''The taste of defeat has a richness of experience all its own.''
- Bill Bradley, in 1976 memoir ''Life on the Run''
WASHINGTON - Bill Bradley was richer yesterday for what he is not: a charismatic orator, a brash street brawler, a master strategist who could whet a national yearning and wring from it personal glory.
For all that and a wider web of circumstances and character quirks, Bradley today will grudgingly end his quest for a job that others had told him since he was too young to vote would one day be his.
Bradley will not be president, not now, maybe never. After a 15-month odyssey marked by flashes of brilliant promise amid periods of languorous stumping, the former basketball star and US senator will announce he has exhausted this phase of his public life and will endorse the target of his renegade run for the Democratic nomination, Vice President Al Gore.
The ''joyous journey'' Bradley launched last year in a living room in Jaffrey, N.H., will officially expire when he promises supporters near his New Jersey headquarters that the ''new politics'' he sought to nurture will some day flourish in America, even if he is absent from the harvest.
''This wasn't our time,'' a top Bradley supporter said yesterday, reflecting Bradley's views. ''But the cause isn't lost.''
By some measures, though, 2000 could have been Bradley's time. But for a rash of strategic miscues and Bradley's rigid reluctance to depart from his original script, the campaign might have turned his way.
Never mind that he would have risked failure in November with a largely liberal agenda of sweeping antipoverty, health-care and gun-control initiatives at a time when polls show the public hungers for little more than marginal change. He planted the seeds of his demise in January.
After soaring in the polls in late 1999 on the strength of a stunning fund-raising effort and glossy news coverage, Bradley squandered his edge by wasting precious weeks and a million dollars in a futile attempt to crack Gore's impenetrable hold on the party apparatus and labor unions that control the Iowa caucuses.
In the process, Bradley clung so dearly to the ''radical premise'' that he could prove the power of ''big ideas'' without dirtying himself in the political maelstrom that he allowed Gore to pummel him with impunity.
Bradley, like a storm-ravaged scarecrow in an Iowa cornfield, showed no pluck. He shunned urgent calls from his advisers to storm back, appearing more intent on martyring himself for passive politics than becoming president.
Indeed, he effectively gave credence to Gore's portrayal of him as a quitter who viewed politics more as an academic exercise than a field of action. And polls showed that Bradley's campaign entered a devastating tailspin after a debate Jan. 9, when he failed to counter Gore's false claim that Bradley in 1993 had opposed disaster relief for Iowa farmers.
Deepening his crisis, Bradley offered only meek protests as Gore pounded him on the issue for days in television ads. And Bradley's advisers, helplessly watching him founder, could do little but despair.
''In politics, you don't do everything perfectly,'' his spokesman, Eric Hauser, said amid the fall. ''Sometimes they don't happen the way you want them to.''
Yet one woe seemed to beget another, most notably Bradley's awkward disclosures about his irregular heartbeat. Rather than fully disclose from the start his relatively common condition, atrial fibrillation, Bradley hewed to what he once described as his ''natural antipathy to the invasion by the press of all the aspects of my life.''
Thus, he attracted outsized attention when he canceled an event in California in December to seek treatment for an episode, and again when he disclosed in Iowa in January that he had experienced four more erratic heartbeats. And he hardly helped himself by diagnosing a highly unscientific cause of the recurrences: his consumption of diet cream soda.
''The heart thing did him in,'' said Bob Hynes, a Bradley supporter from Hyde Park, after Bradley spoke last month at the Codman Square Health Center in Dorchester. ''He can't win because of it.''
Bradley later conceded he was stunned by a New Hampshire poll that showed nearly one in five voters considered his heart condition a serious issue.
By the time he reached New Hampshire in late January, Bradley had ceded his comfortable edge in the state. Worse, the error of Bradley's Iowa strategy was embodied by Arizona Senator John McCain, who snubbed Iowa to trumpet his message of reform in New Hampshire while Bradley, the self-fashioned Democratic reformer, languished. McCain had stolen the Granite State spotlight.
''If we ever do this again,'' one of Bradley's top aides said at the time, ''we'll never go back to Iowa.''
Ironically, Bradley had his best days in New Hampshire when he finally abandoned his professorial mien and savaged Gore as flip-flopping opportunist short on honesty and integrity.
The attacks helped Bradley close Gore's double-digit lead and nearly erase it by primary night. But as McCain surged to victory in the GOP race, he siphoned off legions of independents who otherwise could have provided the additional five points Bradley needed to topple Gore and seize the momentum himself.
Instead, the momentum was McCain's. The magazine covers. The front pages. The nightly news shots. Everything was McCain's. For the next five weeks, Bradley was a footnote in the race for the White House.
''He's been off the radar screen since New Hampshire,'' Senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, a key Bradley supporter, said recently. ''And it's hard to win anything if nobody can see you.''
Yet Bradley compounded the Iowa debacle with a similarly doomed decision to invest five valuable days trying to win a nonbinding, largely inconsequential primary in Washington state on Feb. 29. The strategy backfired badly as Bradley was throttled in Washington and lost so much ground elsewhere that he all but shut down his campaign a week before the decisive round of primaries on Tuesday.
In the end, no one could help him. Not Michael Jordan, the basketball icon who endorsed him in television commercials. Not Harvard professor Cornel West, who lauded Bradley's push for racial unity by declaring, ''Martin Luther King smiles down on this man.'' Not Matt Henshon, the Boston lawyer who served as Bradley's ''body man,'' guiding him through every thicket of the campaign.
Bradley appealed to black voters, and they overwhelmingly backed Gore. He called for eradicating childhood poverty, and the poor largely shunned him, according to exit polls. He advocated making health care accessible to all Americans, but the voters who most warmed to his message were upper-income families who harbored few anxieties about health coverage.
By most measures, Bradley scored highest among voters who yearned for new ideas and an honest leader. And he never stopped asking audiences, young and old, ''What is your dream, for yourself, your community and your country?''
Yet today, Bradley's dream is deferred, if not defunct.
