Time Present, Time Past: A Memoir.

There is, of course, much to admire about Bill Bradley. As has been noted often, he's plugged away at a number of dull but important issues. In the mid-eighties he fostered a bipartisan consensus that the tax code should - and, more importantly, could - be shorn of its worst excesses, despite the entreaties of encrusted lobbies. Bradley's tax reform was the best kind of political alchemy. He got pols - Ronald Reagan, Dan Rostenkowski, and Bob Dole, to name a few - to do the right thing. Tax reform withered away in the late eighties and early nineties, but that is not Bradley's fault. He's not a part of either of the left and right choruses that want to muck up the tax code with deductions for college tuition (Robert Reich) or treat capital gains differently (all Republicans). On the issue of taxes, Bradley has stayed pure.

Purity, in fact, is at the heart of Bradley's public persona. Since adolescence, he has cultivated the image of someone who is thoughtful and pure of heart. His athletic ability, combined with his academic skill, made him a national celebrity at a young age. John McPhee's book on the Princeton basketball star, A Sense of Where You Are, chronicled Bradley's dedication to his craft - the relentless hours of putting weights in his shoes to perfect his jump shots, of putting on blinders to perfect his dribbling. The book also established him in the public mind as pensive, reflective.

Bradley never sought to quash that persona. Rather, he fueled it. In his likable memoir Life on the Run, Bradley reflected on race, money, and fame as he took readers inside the world of professional sports. It was a good book, but it was not a self-deprecating book - except in the way that people use self-deprecation as a form of self-promotion. When Bradley wrote that he wasn't good at small talk or didn't like a lot of hoopla, he was, doubtless, being honest. But he was also telegraphing that he was thoughtful.

When Bradley announced his pending retirement from the U.S. Senate last year, his tone was more than self-consciously thoughtful. It had become self-righteous. He managed to quote both Bertholt Brecht and Robert Frost. In the days after his retirement, he condemned both parties, triangulating himself above the fray. Republicans, said Bradley, believe that "government is the source of all evil," while Democrats "distrust the market and prefer the bureaucrat they know to the consumer they can't control." This is hyperbole, not insight. The GOP aren't libertarians who want to abolish the EPA or the SEC. And what Democratic Stalinists is he talking about? Chris Dodd? Richard Gephardt? Others have criticized both parties for wearing ideological blinders; the Democratic Leadership Council, and this magazine, to name two. But since the tax reform of a decade ago, Bradley has not been identified with any idea that could not have been proposed by a staid liberal backbencher.

As he retired, Bradley hinted strongly that he night run for president. But then he lashed out at the press for having the audacity to ask him about it. Is there something in the Hudson? Because the New Jersey senator's talking and teasing sounds a lot like Mario Cuomo.

Time Present, Time Past has much of the preciousness we saw during Bradley's retirement tour. The title itself is weighty, drawn from a T.S. Eliot poem and meant to denote that Bradley has, with his departure from the Senate, entered a new chapter in his life. Right from the opening, many lines infuriated me. "I have always preferred moving to standing still," he explains, as if this was a confession instead of a platitude. The book skips around Bradley's life. There is Bradley, the earnest small town banker's son, in the Mississippi river town of Crystal City, Missouri, fresh from the NBA, traveling the country and hustling for money, but, like Robert Redford in The Candidate, feeling detached, wondering what all the incessant fundraising, and handshaking is for.

The idea of "listening to America" runs like a skein through Bradley's book. He has encouraged Americans to "sit down with their neighbors and talk about what it would take for them again to believe that the political process can provide answers." Native Americans, victims of corporate downsizing, Scotch-Irish Appalachians like his ancestors are all here, with Bradley as a sounding board. The idea of getting outside the capital and listening to Americans has great appeal, of course. But for all of Bradley's listening, he hasn't come up with much to say. On the issue of race, for instance, Bradley has earned his loudest applause. He has led an integrated life and his concern is admirable; but he has little to add to the conversation. His views - supporting affirmative action, condemning black crime, chiding white racism - are perfectly respectable, but commonplace. There is also a painfully obvious quality to much of what he says on public policy. "If Democrats can help shape the coming information age so that it add jobs, builds community and enhance democracy even as it improves economic productivity," he writes, "we can offer tremendous hope." If Democrats can make cheeseburgers dietetic, they will also be able to offer tremendous hope.

Still, this is a worthwhile book. There's some humor here. Bradley has been in the Senate for 18 years, and so his mentors were the barons of a different era. There are interesting accounts of Henry "Scoop" Jackson (how he won the battle for the B-1) and Russell Long (how he would kill his House opponents in any conference by talking until 3 or 4 A.M.). There are interesting insights into the culture of the Senate, such as how the best players are the informed senators.

What the book - and perhaps Bradley's career - lacks is that final shot of courage. Bradley may have been out front on tax reform, but on other issues where Democrats were afraid to tread he was AWOL. Unlike, say, Bruce Babbitt in the 1988 campaign, Bradley had little to say about entitlements until it became conventional wisdom that they needed to be reined in. Bradley clearly does not think much of Clinton, yet he can't bring himself to criticize Clinton directly anywhere in these pages.

In his cerebral tone, Bradley is not like his fellow seventies senators Gary Hart and Paul Tsongas. All three have written books urging the Democrats to be centrists, and all three have a holier-than-thou tenor in their words and demeanor. But Tsongas an Hart were not mere rectors. They had courage. They faced the question of running for president head on. In Tsongas's case the run was particularly quixotic. Bradley, of course, is not obligated to run; but he goes through the quadrennial exercise of publicly debating whether to do so. And if that wasn't bad enough, at a time when the Democrats need his centrist voice in a riven Senate, he is choosing to leave.

There is a tendency, of course, in presidential years to look fondly on those who considered running but did not. Many Republicans this year long for Kemp or Bennett or Powell, just as Democrats spent the eighties wishing that Cuomo or Bradley had made the race. But, at the end of the day, their hesitation is not worth lamenting. We're better off with the hyperambitions of candidates like Phil Gramm and Bill Clinton, men whose hunger seems laughable but whose risk-taking is admirable. Thoughtfulness is a fine quality. Bradley's life shows why it's also overrated.

Matthew Cooper, a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly, is a senior editor at The New Republic, where he writes the White House Watch column.