n coming weeks, Bill Bradley, candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, will be on a mission. Traveling through churches, shops, parks, and beauty salons, he will be courting ordinary folk in the South - the region most resistant to his challenge to Vice President Al Gore.
Beside him will be Cornel West, Harvard Afro-American Studies professor, Bradley's friend, his Massachusetts cochairman, and a key adviser in a campaign the former senator repeatedly says hinges on race.
Already West, 46, a powerful, preacher-like speaker, has introduced Bradley at a dozen events.
''I don't just endorse Bill Bradley,'' he said at a Washington reception in September. ''Endorse is too weak and impoverished a term. I'm in solidarity with him because he's my brother.''
But as West moves from the forgiving world of academia into the hazardous arena of presidential politics, increasing numbers of observers -- black and white, from politics and academia -- say there is reason to believe that mainstream voters will be dismayed by his views.
The author regularly takes positions to the far left of what voters have come to expect of national politics in recent years, in which the middle ground has become hallowed. He proclaims himself both a radical and a socialist.
''The legacy of white supremacy'' still runs deep in America, he has said.
He has vociferously condemned welfare reform, and criticized President Clinton and the Democratic Party for having no ''intention of responding to the concerns of African-Americans.''
He laments the subordination of workers, and American imperialism, and he sees a cure for many of America's ills in a redistribution of wealth.
He decries ''multinational corporate capitalism, with its bankrupt and authoritarian-like state,'' and describes prisons and police as ''forms of institutionalized state violence against minorities.''
And he is going on the road with the man who wants to lead the very institutions he has been attacking for years.
West concedes that Bradley might not endorse everything he stands for, pegging the candidate as liberal but ''experimental'' rather than radical.
''Bill Bradley and I, we never agreed on everything,'' West said. ''When you're a brother, and a friend, and comrade, you accent what you overlap, and you're candid with your disagreements.''
Bradley bristles when asked if he agrees with all of West's positions, saying they are separate people who agree and disagree on various issues. And both he and West assert that their relationship is more personal than ideological.
But what makes for a lively friendship might not translate so well into the electorate. In this campaign, advisers have been fair game: Gore was pilloried recently for accepting the counsel of popular feminist author Naomi Wolf. And while some observers think West might help Bradley among black voters, others wonder if West's views could harm him among whites.
''I don't think [West's ideas] will play on a national stage,'' said Shelby Steele, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and a conservative black academic frequently at odds with West. ''They will be seen as far left, and kooky, and they will hurt Bill Bradley.''
Bradley has told the stories dozens of times already: of his Aunt Bub, whose every utterance of the N-word cut him afresh; of traveling with his baseball team in segregated Joplin, Mo., and having to stay at third-rate motels because the decent ones would not admit his black teammates; of seeing racism firsthand as a white basketball player traveling with a mostly black New York Knicks team.
As a senator, he made several addresses on race, and spoke often, as he still does, of ''white skin privilege.'' After the Rodney King beating, Bradley took to the Senate floor and made a dramatic speech, hitting the podium 56 times, once for each time King was struck.
Bradley has said repeatedly that he is staking his campaign on his wish for racial unity: ''It is not a political position; it's my core,'' he said at the annual Rainbow/PUSH convention in August.
He said he was convinced that a message of racial healing would attract not just black voters, but also white ones, 30 percent of whom, he said, ''want a deeper level of racial unity.'' His vision of improved race relations is centered on ''building multiracial coalitions'' to solve issues such as child poverty.
''If I'm wrong,'' he told the Globe recently, ''I'm toast.''
As a candidate, he has aggressively courted black voters, not through the usual Democratic Party channels, which Gore has all but sewn up, but in more activist quarters, chiefly by cutting to the left of the vice president, and reaching beyond the establishment, attracting celebrity endorsements.
Making race such a large part of his campaign is unwise politically, said Ronald Walters, a professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, and deputy campaign chairman for Jesse Jackson's two presidential campaigns.
''I wouldn't counsel my candidate to put race front and center, because the issue of race has been the source of so much alienation, especially among whites,'' Walters said. ''It's race that has driven whites away from the Democratic Party, to conceive of [it] as the party of blacks.''
West, for his part, thinks it is entirely possible to talk about race in a way that appeals to all kinds of voters. And though Bradley downplays West's influence on his policies, West illustrates this point by citing the role racial discrimination plays in child poverty, just as Bradley did.
''Bill Bradley puts child poverty front and center,'' West said. ''He understands he's talking about race through the prisms of what our responsibilities are as citizens. It's different from putting race out there in raw form. It's part of a discourse about citizenship in which race plays a role; that's the way to do it.''
West and Bradley met in 1990, when West was a professor of religion and Afro-American studies at Princeton. Bradley, a Princeton graduate and US senator from New Jersey, convened a regular gathering of intellectuals, ''with the purpose of discussing the prospects of the American republic, and the future of American democracy,'' West said.
West, who held professorships at Yale and Princeton before his colleague, Henry Louis Gates Jr., enticed him to join the Afro-American studies department at Harvard in 1994, talked publicly about his disillusionment with the Democratic Party not so long ago, similar to Bradley's when he left the Senate. Changes in the welfare system turned West against the Clinton administration, he said.
''His signing the welfare reform bill was the straw that broke the camel's back,'' West told an interviewer in 1997. ''You just can't play games with people's lives like that.''
More recently, he has expressed his objections in class terms, suggesting that welfare recipients should not be punished until big corporations are weaned from government subsidies: ''We needed welfare reform, but not pushing the poor out on their own,'' West explained recently. ''I wanted to begin with corporate welfare.''
Convinced that Bradley is different, West signed on to the campaign as an unpaid adviser, squeezing in his stumping for Bradley among his many speaking engagements and book-promotion trips. He introduced Bradley to the Congressional Black Caucus in August; took him to meet with the Rev. Al Sharpton and his supporters in Harlem; introduced him before a speech on race relations at Cooper Union College in New York City; and appeared with him at a Washington gala packed with black celebrities.
''They have a union in the way they see the world with respect to the issue of race,'' said Walters, who is black.
But West's rhetoric has been far more incendiary than Bradley's to date. West writes hopefully of the need for racial unity, but he criticized Clinton's vaunted dialogue on race as little more than ''chitchat.''
He is a harsh critic of government in general, writing of the police and prison systems as mechanisms of state violence against minorities, and of the FBI and CIA as more subtle forms of that violence, ''whose actions threaten personal liberties, and remain beyond public scrutiny and accountability.''
''Is not the grand paradox of American democracy at its inception that the people are distrusted and contained, their power dispersed and diluted so that elites may prosper at the expense of workers' power, women's power, and especially black, brown, yellow and red power?'' West wrote in the introduction to his latest book, ''The Cornel West Reader.''
He criticizes ''multinational corporate capitalism, with its bankrupt and authoritarian-like state,'' persecuting the ''black and brown, and working poor and underclass,'' attacking women's reproductive rights, and making lesbians and gays ''cultural scapegoats.''
He believes that white fear of a black sexuality is ''a basic ingredient of white racism.''
He has criticized today's black middle class as ''more deficient and more decadent'' than in previous decades, their selfishness a prime reason for what he sees as a crisis in black leadership.
''Most present-day black leaders seem too hungry for status to be angry, too eager for acceptance to be bold, too self-invested in advancement to be defiant,'' he wrote in his bestseller, ''Race Matters.''
West's association with Sharpton, who has a reputation for widening the racial divide, and his qualified sympathy for Minister Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam reinforce his image as a radical.
His links to Sharpton and Farrakhan, especially, will not fly on a national political stage, said analysts.
''He has some rather bizarre ideas,'' said Steele, of Stanford. ''That children should be able to vote, that government should take care of everybody. He's socialistic in that bent. Overall, those ideas would be dangerous for Bradley politically because the public would identify him with the far, almost exotic, left.''
Added Abigail Thernstrom, the coauthor of ''America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible'': ''I do not think Cornel West's ideas or Bradley's ideas, which are very `two nations, separate and unequal,' [are] reality in 1999, and I think the American public knows that. The average voter will say, `Give me a break.'''
Voters will not respond well to claims that ''all whites are racist, and that there has been no black progress that is meaningful,'' said Thernstrom, who knows both Bradley and West. ''I don't think his voice is where the American public is, I really do not.''
The American public has never responded well to calls for a redistribution of wealth, even during the Great Depression, said Karlyn Bowman, a resident fellow and public opinion specialist at the American Enterprise Institute.
She cited a 1993 survey, which found that even 51 percent of people who earned less than $15,000 a year believe Americans should be able to accumulate as much wealth as possible even if others live in poverty.
Nor are voters likely to respond well to West's criticism of welfare reform, Bowman said. In a mid-November Los Angeles Times poll, which asked respondents what opinions would make them likely to vote against a candidate, 59 percent of respondents were less likely to vote for someone who opposed the welfare reform bill, as Bradley did. Of the many issues surveyed, that position elicited the strongest negative sentiment, Bowman said.
For his part, Bradley rejects the suggestion that he might be called upon to answer for West's views.
''My positions on race are formed out of my own experience and my own life,'' he said. ''Cornel's a friend and he's an admired friend. I don't know all the positions he's ever taken on all the issues. I don't think they'll be liabilities because Cornel is speaking to who I am as a person. I'm not worried, because I speak for myself as to what I want to do.''
To be sure, many observers, especially those who know Bradley, warn against overestimating West's sway.
''I would doubt that Cornel West has a lot of influence on him,'' said Walters, who was Bradley's colleague when the former senator taught for a short time at the University of Maryland. ''I don't think anybody has that much influence over Bill Bradley. [He] has proven he's his own man. That's precisely the attraction he has for a lot of voters.''
Bradley does not brook attempts to hold him responsible for the people with whom he associates: he defended his August visit to Sharpton in Harlem.
''I think I was the first Democratic politician in a primary campaign to go to Harlem since 1968,'' Bradley said. ''I don't agree with Al Sharpton on all the issues. But I recognized that it was an opportunity to speak to a community that doesn't often have presidential candidates come speak to them.''
But despite Bradley's determination to remain solely responsible for his public views, Walters said, West's presence in the campaign might pull Bradley's image farther left.
''There is that view that Bradley is more liberal than he really is, because he has surrounded himself with people like West,'' Walters said.
Nonetheless, Bradley and West will be bound together even more closely in coming weeks, during their tour.
''I think he's a very highly respected voice in the African-American community,'' the candidate says of West. ''He's a friend of mine who's known me for many years, and he can speak about me in ways other people can't.''
Added West: ''It's just to push him over the top. We'd go everywhere, especially through the South. We'd be going to churches and synagogues and trade union centers, barber shops and beauty salons, the full court press.''
They face a difficult battle. In the South, where most black Democratic voters live, Gore's approval rating is at 74 percent, while, according to an August survey, 42 percent of voters still did not know who Bradley was. And West is a complete unknown outside intellectual circles in the Northeast, said David Bositis, senior political analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic studies, who conducted the survey.
The whole trip might backfire, turning off black voters, Steele said.
''I think Bradley is making a very serious mistake,'' Steele said. ''If he's working through Cornel West, he does not understand the black American community. He needs to reach out in a much broader way.''
Steele called West's ''aggressive support of racial preferences very out of step with broader America,'' including a half of black Americans. ''Bradley is placing himself in the far left of black community,'' Steele said.
West, however, is unlikely to abandon his position as a liberal crusader against institutional power - even if he succeeds in helping his friend make it to the White House.
Then, West said, ''I'll become his loving and friendly critic.''
