To plead his case to the unions, Gore dispatched his new campaign chairman, Tony Coelho, and a team of aides. Gore, they noted, would have the full backing of elected party officials. The vice president would step out from behind the podium–and out of Bill Clinton’s shadow–and present himself as a “fighter” for working families. As for Bill Bradley, they promised, his free ride was over. He’d never faced the kind of scrutiny he was about to undergo. He was weak on meat-and-potatoes Democratic issues–public education, Medicaid–and he was running as a man above politics. Gore would bring him down to reality. “They made it clear that they were going to mix it up,” said Steve Rosenthal, the AFL-CIO’s political director. “They were going to define the differences.” A top Gore aide later put it more pungently. “We said, ‘This isn’t the old NBA. This is our ball game’. "
Apparently so. In the NEWSWEEK Poll, Gore, who once trailed Bradley in New Hampshire, now leads him there by a 51-40 margin. Bradley has the money, resilience and pride to fight to the bitter end–or at least until the end of March. But Team Gore has accomplished the goals it set forth last fall. It repackaged a man of legendary stiffness into a scrappy champion of the common man, willing to answer the last question at the last town hall on the last snowy winter night. And, with relentless precision, it lured Bradley, a would-be paragon of political purity, into acting tinny, petulant–and defensive. “The Gore people turned the vice president into an attack Chihuahua,” said Rick Sloan, a Bradley adviser on the labor movement. “And if you get enough bites on the ankles, you bleed.”
Already on the defensive, Bradley last week faced new questions about his health. The issue arose last December, when Bradley disclosed that, since 1996, he’d had several episodes of “atrial fibrillation”–irregular heartbeat. Though the problem is not life-threatening, Bradley early on had to be treated twice with electroshock to restore a normal heartbeat. Since then he’s taken the drug Procanbid to control the condition.
There the story ended–until last week. Another “hole” in his schedule (for debate prep, it turned out) prompted a reporter to inquire if Bradley had had another episode. The answer was no, not that day. But, aides disclosed, there had been four since late December. In each, Bradley said, his heart had “flipped out” and “flipped back” without need of treatment. He also disclosed that he travels with a portable heart monitor that allows him to fax a tape of his EKG to his doctors. The most recent episode, he said, might have been caused–no kidding–by swigging too much cream soda. The caffeinated drink can trigger a “flip-out.”
Bradley seemed annoyed and perplexed that anyone would care–or demand more than rudimentary details about his condition. “This doesn’t affect me at all,” he said. “You want me to tell you every time I have an upset stomach?” The controversy highlights a trait that the Gore team thought from the start was Bradley’s chief weakness. “He seemed to think that his every pronouncement, his every idea, should be taken at face value,” says Gore adviser Bob Shrum. “He thinks he decides what can be discussed. Well, that’s not the way it works. We’re allowed to examine his proposals.”
To conduct the “examination,” Gore assembled a team of the toughest consultants in town. He knew what he wanted: a posse of the “Unforgiven,” who care more about winning than being liked. Gore’s strategy was simple: the two-way race had helped Bradley at first, but if he was taken apart, Democratic voters could only come home to Al. Gore would press for debates and launch attacks in person–not through surrogates or in ads. Being a “fighter” would move the story past Clinton, and show Gore’s passion. And Gore was no stranger to combat. He helped eviscerate Dick Gephardt in the 1988 Democratic race, and did the same debating Ross Perot about NAFTA in 1993.
“Fighting Al” first stepped onto a stage with Bradley in Iowa last October. He lit into his foe, reminding a Democratic dinner crowd that Bradley had voted for Reagan’s budget cuts in 1981 and had quit the Senate after the GOP took over. “I decided to stay and fight,” said Gore. The crowd, not surprisingly, went wild: it was Gore’s idea to pack the hall. When Bradley called a press conference, Gore insiders expected a counterstrike. There was none. “I am simply not going to deal with the darts that are being thrown,” Bradley said with a sniff.
The Gore team was surprised, and delighted–and wheeled out the howitzers. The rhetorical tactic in each case was the same: focus on a vote, an aspect of a proposal. Paint it in the harshest possible tones while staying just this side of the literal truth. Bradley would “tear down” Medicaid, said Gore–neglecting to add that Bradley wanted to replace it with something else. Bradley would leave blacks, Latinos and the disabled “out in the cold,” since they relied on Medicaid disproportionately–implying that Bradley was insensitive to racial considerations.
The last blow came in the place where the first one had–Iowa. Bradley, Gore said in a debate, “didn’t help farmers” when he voted against a flood-relief amendment in 1993. (Gore brought along one such farmer to plant in the crowd.) Bradley, it turns out, had voted for the $4 billion main bill, but not the extra $1 billion that Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin had wanted. “This is not about the past, this is about the future,” Bradley said. Sure. Within hours, Harkin was on the Iowa airwaves in a Gore ad called, with appropriate Biblical finality, “Flood.”
As his numbers lagged, Bradley tried–late–to fire back. He blasted Gore for a 15-year-old vote on tobacco–the kind of rummage-through-the-record tactic he’d derided. He blamed Gore for putting furloughed murderer Willie Horton into the “lexicon” of politics–which wasn’t quite true.
The combat seemed to be taking its toll on Bradley. At a day-care center in Salem, N.H., last week, he looked tired and on edge. He snapped at a local TV reporter who asked a question he did not like. Bradley’s friends were angry at Gore. “How does he go home and look his children in the eye?” said John Rauh, a Bradley supporter. In the Gore camp there was another concern. “Do you have one of those IOWANS FOR GORE buttons?” asked one of the Unforgiven. “I want one for my collection.” It sounded coldblooded, but that’s the way they play the game.
