"To me, protecting the environment is who I am as a person. It's part of my core," Bradley told a friendly crowd of 300 at a town hall meeting here.

Bradley aides flatly denied a story in today's editions of The Washington Post saying the former New Jersey senator is likely to abandon his campaign if he does not achieve significant victories March 7, when 16 states hold primaries or caucuses.

"We expect to do well on March 7th," spokeswoman Kristen Ludecke said.

Both Bradley and Vice President Al Gore are appealing to environmentalists in their campaigns for the Democratic nomination for president.

Gore supports spending $2 billion over 10 years to set aside more parkland, paying for it with new mining royalties from federal lands, and defends a Clinton administration order limiting logging in national forests.

But Bradley, arriving in Seattle in a green sweater, told the town hall meeting Friday that the Clinton-Gore administration has spent too little money from offshore oil drilling royalties on protecting public lands and has done little to rally the public behind the "Kyoto Protocol" climate change agreement.

He said he fought as a senator for the Superfund law to clean up contaminated land and wrote the law allocating more California water to environmental uses.

Bradley noted that he voted with the League of Conservation Voters 84 percent of the time during 18 years in the Senate, compared with 64 percent for Gore during 14 years in the House and Senate.

"That is the most unreported fact in this campaign, but that's the record," Bradley said.

He said that, as president, he would enforce a moratorium on offshore oil drilling, use money from existing offshore oil production to fully fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund, and create a $250 million coastal and ocean protection fund to help restore marine and coastal habitats.

He also said the next president should insist that sport utility vehicles be required to meet more stringent fuel efficiency guidelines.

Gore has also pledged to halt oil drilling off the coast of California and Florida. But Bradley questioned why Gore couldn't dissuade Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt from extending some three-dozen offshore leases to petroleum companies last year.

Earlier, talking to reporters in Minneapolis on a refueling stop on his way to Seattle, Bradley said reform-minded voters choosing between him and Republican John McCain need not look far for distinctions.

"He's against abortion rights, I'm for abortion rights. He's against gun control, I'm for gun control," Bradley said. "He doesn't have thoughts about how to resolve the 44 million people without health insurance in America. I've put out a very specific program to do that. ... He has an environmental record that's not good. I have an excellent environmental record."

Nearly every place Bradley goes, campaigning at full throttle in advance of the March 7 primaries, he encounters questions about McCain's surprisingly strong challenge to Texas Gov. George W. Bush.

As Bradley logged long days of campaigning throughout the Northeast late this week, the attention remained on today's Bush-McCain showdown primary in South Carolina.

Bradley said there's time to regain the spotlight.

"Most campaigns are fought in the last two to three weeks," he said, "and this will be no different."