EW YORK - Presidential candidate Bill Bradley came to one of Brooklyn's poorest neighborhoods yesterday to call for an end to ''child poverty as we know it'' by the end of the next decade.
Speaking before teachers, social workers, and political activists in a crowded Baptist church in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section, the former Democratic senator compared the task to Franklin D. Roosevelt's vow to end the Depression and John F. Kennedy's pledge to put a man on the moon.
In each case, Bradley said, the president ''wasn't sure exactly how to do it, but he knew that we had to do it, and the first step was saying so.''
Bradley went well beyond that first step yesterday, laying out details of a plan, which he said would cost $9.8 billion a year and would reduce by 7 million, or roughly by half, the number of impoverished children. The plan would:
Increase the minimum wage by $1 over the next two years, then index it to annual rises in the national median wage.
Expand the Earned Income Tax Credit.
Subsidize child care for low-income families.
Enroll 400,000 more children in Head Start.
Give scholarships, or forgive loan repayments, to 60,000 college students who go to work as teachers in low-income urban and rural public schools.
Offer tax incentives to nonprofit groups that create after-school community centers for poor schoolchildren and ''second chance homes'' that would provide adult help to poor, pregnant teenagers during their babies' first year.
Spokesmen for Vice President Al Gore's campaign dismissed Bradley's attempt to present himself as the preeminent candidate for America's poor. One aide, Roger Salazar, called Bradley's plan ''more an echo than a voice,'' saying Gore had already proposed - or, in some cases, helped enact - many of his challenger's ideas.
At one point during his speech, Bradley made light of the Clinton-Gore administration's efforts to deal with the problem, saying child poverty has been cut by only 3.8 percent in the past six years.
Gore's office disputed this figure, saying it has actually been cut by 16.7 percent.
Julian Palmer, spokesman for Columbia University's National Center for Children in Poverty, attempted to clear up the conflict. From 1993 until 1998, he said, the percentage of children in poverty has gone down, from 22.7 percent to 18.9 percent.
''How you measure this,'' Palmer said, ''depends on whether you look at percentages or percentage points.''
''Technically, they're both correct,'' Palmer said. ''To us, the important thing is that Bradley has committed himself to cutting the rate by half within a decade. That would bring the rate of children in poverty down to 9.5 percent.
''We would hope,'' he continued, ''that, rather than get into a debate over numbers, all the candidates - Bradley and Gore, (Texas Governor George) Bush and (Arizona Senator John) McCain - would agree on that as a goal, then have a debate over how you get there.''
On Wednesday, in a move widely seen as a preemption of Bradley's address, Gore made a speech of his own on the subject, proposing to give federal child support funds only to states that imprison deadbeat dads; to deny Workfare to parents who don't make child-care payments; and to turn over their names to credit-card companies.
Still, Palmer gave Bradley points for being the first candidate to declare poverty-cutting as a high-profile goal - and to state a precise target.
According to official figures, 13.5 million children under the age of 18 live in poverty, defined as a family of four earning less than $16,400 a year.
