ONCORD, N.H. - They started as creatures of the same culture, pro-labor Democrats with Ivy League training and Senate pedigrees entering a collegial contest for their party's top prize.
Now this: With their first warm handshake of the 2000 campaign turned cold over time, Vice President Al Gore and former senator Bill Bradley today conclude the New Hampshire primary as politically bloodied as if they had warred with Republican rivals.
The aura of their shared ideals has evaporated in the heat of their effort to condemn each other for their differences, some almost too small to discern. And as they looked beyond New Hampshire yesterday to the national battleground, the angry rivals gave every indication there is no truce in sight.
Bradley, in a remark that was as piercing as it was playful, started the day on the ''Imus in the Morning'' radio show by saying Gore has been ''squealing like a stuck pig'' from the wounds that Bradley believes he has inflicted by assailing Gore's honesty and integrity.
And Gore, stumping at the Tilt'n Diner in Tilton, said, ''This is a contest. The real fight is far from over.''
While both Democrats insist their differences are minuscule compared with the gulf between either of them and the Republican field, the question remains: Will the Democratic survivor be strong enough - politically and financially - to withstand the deep-pocketed GOP campaign that awaits him?
Gore, as if ripping a page from a Republican playbook, has branded Bradley a ''quitter'' for leaving the Senate in 1996. The vice president has mocked Bradley as an ivory tower intellectual who is too cerebral to conduct the political spadework he would need to make good on his bold promises.
And Gore has ridiculed Bradley's agenda, depicting the onetime New Jersey senator as a liberal throwback who would bust the federal budget with his sweeping overhaul of health care.
Bradley, after largely absorbing Gore's blows for five months, last week unleashed a five-day fusillade of negative counterpoints. He derided the vice president as having flip-flopped on abortion, rapped him over his controversial appearance at a 1996 fund-raiser at a Buddhist temple, and ultimately cast doubt on Gore's fitness for the presidency by challenging his veracity and ethical integrity.
Bradley did all that after accusing Gore of hurting Michael S. Dukakis in the 1988 presidential race by raising the Willie Horton furlough issue.
And as Republicans reveled in the ''rat-a-tat-tat,'' as Bradley refers to the bitter partisanship of modern politics, some Democratic loyalists cringed.
''The attacks don't elevate anyone in terms of esteem in the eyes of the voters,'' said Irwin ''Tubby'' Harrison, a Democratic pollster in Boston.
The ugliness boiled over Sunday when Bradley partisans, led by Senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska and Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, turned up at a Gore event to rebut the vice president's attacks. Gore activists ridiculed the overweight Nadler and shouted at Kerrey that he was a ''quitter'' for deciding not to seek reelection this year.
Gore's spokesman, Chris Lehane, defended the activists, saying they were exercising their free speech rights.
Yesterday, Bradley's communications director, Anita Dunn, asserted that if Bradley supporters had similarly heckled lawmakers loyal to Gore, Bradley would have apologized. ''I find that so indicative of the tone of their campaign, which is set by the candidate,'' Dunn said of Lehane's remarks.
Barring a gaping loss by Bradley today, the struggle will continue for at least another five weeks, as the candidates vie for nearly 60 percent of the total nominating delegates in multistate primaries on March 7 and 14. Both candidates have reserves of campaign cash to finance such an effort, though Bradley's campaign is the more flush, with $8.3 million left at the end of last month - compared with Gore's $5.7 million. Both men have spent heavily in New Hampshire since.
An irony of the political alley fight between the two Democrats is that they have long taken pains to present themselves as gentlemen and public policy scholars. But another mutual trait also clearly compels them: Both want desperately to win, and neither has a history of giving up easily.
Allies of both men insist the candidates have limited their assaults to policy, not personality.
''For Al Gore, there is a difference over health care, and how to do it right,'' said Bob Shrum, a Gore advisor. Gore and Bradley ''have the same objectives,'' Shrum said, but different solutions to the problems Americans face.
Gore engaged in a cease-fire yesterday, Shrum said, because ''Senator Bradley appears to have stopped for the moment.''
But Bradley's spokesman, Eric Hauser, said Bradley had refrained yesterday only from focusing on Gore's abortion record and fund-raising practices. ''There is no backing away,'' Hauser said. ''There is only a crystallizing of all the arguments we have made over the five days into one central point for voters.''
Many voters, as they prepared to head to the polls today, said they were baffled by the vitriol in the Democratic contest. Others said they were saddened. And some appeared resigned to the nasty nature of the process.
''Unfortunately, it does turn me off,'' said Jo Anne Marchant, 35, a Gore supporter in Sanbornton.
''But it's the nature of the beast, in politics,'' she said.
