WASHINGTON
From the start, Bill Bradley's presidential campaign has been built as an insurgency. Those days are gone, much to the distress of the former New Jersey senator who tries to maintain the pose even as his high command gushes over the latest polling results.
If not an insurgency, then, Bradley at least hopes to lead an agenda for change that can mean something to people.
In his first effort to fill in the big blanks, Bradley successfully presented his ideas at the end of September for expanding health insurance to nearly everybody. You could agree or disagree, but there was no doubt that Bradley offered serious ideas.
His second attempt to be bold was less clear-cut. Again, Bradley made an effective presentation on the serious stresses working families face in a rapidly changing work, home, and school environment. But whether he provided a solid basis for a choice was more open to question. In the end, details of policy thinking do not produce presidential nominations; but those details, as they get questioned and tested, help voters make up their minds.
In New Hampshire last week, Bradley focused on very young children, 13 million of whom spend part of each day away from home because their parent or parents work. Helping working families of modest means with this huge burden takes more than $10 billion a year in federal funds, both for early-childhood education and day-care expenses.
Bradley would toss in another $2 billion over five years, adopting a model in use in North Carolina and widely praised. The states would be the vehicle for creating partnerships at the state and county level to find the most worthwhile early childhood programs in each community, with Uncle Sam contributing $5 for every $1 a state spends. The money would presumably fund existing networks of preschool and child-care efforts.
Sounds solid, but there are four points worth mentioning. The first is that while $2 billion isn't hay, it also isn't much. Having been willing to invest more than $600 billion of the projected budget surpluses of $1 trillion in trying to make health insurance nearly universal, Bradley has to be stingy with the rest, especially because his upcoming third policy initiative will be a very big-ticket item: poverty among children.
That is one reason he tossed a smaller stick on his pile in his proposal to expand the shrunken pool of child-care workers by offering senior citizens tax-free stipends up to $200 a month for at least 15 hours of weekly work with kids.
The second point involves some of the things Bradley chose not to mention, such as raising the minimum wage, eliminating the portion of the so-called marriage penalty in the tax code that affects moderate-income families, after-school programs, and helping low-income urban workers find transportation to jobs in the suburbs.
These are Clinton-Gore administration initiatives, and they also are very important to working families. Also, last May, Al Gore proposed a potentially more sweeping idea to make preschool availability universal.
Gore has yet to provide price tags for some of his early campaign ideas, but he has plenty of time to fill in the blanks. It was also interesting that at least in one area - family and medical leave - Bradley found it unavoidable to support an expansion of the existing law that Bill Clinton won passage of six years ago to guarantee 12 weeks of unpaid leave and expand coverage to firms with 25 or more employers, plus an additional three working days annually for such obligations as parent-teacher conferences. Bradley's speech didn't note that Gore has also proposed this.
Finally, Bradley included in his package a $400 million annual investment in the country's 1,000 community colleges as the most efficient centers for the lifelong learning most workers will require in the future to upgrade the greater skills local employers will require.
A sound proposal, but a slight stretch for a speech that began with a nostalgic remembrance of supper every evening with the entire family present.
The truth is that Bradley is good, but so is the retooling Gore. They appear to have differences worth debating over budget surplus priorities and health care. But the lesson Gore should take from Bradley's success is not that he should go after Bradley or assert his incumbent administration muscle and advantages. The vice president needs to concentrate on making his own connections to voters, in which case he'll do just fine.
Thomas Oliphant is a Globe columnist.
