BILL BRADLEY'S MAGIC.

It's not just hoop dreams

Bill Bradley is running ahead of Al Gore in New Hampshire and New York, looking more and more like a candidate with a serious chance to win. Democratic leaders worry that Gore can't beat George W. Bush, and Republicans, partly to encourage a Democratic dogfight, are speaking of Bradley as the candidate they fear. (With reason: Matched against Bradley, Bush's soft support turns undecided, narrowing the race, and it's especially notable that, in a Wall Street Journal survey, Bradley led Bush among upper-income voters). If Bradley does well in the early primaries, particularly the March 7 contests in New York and California, even Gore's supporters will be having second thoughts. It's a long shot, but Bradley has made those before.

At first glance, Bradley's gains are a little mysterious. As a candidate, he's no poster boy: His speeches are earnest but monotonous and he tends to step on his applause lines. As Maureen Dowd of the New York Times described him, he is a man with "a belly and a bald spot" who makes little attempt to conceal either, and who is apt to campaign wearing disreputable sneakers. It's hard not to wonder whether this artless shabbiness is really artful, an image designed to emphasize Bradley's rejection of a politics dominated by money and packaged campaigns, his promise of a "different way." In any case, it may be an asset, this election, that Bill Bradley is not slick.

So far, Bradley's fundamental appeal has been a simple negation: He is not Al Gore, and hence the only alternative for Democrats disaffected from Bill Clinton's administration. The impeachment crisis muted their criticism of the president, making Gore's nomination seem inevitable, but steadily, discontent has been recovering its voice. In April, almost two-thirds of Democrats in one poll were saying that they were "tired of all the problems associated with the Clinton administration," and in September, more Americans thought the country needed a "new direction" than were happy with things as they are.

Bradley has profited from the itch for change, but any coalition gets more fissiparous as it gets larger, and Bradley-who recently shared a platform with Al Sharpton and Ed Koch-will be increasingly hard-pressed to overcome the antipathies in his own camp.

Much of his support, of course, derives from distaste for the administration's aroma. Voters know that Al Gore is a straighter arrow than the president, but they remember his shilling in that Buddhist temple, and they question his failure to lay into the president after Clinton's deceptions were revealed. Professional political observers shrug this off: A vice-president with ambitions doesn't criticize his boss. To a great many Americans, however, this only demonstrates that Gore is "just another politician," willing to do whatever it takes to win. Hoping to blunt this perception, Gore has been trumpeting his religious beliefs, even waffling a little on creationism in the schools, but this approach hasn't been well received. Secularists are outraged, religious conservatives detect "theological shoplifting," and Gore's tactical contriving is evident all around. By contrast, Bradley's character is unshadowed; he has avoided "faith talk," working more subtly to associate himself with the virtues of an older, small- town America in which religion went without saying. Even so, the question of "values" will be tricky for Bradley, who is seeking to yoke more or less traditional moralists to the Democratic Left.

Of course, the Democrats' left wing is itself a crazy quilt. Orthodox liberals-for whom welfare reform and "don't ask, don't tell" rank high on the administration's list of sins-are never entirely at ease with labor Democrats, engrossed with the problems of employment and job quality. Still, left liberals and Old Democrats alike are natural parts of Bradley's constituency of discontent.

Prosperity has lessened misery, but the Clinton administration hasn't dented inequality and, to tell the truth, really hasn't tried. Increasingly evangelical about market economics and freer trade, it implicitly ranks gain above security, and Al Gore, so often the administration's champion, is tied by history and inclination to its technophilia and its enthusiasm for globalization. For the Democratic Left, especially the industrial unions, that stance is anathema, at least in part, because globalization shrinks the sphere of democratic self-government in favor of mercantile despotism (just as, for similar reasons, Americans across the ideological spectrum are troubled by how far the administration will go to conciliate a "trading partner" like China).

Bradley has had some success in appealing to such concerns, inspiring enough interest among the industrial unions to keep the AFL-CIO from endorsing either candidate at this stage of the game. But Bradley has a problem: In the Senate, he was a supporter of liberalized trade, and even sympathetic union leaders are pressed to find evidence that Bradley's trade policy would differ from Gore's. Bradley has tried to provide it, for example, by indicating opposition to the operation of foreign-owned trucks in the United States. Still, his room for maneuver is limited precisely because character is his Excalibur: An expedient abandoning of his earlier principles would lower him to the level of leaders whose convictions are notable chiefly for their flexibility.

Where his past is less confining-on campaign reform, on gun control, on racial and economic equality and the like-Bradley has been sending strong signals to the Left. But even if he wins over the Democratic Left (and there will be exceptions like Tom Hayden), it won't be enough.

To be nominated, and, even more, to be elected, Bradley will need support from the legions of Americans who are unhappy but unattached, like the younger voters who go virtually ignored by candidates and parties. And at times, observers catch hints that Bill Bradley, pedestrian rhetoric and all, may speak the language of enough of those Americans to revive civic life.

Bradley does have an odd, shambling kind of magic. David von Drehle, writing in the Washington Post, understood part of it: Bradley, he argued, is a natural aristocrat, identified as a potential president thirty-five years ago in a John McPhee New Yorker profile, comfortable with the idea of power and less likely to be plagued by its demons.

It may be even more important that, during his basketball years, it was a commonplace that Bradley "moved without the ball"-that is, that he was always in the game, seeing it as a whole, never letting his ego get in the way of his grander ambition. There are flashes of that quality in Bradley's politics. Refraining from criticizing Bill Clinton directly, he has remarked-correctly-that the oath of office makes the president into a public person, with a corresponding duty to subordinate his private needs and rights. Even Bradley's rather hokey invoking of his roots in Crystal City, Missouri, reflected his recognition of America's need for a common life, the "deeper prosperity" that comes from a sense of being in the great game of self- government. It's no wonder that so many Democrats are becoming intrigued by what Bill Bradley might do if he had the ball.

Wilson Carey McWilliams teaches political science at Rutgers University.