he press got the Bradley-McCain story wrong. The impression one gets from the Super Tuesday post-mortems is that both lost because of the errors they made on the campaign trail. Bill Bradley is castigated for being too diffident. If only he had attacked Gore harder and been more attentive to the press. McCain is criticized for being too intemperate and aggressive. If only he had refrained from personal invective against Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell and hewed more closely to his reformist message.
Both men undoubtedly made mistakes. But Gore and Bush committed their own blunders (or was that a George W. impersonator I saw on the Letterman show). Indeed, mistakes are inevitable in the hurly-burly of campaigning.
To blame the defeats of Bradley and McCain on tactical or temperamental errors is to miss the forest for the trees. Their losses have deeper tales to tell about the nature of the presidential nominating process. At the end of the day, the nominating process is dominated by the hard-core constituencies of each party, and neither Bradley nor McCain had a plausible strategy for appealing to those core elements.
For Bradley to have had a chance against Gore, he would have had to morph himself into being Paul Wellstone. He would have had to differ with the Clinton-Gore administration on important matters of public policy about which core Democrats differ with the administration.
As the fracas in Seattle revealed, the most critical such issue is foreign trade. The Labor movement, environmentalists, and human rights advocates - all part of the Democratic base - oppose the Clinton-Gore advocacy of free trade. They believe that the result of unfettered globalization will be the loss of American manufacturing jobs, depletion of rain forests, and greater leverage for dictators to persecute dissidents. But Bradley is an ardent free-trader. His minor differences with Gore regarding health and race pale before this similarity. Understandably, the Democratic voters gave the incumbent vice president the benefit of the doubt in a race against a slightly taller but otherwise indistinguishable opponent.
Given the lack of ideological differences, Bradley's only real hope for the nomination was to cruise through the primaries acting serious and noble and hope that Gore would self-destruct. Which Gore nearly did. If that had happened, Bradley's me-tooism would have become a plus, giving voters who favored Gore's policies a safe place to go.
McCain's hero is Teddy Roosevelt, and he suffered from the same problem that doomed TR in 1912: Republican conservatism. In 1912 and in 2000, a large group of middle-of-the-road voters were enamored of pleas for political reform, but in both cases far too few of them were Republicans.
The moderate nature of McCain's campaign had the perverse effect of curing Republicans of their doubts about Bush. Initially, many of them feared that compassionate conservatism was simply liberalism in sheep's clothing. McCain's attacks inoculated Bush against such fears.
Like Bradley, McCain's only real hope rested in the self-destruction of his adversary. If Bush had shown less tenacity in the wake of McCain's New Hampshire victory, the outcome might have been different. But Bush fought back hard in South Carolina and successfully mobilized the Christian Right, which is so formidable in that state. With Bush's campaign on track, McCain's inability to sell registered Republicans on the need for reform ended the contest.
Setting this record straight reveals just how deplorable the state of American party politics really is. In order to hold their support among core party constituents, Gore and Bush have both seriously wounded themselves.
Gore destroyed all ideological distance between himself and Bradley by adopting positions on gays in the military and abortion that suit hard-core Democrats but push him far from the middle of the road. Don't ask don't tell may be an unprincipled policy, but ending it, as Gore now advocates, rankles many independent voters. In response to Bradley's attacks on statements he made while in Congress, Gore went beyond being prochoice and gave up the moral anguish with which even most prochoice voters confront the abortion issue. Likewise, Bush cozied up to Christian conservatives in a manner that affronts not only Catholics, Jews, and atheists but many Protestants as well.
To win in the fall, each must now pretend that the primaries never happened. Watching these two instinctive moderates try desperately to shed themselves of their party baggage will not be a pretty sight.
Marc Landy is a professor of political science at Boston College.
