NDIANOLA, Iowa - First he ambled for president. Then he loped for president. Now, 10 days before the Iowa caucuses, Bill Bradley is running for president.
And running hard. In a finishing sprint that is somewhere between determined and frantic, the former senator from New Jersey is struggling to cobble together an organization in Iowa that can compete with Vice President Al Gore's, fighting to wrestle back the momentum from Gore in New Hampshire, and taking on the vice president's record and positions in personal appearances and a television blitz.
''We're in the fourth quarter,'' the former New York Knick said, and no one in the shivering crowd assembled around a John Deere tractor the other day missed the reference, or the meaning.
In the last several days alone, Bradley has assaulted his rival on education (saying Gore is more generous to the military than to the schools), agriculture (arguing Gore hasn't fought to save family farms), and tobacco (asking why Gore opposed a 1985 effort to block a cut in tobacco taxes). At the same time, Bradley is airing new television ads here, identifying himself with ''that hard-working, middle-class family that has a wife and a husband working sometimes two jobs'' and placing a banner ad for Iowans on two Internet sites, including hotmail.com.
The Internet message: ''Tired of politics as usual? I am.''
Cold conventions of politics
That is the message Bradley, a three-term senator, is taking to the early political states. He is giving Gore a run for his money. Indeed, he may have more money for the run than Gore does. But the lesson of presidential politics - Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona is enrolled in the same seminar this semester - is that even candidates who run against the silly conventions of politics end up being measured by the cold conventions of politics.
''I am not in control of the process,'' Bradley said in a conversation as his chartered Canadair regional jet cruised at 640 miles an hour between Iowa, where he is catching up, and New Hampshire, where Gore has caught up. ''Al Gore is in control. I said I'd play it as it lays, and whatever the rules called for, I'd do it.''
He is. An hour earlier he stood in the frigid shed out behind Todd Lieber and Colleen Heatherton's dairy farm, a pitchfork, bent long ago by the hardness of the soil, hanging in the background. For Patrick J. Buchanan, the apostate Republican who is seeking to rouse the passions of peasants with pitchforks, the symbolism would have been irresistible. For Bradley, who campaigns with words, not symbols, the pitchfork remained on the wall, but the talk about ''the crisis not only of the economy but of the spirit'' flowed freely.
Wonk words and poetry
Every campaign takes on the character of its candidate, and none more so than the campaign being run (the word run is apt, finally) by Bradley. The other morning he assembled a group of farmers' advocates - former agriculture secretary Bob Bergland of Minnesota, legendary state Senator Jack Kibbie of Iowa - and spoke easily of capped countercyclical income stabilization proposals (the better to help small, independent farmers when agriculture prices drop) and his plan to shift the Packers and Stockyard Administration from the Agriculture Department to the Justice Department (the better to watch for anticompetitive maneuvers in the farm sector).
But he seasoned the wonk words with a prose poem about Iowa's family farmers, who, he said, possess ''a kind of dignity and a kind of honor and a kind of fear that I've rarely seen.''
Tributes to the virtues of the family farmer are, to be sure, as common on the campaign trail in Iowa as steak sauce is on the tables of the beef palaces that serve up a steady stream of 26-ounce T-bones and paddle-sized filets (wrapped in bacon, in case the meat theme doesn't come through quite strongly enough). But Bradley is trying to transform the idiom of politics. He talks that way even when he's 33,000 feet above the nearest silo.
''My candidacy is a way to restore trust in the process and confidence in our collective will,'' he said on his chartered jet. But the test of his political will is in his success with the process. And that, as former governor Mario M. Cuomo of New York would say, is the difference between poetry and prose.
Right now Gore may not possess the rhetorical advantage, but he retains the organizational one, more important in Iowa than perhaps any place else on earth. ''They've had no trouble getting Bradley to attract a crowd, which means that they have lots of names,'' said Hugh Winebrenner, the Drake University political scientist regarded as the most astute expert on Iowa's peculiar caucus system. ''But there's a big organizational challenge in getting people to a caucus.'' Gore has the help of the political establishment and the unions, including teachers. Bradley's staff is still recruiting precinct captains. But the insurgent is running now, as time runs out.
