Two weeks before voting in the caucuses, Bradley holds out hope for a strong showing although he has gained little traction in this farm state and remains 20 points behind Democratic presidential rival Al Gore.

"Remember Harry Truman and how they said to him, 'You're never gonna win; you're never gonna beat that guy Dewey,"' Bradley declares. He says he'll be happy with 30 percent of the vote.

Bradley spent his first days of the new year here preoccupied with damage control on agriculture and education policy, areas where Vice President Gore has accused him of neglect.

"My mother was a school teacher, my aunt was a school teacher," Bradley told students at Atlantic High School on Monday. He outlined proposals for after-school programs and for recruiting 60,000 new teachers.

A day earlier, Bradley was consumed with defending his Senate record on farm policy against a pointed offensive by Gore. And Gore's supporters were back on the attack Monday, with Sen. Tom Harkin saying, "Yes the farm economy is bad, but matters would be a lot worse if Bill Bradley had had his way when farmers really needed his vote."

Since the vice president has a lock on the party activists who traditionally dominate Iowa's caucuses, Bradley's challenge is to coax first-timers to the Jan. 24 caucuses.

Crowds for the former senator and basketball star can border on starstruck, but they also are thin, offering little hope for a big turnout on caucus night. Where the vice president draws about 500 to high schools and 4-H centers, Bradley, with his wife, draws closer to half that.

Still, Bradley told could-be supporters at the Crouse Cafe in Indianola, "On election night, when the caucuses are counted, I want to surprise a lot of people."

He personally keeps count of the pledges voters sign at each stop -- 47 at the cafe, he reported -- and likes to recall that no insurgent has done better in the Iowa caucuses than the 31 percent Sen. Edward Kennedy took from winner Jimmy Carter in 1980.

On Monday alone, Bradley had 15 pages of "call sheets" to work through, telephoning potential caucus goers.

There is encouragement in the response of such Iowans as retired airline employee Dottie Lewis of Creston, who said Bradley's flood of straight-talking TV ads persuaded her to plan to attend a caucus for the first time. "I've never been as interested in a candidate before," she said.

Defending his Senate voting record on farm issues is hardly what Bradley hoped to be doing in January. "When you're 20 points down it doesn't help," said Drake University political science professor Dennis Goldford. But Goldford suggested the damage may be limited.

"I don't know how much of Bradley's support comes from the farm side," he said.

The intensity of Bradley's effort hasn't turned him into a 24-hour grump.

Sitting on the bus with a diet A&W vanilla soda propped between his legs, Bradley said he was tickled the other night when a couple of gals at the American Legion, where he drank beer straight from the pitcher, coaxed him into a "tag dance." He was disappointed not to find a karaoke bar in downtown Des Moines.

The often-private Bradley also gabbed about his mental health -- no depression or other mental illness, "I can certainly tell you that" -- and his favorite recent movie -- "The Green Mile." Both those questions were ruled off-limits when reporters raised them last year.

An animated storyteller, Bradley spices his stump speech with dramatizations of a Russian basketball player's elbow jabs.

But the elbows from Gore on his record and promises put an angry edge into Bradley's voice.

Gore "doesn't have a leg to stand on" when it comes to farm policy, he tells reporters. If he sounds negative -- a no-no among voters, according to surveys -- he says Gore and his camp started it.

"I didn't open that door, but they did," Bradley said. "I'm certainly not going to lighten up."

By caucus date, Bradley will have spent $1.4 million on television advertising here, a sum that his campaign manager Gina Glantz said was equivalent to Gore's Iowa ad expenses.

The Gore camp, trying to worsen the perception of Bradley's showing, whatever vote percentage he gets, calls the ad spending evidence Bradley is out to win.

This two-day bus swing through Iowa's heavily Republican southwest is Bradley's 31st trip to the state as a presidential candidate. And yet, by way of explaining his persistent double-digit deficit to Gore in polls, Bradley says Iowans still don't know him. A poll last week said 13 percent of registered Iowa voters were unsure or uncommitted.

It doesn't help, Bradley said, that Gore has the forces of the Democratic Party gathered behind him.

Asked Sunday about a report that Democratic National Committee officials were faulting Bradley for not helping the party raise money, as Gore has, Bradley suggested he doesn't owe the party establishment anything right now.

"I feel that the DNC has to be supportive of both candidates. And I think that early on in this process that wasn't always the case," Bradley said.

"We'll help later."