too...
...Dent explained that he had followed Bradley's career over the years and was thrilled to learn that his old friend was running for president...
...Anybody with cable television can listen to Dick Gephardt say stuff like this all day long on C-SPAN...
...What are your thoughts...
...Bradley treats it like an outrageous non sequitur, like he's just been asked the price of yak butter in Bhutan...
...What do you think, he asks, of the House vote to allow the Ten Commandments to be posted in classrooms...
...He has come here, he says, not to lecture people on his ideas, but to listen to theirs...
...As the dinner begins, Bradley's wife gets up (confirming publicly for the first time all day that she is in fact his wife) and introduces the candidate...
...Helping America's children may seem a long way from reforming campaign finance," he admitted, "but, in fact, they're closely intertwined...
...Located on skid row, the center is the perfect venue for a candidate running left, and for the first part of his remarks Bradley seemed to be...
...In the glare of the spotlight, his enormous forehead has become a mirror, reflecting a beam across the ballroom...
...Still later in the speech, Bradley made distinctly conservative noises, declaring that only parents (not governments or villages) are fit to raise children...
...it's on the front page of today's Washington Post...
...Except that Jesse Jackson would have proceeded to demand new and larger government programs to fight child poverty...
...The reporters are beginning to look as bored as the candidate does...
...I can't help thinking of a conversation I had at the beginning of the day...
...Well, I'm glad this is a conference on guns," he says...
...On the other hand, this is politics...
...That's not an easy issue," Bradley says, shaking his head...
...Even armed, Bradley has a narcotic effect on audiences...
...Sitting next to Bradley is his wife, Ernestine Schlant, a professor of German literature at Montclair State University in New Jersey...
...asks one woman with palpable intensity...
...A heavy-set woman in a yarmulke has risen and introduced herself as the center's resident rabbi...
...Before the woman can answer, a man next to her cuts in to propose "a federal task force to deal specifically with teachers and administrators...
...Just so you know my record," he says, "I voted for the Defense of Marriage Act in the Congress...
...Bradley's old roommate from his years on the Knicks, Phil Jackson, has just signed a $30 million contract to coach the Lakers...
...Pictures of Jackson and Bradley led the local news...
...He introduced himself as Anthony Dent, a financial analyst in Los Angeles who had gone to Oxford with Bradley in the mid 1960s...
...Like many politically active gays, the rabbi is infuriated at the prospect that the initiative will pass...
...To this day, he says, he fondly remembers accompanying his grandfather "along the banks of the Mississippi River in Missouri with a .22 and shooting things in the river...
...It's a Lorcin .380, a small, semi-automatic pistol that Bradley claims sells for virtually nothing in the inner city...
...But he delivers it in such a flat, no-big-deal tone that nobody in the room seems to notice...
...senator—by any measure, Bradley has a dazzling resume...
...Bradley refused...
...He has hired a campaign manager who once worked for Ted Kennedy and NARAL...
...It's really not an easy issue...
...He just nods slowly...
...The New York Times described Bradley's campaign style as "a kind of Zen-like calm and self-acceptance...
...The room is set up for an ordinary press conference—folding chairs, television cameras, a podium placed in front of a campaign banner—but Bradley doesn't behave like an ordinary candidate...
...The rabbi merely nods understandingly, as if to say: Of course...
...The obvious—and by now, conventional—explanation is that Bradley is trying to outflank Al Gore on the left...
...According to ATF statistics, two out of the three guns most frequently used in crimes—the Smith & Wesson .38 and the Ruger 9 mm—are expensive and well-made...
...And without being asked, I'm telling you about it...
...It also makes you wonder what inspired him to run for president...
...Bradley is several days into an extended swing through California...
...He slowly waves it around the room...
...It seems a shame he'll have to add Hack Presidential Candidate to his list of occupations...
...It seems like he doesn't want any more press," says a reporter who has been covering him for weeks...
...It's meant as a compliment, but Bradley seems to bristle...
...Bradley seems to be in a better mood several hours later at the day's last event, a fund-raiser at the Beverly Hilton hosted by TV baron Barry Diller...
...It's a little before 11:00 on a sunny June morning, and Bradley is sitting with a small group of gay activists at the L.A...
...But no one in the room seems to care enough to make him explain himself...
...Bradley, meanwhile, seems almost ethereal...
...This makes him popular with a certain kind of well-educated moderate, but it makes his campaign against Al Gore—the solid favorite among middle-of-the-road Democrats—harder to rationalize...
...Instead, he abruptly segued from old-style power-to-the-people liberalism to Clinton-era yuppie whining...
...For Bradley, it's a point of pride not to worry about details like shiny foreheads...
...Most reporters are fairly sympathetic to Bradley—he and John McCain are favored to win the Media Primary—but the ones in the van aren't sure what to make of behavior like this...
...Everything about Bradley's demeanor—the heavy-lidded eyes, the sleepy voice, the wading-through-molasses hand movements—promises a uniquely soporific 30 minutes...
...It's a mixture of left, right, and center—he quotes Paul Wellstone one minute, calls for "the lowest possible tax rate" the next—but it's intelligent and easier to listen to than his earlier efforts...
...He didn't sound very convincing...
...It goes on like this for half an hour, as Bradley fields questions he often can't answer from professional gay activists...
...The next stop is a "media availability" at the California Hospital Medical Center downtown, where Bradley plans to unveil his position on gun control...
...Known as a moderate over his 18 years in the Senate, Bradley recently has shown signs of an ideological edge...
...Everyone, welfare mothers and soccer moms, can "suffer from 'time poverty.'" As an example, Bradley offered the less-than-heart-rending story of "a mother who is a corporate vice president who only sees her child for a rushed bedtime story at night...
...Bradley doesn't reply...
...If you didn't know better, you might mistake it for sleeping pills...
...Dent didn't come out and say so, but he seemed to agree...
...Until you listen to what Bradley actually says...
...In his ten days in California alone, Bradley gave his pitch to gays, feminists, organized labor, environmentalists, and the homeless...
...Gay and Lesbian Center in Hollywood...
...What kinds of things...
...What I'd like to hear from you, Senator, is how we can build stronger gay and lesbian families...
...Though he did promise it would "allow leaders to listen to their own inner voice...
Vol. 4 • July 1999 • No. 40
