ASHINGTON - A day after an irregular heartbeat sent him to a California hospital and jolted his campaign, a healthy looking Bill Bradley declared he was ''feeling great - no problem,'' and said he was in excellent shape to restart his run for the White House.
''This is just a nuisance, quite frankly,'' Bradley said at a news conference in Palo Alto, Calif., as he tried to minimize his occasional bouts with a fairly common condition called atrial fibrillation. ''It's just one of those things you live with. It's an attribute of my person,'' he said.
Bradley, 56, was forced to cancel several campaign events Friday because, he said, his heart rhythm ''flipped out'' for 23 hours before it `flipped back in.''
He wasted no time yesterday in giving a full account of the previously undisclosed condition, from how it was found to how it felt to how it was treated. Most important politically, the former professional basketball star stressed how little it affects his vigorous life, which includes dashing around the country as a candidate and working out on a Stairmaster several times a week.
''There is absolutely nothing for voters to be concerned about,'' the former Democratic senator from New Jersey said, noting that his physicians assured him the abnormality was not a symptom of a serious underlying ailment or related to the structure, function, or strength of his heart.
''It is something that doesn't affect my daily activities,'' he said.
Bradley said the 3-year-old condition, which he has treated with prescription medication for 18 months, ''was not something I was trying to conceal.''
He described it as so inconsequential that neither he nor his doctors thought it was necessary to reveal it outside of a full medical report of a Dec. 3 examination that the Bradley campaign had planned to release tomorrow.
But the campaign's response - the news conference, making public a letter from Bradley's New York physician, getting the candidate back on the road for a speech to the Florida Democratic Party today - signaled Bradley did not want his health to become an issue in what polls show is a very tight nomination fight with Vice President Al Gore.
''In a race that is going back and forth, any little thing could change the outcome, and Bradley can't afford that,'' said Dick Bennett of the Manchester, N.H.-based American Research Group. Bennett said state voters' experience with Paul Tsongas, the former Massachusetts senator and presidential candidate who said in 1992 he had won his fight with cancer but died from the disease in 1997, might cause them to challenge Bradley's clean-bill-of-health story.
Scrutiny of candidates' health has increased since then, and reporters are sure to pore over Gore's medical records. Those records could be released as early as this week, campaign sources said.
Bradley disclosed that he had experienced an episode of atrial fibrillation a month ago and that he was en route to a New York hospital for a possible cardioversion, an electric shock to restore normal rhythm, when his heartbeat returned to normal. He immediately resumed his schedule, he said.
Bradley attributed Friday's irregular rhythm to forgetting to take his medicine - four pills of Procanbid in the morning and four at night - and that last month's bout with arrhythmia was probably caused by the same thing.
Bradley said the condition causes him ''zero pain,'' and it was only detected in a routine physical in 1996, when he was a senator.
He notices it when the normal, steady rhythm of his heart changes from a ''thump-thump,'' to a ''thump ... thump-thump ... thump-thmup-thump,'' he said.
Dr. Susan O'Donoghue, associate director of the Cardiac Arrhythmia Center at Washington Hospital Center, confirmed that the condition is not uncommon in people of Bradley's age and older and that it is not life-threatening.
''I would say that it's a little more than a nuisance, and in some cases it can cause problems if people don't take their medication and care of themselves,'' O'Donoghue said, adding there is a ''small risk'' of a stroke if an individual is not treated within 24 to 48 hours of the arrhythmia's onset.
John Zogby, a New York pollster who had a heart attack and quadruple bypass surgery at 46, said Bradley's brief hospitalization was ''a temporary scheduling setback'' and would have no impact on his candidacy.
''There are some health issues that matter and some that don't,'' Zogby said, noting that he would put an irregular heartbeat in the category with mild asthma or bad allergies, not a condition a candidate had to disclose.
Bradley, either to highlight his athletic history or to bare every ailment, said ''some of my old Knicks injuries bother me more'' than the irregular heartbeat and that he occasionally takes ibuprofen to ease the aches and pains.
''What I saw Bradley saying to all these young whippersnappers was, `Hey, you have to believe me, being middle-aged doesn't slow you down,''' said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a political scientist at Claremont Graduate University in California. ''There is a large baby-boom sympathy vote to tap out there, and a lot of people, just like him, need to remember to take their pill every day.''
