Bradley bores but scores in Boston

Beantown finally gets a visit from a candidate who knows his foreign policy inside and out.

By Michael Joseph Gross

Nov 30, 1999 | Last month this city played host to a conspicuous little foreign-policy blunder by George W. Bush, when he failed local news reporter Andy Hiller's pop-quiz game of "Name That World Leader."

On Monday, Bill Bradley, no doubt intent on parading his much-more-impressive foreign-policy prowess, came to the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University for what promised to be an invigorating question-and-answer session with some of this country's smartest foreign-policy students.

The contrast between the candidates would hardly be lost on anyone who was paying attention.

This time, Andy Hiller stayed away -- even his cameraman claimed to not know where he was -- and, boy, was he missed! Petty as it may have been, Hiller's gambit had added a snappy surprise to an otherwise boring news day when Bush visited.

Bradley's appearance had no such snap.

The Democratic candidate for president delivered a 21-minute speech, punctuated by bullet points describing lessons learned from his foreign-relations work in the Senate. "Define the problem right ... Seek bipartisan support ... No appeasement," and so forth.

Once finished, he opened himself up to a half hour of softball questions from the students. Bradley's strongest statements in this part of the session concerned U.S.-Russian relations, as he proposed strategic-arms-reduction talks to cut the number of nuclear warheads deeper than President Clinton would like. He also expressed his intention to strike a diplomatic stance toward Russia that focuses less on Boris Yeltsin and more on the Russian people.

He also took a sidelong swipe at Gore and Clinton with his promise to "always be straight with" the American people regarding foreign affairs. And though he defended America's moral obligation to intercede in foreign humanitarian disasters such as "genocide" in Bosnia and Kosovo, he emphasized that Americans "cannot give an open-ended humanitarian commitment to the world."

None of this, of course, was news. More details of Bradley's foreign-policy proclivities were articulated by James Dao's preview piece about the Tufts event in Sunday's New York Times than were revealed during the event itself. So, on to the real stuff: The auditorium was too hot. The Fletcher School's final exams are coming up, so students were jumpy. Bradley had big bags under his eyes. Pushy white men hogged the pitifully short question-and-answer period, after which Bradley rushed off to a meeting with the editorial board of the Boston Globe. These were some of the factors to blame for the lack of excitement on Monday.

After Bradley was gone, Fletcher students crammed into the graduate program's tiny cafeteria and engaged in some grumbling about the poor quality of the dialogue they'd just witnessed. Nevertheless, they said they liked Bradley -- they really liked him.

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