ONCORD, N.H. - He casts himself as a Franklin D. Roosevelt for the 21st century, a daring leader who would ''liberate our democracy'' from the tyrannies of dollar-driven politics, child poverty, and handgun violence.
No ''nickel and diming,'' Bill Bradley says from the barrios of Southern California to the white-steepled villages of New Hampshire. No ''nibbling around the edges.''
From revolutionizing the health care system to bridging the racial divide, Bradley envisions ''big things'' for the country, ''bold things,'' and says he harbors the presidential leadership skills to achieve them.
But for all its grandeur, Bradley's self-portrait as a titan of leadership puzzles many former colleagues and congressional analysts who witnessed his 18 years as senator from New Jersey. The Bill Bradley they remember displayed flashes of leadership but largely dwelled in the shadows, more detached than driven, more big thinker than big doer.
It is a mystery of Bradley's candidacy: whether an outsider who cultivated relatively few allies in the political establishment during his lengthy service can convince voters he would have the ability as president to build the consensus and coalitions he would need to fulfill his agenda.
''Bradley is a fascinating, intelligent figure with a special quality of celebrity and intrigue about him,'' said Thomas E. Mann, a congressional scholar at the Brookings Institution who has tracked Bradley's political career. ''But he is not one who naturally uses the bully pulpit. Nor is he one who has worked consistently to reshape public opinion and build broad coalitions.''
Mann said Bradley's proudest leadership moments in the Senate are not ''the stuff of FDR.''
Bradley and his supporters said his critics are confusing leadership with conventional political success. As an outsider who rose to the Senate from professional basketball rather than the traditional route up the political ladder, Bradley never strived to be a conformist, a back-slapping, favor-swapping baron of incremental legislation.
Instead, Bradley stalked big goals from the start of his political career, his allies said. And they argue that his greatest victory, the 1986 overhaul of the tax system, proves that when Bradley embraces a challenge, he throws himself at it with the kind of vigor and stamina he tapped to make himself into a basketball Hall of Famer.
Bradley labored for six years on the tax issue to overcome stern opposition in Congress and indifference from the Reagan administration. In the end, he forged an alliance with Ronald Reagan and convinced Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill that reducing tax rates made economic and political sense if the cuts were offset by closing loopholes.
The result was the largest overhaul of the tax code in a generation. ''What you see with Bill is somebody who is so smart and has so much integrity that once he puts himself into an issue and reaches a conclusion, you may not agree with it, but you know he has thought it through so well that he is apt to be right,'' said Senator Bob Kerrey, a Nebraska Democrat who served on the Senate Finance Committee with Bradley and supports him.
Other Democratic senators recall Bradley more as a passive participant than a leader. And only three senators and seven House members who served with him have endorsed him, though many have been pressured by Democratic leaders to stand by Vice President Al Gore.
Still, none of Bradley's former congressional colleagues from New Jersey, the politicians who should know him best, have risked any political capital to back him.
''In terms of leadership, most of his colleagues would scratch their heads a little bit,'' said a Democratic senator who served with Bradley throughout his tenure and is backing Gore. ''He always seemed to be fairly distant from the process.''
Newark Mayor Sharpe James, who supported Bradley until his final Senate term, was more blunt. Like several other New Jersey officials, James said Bradley disdained the involvement in state and local politics that is vital to building grass-roots consensus and coalitions.
''Bill saw the US Senate as a chance to write books, deal with theory, and lecture about foreign affairs,'' said James, who backs Gore. ''He never got involved with local affairs that affected people's lives. He just wouldn't deal with them.''
Yet a number of other New Jersey leaders are supporting Bradley, as are a group of liberal House members from New York to California.
Several of the House members said they backed Bradley for his compelling speeches on behalf of the disadvantaged, his fights against harsh welfare provisions, and his stands against racial bias. Others, such as Representative George Miller, a California Democrat, cited specific examples of Bradley's leadership.
Six years after Bradley's tax victory, Miller watched with a measure of awe, he said, as Bradley posted one of his few other major leadership triumphs in Congress. As chairman of a Senate Energy and Natural Resources subcommittee, and with an eye on a future presidential run, Bradley took on California's Republican governor, Pete Wilson, and the Bush administration in trying to reallocate the state's scarce federal water supply for other uses.
The water had long been controlled by powerful landowners, backed by corporate and political leaders. But Bradley wanted to make the water more accessible for cities, businesses, and environmental purposes, and he started in 1990 by reaching out to Miller, who had long struggled for the cause.
''When I stopped laughing, I told him, `You don't understand; all the politics on this is going the other way,''' Miller said. ''I figured I'd never hear from him again and it would never happen. But the guy worked on it for two straight years, and in the end, he made it happen.''
Bradley also has been widely credited for playing key roles in creating the framework for the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs and helping to establish the North American Free Trade Agreement. And his aides relish noting that Bradley helped coach Gore on NAFTA before Gore's 1993 debate with Ross Perot.
Yet Bradley watchers in Washington describe his major legislative victories as less than convincing evidence that he could match the leadership prowess of Roosevelt or President Lyndon B. Johnson.
Every day on the stump, Bradley presents himself as a leader in the mold of Roosevelt, who created the Social Security system, and Johnson, who established Medicare. ''In that same spirit,'' Bradley tells his audiences, ''what we must do today is take a national problem, turn it into a public issue, mobilize the idealism of the American people, and solve the problem. Doing big things, that's what leadership is.''
But just when Bradley might have matured as a leader, he entered his third and final term in Congress in 1990 more concerned about his personal, political wounds than a vision for the future. He had suffered a devastating near-defeat that year, barely edging Christine Todd Whitman, then a political neophyte.
''He seemed like he basically quit after that,'' said a Democratic senator who largely shared Bradley's political philosophy and is backing Gore. ''He was uninvolved and uninspired.''
Bradley acknowledged as much in his 1996 memoir, ''Time Present, Time Past,'' writing that his poor showing in the 1990 election ''hung over me like a bad dream.'' Calling the election ''a terrible blow,'' Bradley said he considered the outcome ''essentially a rejection of me'' and recalled that he ''began to shy from contact.''
In the long run, Bradley said, the experience was ''the best thing that ever happened to my political career.'' He said the near-loss forced him to confront his weaknesses and ''freed me to share what was in my gut as well as in my mind.''
While some of Bradley's former colleagues remain skeptical, he has impressed enough voters to help him bolt from nowhere in the Democratic primary to a position of strength in New Hampshire, if not nationally. And some of Bradley's supporters detect a hint of Roosevelt in him.
''When I was growing up, FDR in our house was like Jesus Christ in most houses,'' said Neil Vauthrin, a retiree in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. ''Rather than a cross on the wall, we had a picture of FDR. Bradley reminds me of Roosevelt. He has the same sincerity.''
