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Wednesday, Oct 15, 2008
He was an honorable antidote to Clinton, but for an electorate conditioned to empathy from their leaders, Bradley didn't work.
Mar 9, 2000 | Thursday marks the end of the insurgent campaigns for president, the brief flirtation by the American people with two candidates -- Sen. John McCain and former Sen. Bill Bradley -- who represented something other than what their party leaders wanted, which voters were then expected to rubber-stamp.
As an avowed independent who routinely splits my ticket, I was drawn to the insurgents -- first to Bradley because I am a fallen Democrat, seduced by President Clinton when I was just 18, then routinely disappointed by him over the course of the seven-plus years that followed. The final betrayal was when he looked me in the eye, shook his finger and lied to me about Monica Lewinsky. I didn't think something like that could affect a jaded Watergate baby like myself, but it did. I joined Clinton as a young Democratic idealist, and left him as a grizzled independent cynic.
Enter Bill Bradley. On paper, when he launched his campaign, Bradley was the candidate who should have reignited my moderate political optimism. Before he reinvented himself as a liberal, he had developed a reputation as a centrist iconoclast, an independent thinker who during his 18-year Senate career frequently cut deals with Republicans to get key pieces of legislation signed by Republican presidents and, later, through a Republican-controlled Congress. Bradley fell out of love with the Democratic Party at the same time I did, resigning in a huff in 1995, complaining that both parties had strayed from the American people.
When Bradley reemerged as a presidential contender some four years later, I was actually attracted at first by his style. He seemed soft-spoken and sincere, sometimes aloof, even slightly stoned. He reminded me of my favorite college professors, who derived strength from their deliberateness, their aura of gravitas, their detachment.
In fact, watching Bradley in action made me think of the professor who led my senior seminar in American politics. He made us read a short story by Herman Melville, "Bartleby the Scrivener." At the time, I couldn't quite figure out why we were reading "Bartleby" in a politics course; it was a simple tale of a clerk who refused to do anything his boss asked him to do, with the haunting refrain, "I would prefer not to." Strangely, watching Bradley on the stump four years later made sense of the story assignment.
On the basketball court Bradley, like Melville's Bartleby, lived life through repetition. In John McPhee's famous portrait of the young Bradley, "A Sense of Where You Are," we see him shooting free throws over and over again in empty Missouri gymnasiums, singularly driven, even vaguely autistic. Both characters are the kind of people who can make their opponent tear their hair out, and in that quality, I found something to admire. As Melville writes of his protagonist, "Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance."
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