DAVID NYHAN

Bill Bradley's game

By David Nyhan, Globe Staff, April 14, 1999

Bill Bradley is one of those cerebral-type politicians who don't want to leave you with the impression that any of the nation's problems have simple answers.

If Bill Clinton is the Music Man, a saxophone-tooting, fast-talking smooth-dancing, ear-nibbling salesman with a roving eye and those perpetual-motion lips, Bradley is the bookish professor of music theory, whose charts, staffs, sharps, and flats spill out of his briefcase every time he flashes his wares.

The former New Jersey senator is today in the position of those couples hoping to conceive a millennium baby: He'll know right around New Year's Day what his chances are -- because Bradley has just about nine months to father a presidential campaign with a reasonable shot at disinheriting Al Gore for the Democrats' presidential nomination.

For the D's, the voters have a simple choice: one from Column A (Vice President Gore) or one from Column B (Bradley). Republican voters must winnow their way through a grab bag of 11 warring candidates. In Gore and Bradley, Democrats choose between two non-Clintons, both of them strait-laced dudes with Ivy League credentials, brainpower to spare, and a penchant for wonking on and on about the greenhouse effect, tax policy -- or nets: Gore is an Internet junkie and Bradley was a professional basketball player.

Neither will bowl you over in the oratory department. Both are experienced Senate veterans with clean rap sheets and heavy-duty intellectual equipment. In a trash TV-tabloid environment, they'll both fade to pale gray in the thong wars of contemporary journalism. But Democrats will be well served by a campaign of lengthy, lofty, highbrow issue debate.

Bradley, it seems, will be a hard guy to draw out. In a conversation of more than an hour Monday with Globe editorial writers and editors, Bradley was precise, if not concise, analytical without being particularly revealing, comfortable in his new role as challenger, if not totally sanguine about the eventual outcome. He adopts the mantle of fatalism acquired by the mature politician. Like so many other capable senators of the last generation, he had a bellyful of the "world's greatest deliberative body" and opted out.

On the most pressing issue of the day -- Clinton's aggressive prosecution of the NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia -- Bradley was unwilling to say what he would have done differently from Clinton when forced to choose among the "no good options" in the Balkan war. Focusing for more than 20 minutes on Kosovo, Bradley did a typical senatorial big-picture tour of the landscape.

I have to support the troops in the field, he said, and support the president in his role as commander in chief. That said, he skewered the administration for screwing up the Balkans, to wit: "I've always believed you do not commit military force into some place without figuring out how you get out of that place." He criticized Clinton's decision to bomb in Bosnia in '96 and for committing US troops as peacekeepers there. "I said in a speech in the Senate that we just created the next Berlin."

Bradley lectures that "we have to be rather modest" in our ability to halt ethnic cleansing around the planet, and, yes, "Milosevic is abominable . . . but there are no good choices." Constantly pointing to shortcomings between Clinton's professed goals (halting ethnic cleansing, keeping Milosevic out of Kosovo, keeping the war from spreading, restoring the refugees) and the record on the ground, Bradley emphasized: "Our relationship with Russia is enormously important in the long term."

In fact, he argued, this country's vital interests are nowhere near as important in the Balkans as they are with Russia, China, the Mideast, Iraq, and North Korea. By my count, that implies Bradley believes that Kosovo is only our sixth-most-important global challenge and, again by implication, not worth the effort Clinton has led us into. "You don't deploy military force on the cheap; it always has unintended consequences."

But, Senator, what would you do differently from what Clinton did, given the choices he faced when he faced them? "If I'm in Clinton's shoes, I'd have intervened much earlier in Bosnia and Kosovo." OK; how? "The first problem was on Bush's watch," when the United States went along with Germany's recognition of Bosnia as a separate state. "That was the beginning of the unraveling." But that was then, this is now; do you support the NATO bombing, Senator?

Bradley refused to answer. "Because right now people are in the field, and right now I'm not going to make criticisms of the government."

OK. This is not George McGovern waging political war on LBJ's Vietnam conduct. We'll put Bradley down as probably, but silently, opposed to the NATO bombing. It may not be as complete an answer as one might expect from a candidate who vows "to go out and tell people what you believe." But we'll have nine months more to check back with Bill.