ASHINGTON - A speech on the floor of the US Senate 18 years ago is now resounding on the presidential campaign trail.
It was July 31, 1981, when Bill Bradley announced that he opposed President Reagan's tax cut, the largest in US history, but would support the president's massive, across-the-board cut in domestic spending.
''While no spending cuts are easy to make, some must be made,'' the former New Jersey senator said then. ''Our economy requires a reduction in federal spending if we are ever to restore the economic growth that will allow us for the long term to keep our promises to the poor, the disabled, and the elderly.''
Today, Al Gore, his rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, regularly reminds party activists that Bradley voted for ''Reaganomics'' in what the vice president calls ''the single most defining vote for the Democrats in the last 20 years.''
The vice president portrays Bradley's vote as part of a pattern of abandoning Democratic causes, including Bradley's leaving the Senate in 1997 and declaring that ''politics is broken'' after Newt Gingrich led the GOP takeover of Congress; Bradley's contemplating an independent run against President Clinton in 1996; and his support of Republican proposals for school vouchers and raising the retirement age for Social Security.
Even some Gore supporters disagree with his intepretation of the 1981 vote as a litmus test of party loyalty, because Bradley had the company of 30 other Democratic senators, many of whom now support Gore for president.
Moreover, Bradley did not vote with the 26 Democratic senators who supported Reagan's 25 percent tax cut, which some politicians and poverty specialists say hurt the economy more than the budget cut. According to some economists, if the full Senate had voted as Bradley did, in favor of the cutting the budget by $35 billion and against the tax cut, the federal budget deficit would have been nearly erased at a time of sharp inflation.
While some Democratic senators supporting Gore disagree, they also cringe at Gore's suggestion that the budget-cut vote was a watershed moment for the party. To three senators who voted for the Reagan budget cuts 18 years ago, Gore's criticism of Bradley could be taken as an indirect swipe at them, too.
''I would respectfully disagree with the vice president,'' said former senator Dennis DeConcini, a Democrat from Arizona. ''To me that was not a defining vote. It was about people like me who were moderate Democrats who gave the guy a chance. At the time, I was enamored with President Reagan like everybody else,'' he said. ''I thought he really knew what he was talking about economically, but it turned out he didn't.''
While careful not to say he was offended by Gore's criticism, Bennett Johnston, a former Democratic senator from Louisiana, said, ''I'm not sure there is much traction with an issue that old for Gore.''
And Wendell Ford, a former Democratic senator from Kentucky, said of Gore's critique: ''I don't take it personally. Fortunately, in this life, you make a mistake and they don't make a criminal out of you.''
Representative Barney Frank, the Newton Democrat who has not endorsed either presidential candidate, said Gore's criticism of the budget vote was ''excessive. First, it was 18 years ago and it's only one vote. If there was a consistent pattern ... it would be more damaging.''
Some poverty specialists said Bradley redeemed himself in their eyes after voting for the budget cut by working to extend health care for children, expand the earned income tax credit for the poor, and enforce child-support laws.
''From 1984 to 1996, he was one of two or three principal leaders in the Senate working to expand poverty programs,'' said Robert Greenstein, executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal-leaning think tank in Washington.
''The proposals he is offering in the campaign'' for nearly universal health coverage for the uninsured and to substantially reduce child poverty ''do seem consistent with the record he had established in the last 12 years in the Senate,'' Greenstein said.
Gore spokesman Chris Lehane said of Bradley: ''You can't on one hand cast your vote and declare the system broken and then run for president and not expect people to raise questions.''
He added, ''Al Gore never declared that politics was broken, never turned his back on important constituencies within the Democratic Party.''
For the most part, Bradley has let Gore's criticisms pass. Though in a recent interview, Bradley said his time away from the Senate was a ''period of rejuvenation'' and reflection that enabled him to see where he wants to take the country.
Roger Wilkins, a Bradley supporter and historian at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., defended Bradley's vote, saying the tax cut was the ''Draconian part'' of Reagan's economic program, and Bradley opposed it.
In a slap at Gore, Wilkins said leaving the vice presidency was never an option for Gore like leaving the Senate was for Bradley. ''He stayed because he was determined to be president,'' said Wilkins, ''and the way to become president is... not to resign as the vice president.''
Regarding Bradley's musings about an independent candidacy, Wilkins compared Bradley to Jimmy Carter, who once said he had ''lust in his heart'' for women other than his wife but had never cheated.
''He thought about it, but he didn't do anything about it,'' Wilkins said of Bradley. ''What's the big deal?''
At last month's town meeting in New Hampshire, Gore tried a new line of attack. He said the cost of Bradley's sweeping health-care proposal would eat up the nation's budget surplus and ''shred the social safety net.'' Since then, Gore has begun to challenge Bradley to explain his stance on raising the retirement age for Social Security. And just yesterday, the vice president said Bradley's health-care plan would hurt blacks disproportionately.
Former Republican Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming, director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, said Gore is likely to continue experimenting with attacks against Bradley until he finds a theme that works. Any thoughts by his campaign that Gore would be crowned as the Democratic nominee have faded, he said.
''Gore's got a fight on his hands. He never dreamed that, and his staff never dreamed that,'' Simpson said. ''Bill Bradley is driving Gore goofy. He's thrown them all off. They've now rolled up the carpet and put the crown away.''
