How To Tell Them Apart

DIANA WALKER FOR TIME
PORTABLE: Gore uses a laptop to keep up

P.F. BENTLEY FOR TIME

THE CHOICE: In Gore vs. Bradley, the bunker meets the ivory tower

There's a moment worth waiting for during every Democratic presidential debate these days--the moment when Bill Bradley's feelings for Al Gore bob into view like a big chunk of ice on a cold gray sea. "Maybe you weren't in the loop, Al." "The point is, Al--and I don't know if you get this--but a political campaign is not just a performance for people." "Let me explain to you, Al, how the private sector works." At such times, Bradley looks at the Vice President as if Gore had suddenly morphed into an overripe mackerel; Bradley's voice, normally so flat and affectless, drips with sarcasm and a condescension that borders on contempt. Because to Bradley, who really does see himself as a better class of politician, Gore is an opportunist driven by ambition instead of principle--the kind of candidate who will demand on Wednesday that his Pentagon leaders support gays in the military, then backpedal on Friday. "Bill sees Gore as a smaller guy, a smaller guy all around," says someone close to Bradley. "Gore leapt at the vice presidency, a job Bill would never have taken, because [Gore]'s devoted to furthering his career over all else." And last fall, when Gore saw that Bradley's high-minded pitch was working in New Hampshire, he stole it and started talking about "elevating our democracy" by running "a different kind of campaign"--all Bradley-speak. Sometimes Bradley can't stand him.

And sometimes the feeling is mutual. Gore views Bradley as a slave to his own self-regard, a man whose sanctimony is an ineffective and even hypocritical approach to politics. Gore's lieutenants love to point out Bradley's contradictions: he spent $2 million on his polling operation in his 1990 Senate race--an early attempt at Clinton-style values polling--yet claims to hate poll-driven politics. He calls himself a crusader against corporate tax loopholes, yet came out in support of ethanol subsidies that chiefly benefit one conglomerate, Archer Daniels Midland, because he wants to curry favor with Iowa farmers. "What's fatal," says a Gore strategist, "is holding yourself up as superior."

The candidates' disdain was on display last week as the battle for the nomination began to crackle. The Iowa caucuses are two weeks away, the New Hampshire primary three weeks away. Young Gore and Bradley volunteers are starting to tussle in the streets, and the candidates are tussling onstage. Last Wednesday in Durham, N.H., and on Saturday in Johnston, Iowa, Gore was hammering away at Bradley's health-care plan, as usual, and Bradley was sneering back at him, employing his recent tactic of responding to Gore attacks by pointing out their theatricality. In these instances, though, Gore didn't sigh or groan while Bradley spoke. And he didn't even distort Bradley's positions. He merely pointed out that Bradley's proposed monthly health-care subsidy, the one that's supposed to replace Medicaid, wouldn't be enough to buy coverage for poor people in either state. So when Bradley gave him that dead-fish look, the former Senator just came off as peevish, like a college professor who hates it when a grad student challenges his lecture.

"Bill gets a little out of sorts when I talk about the substance of the policy," said Gore in Durham, smiling sweetly and obviously having fun getting under Bradley's skin. He had just suggested that Bradley lacks "the experience to keep our prosperity going," and that Bradley "wants to blow the whole surplus" on an "unwise" plan, and then he stuck the knife in further: "I think he's a genuinely good person." Ouch. Gore was practicing an age-old Southern put-down: if you're going to say something snide in polite society, sprinkle a little sugar on it for extra effect.

The way Bradley and Gore see it, the primaries offer a clear choice--the Washington bunker, as Bradley calls it, vs. the ivory tower. Bradley says that after two terms in the Clinton Administration, Gore has become one of those politicians who "stay too long and fight too much." But Gore is proud of his bunker. He's pleased to be a gladiator in the arena too--a pro who knows how to get the job done, who didn't leave town but stuck around to fight Newt Gingrich--because "the presidency is not an academic exercise or seminar; it's a daily fight." He dismisses Bradley's "maximalist measures" as having no chance of becoming law in the real world. Bradley's rejoinder: "The Democratic Party should be thinking big things with big ambitions ... Where would the country be today if Franklin Roosevelt said Social Security's too difficult to do?"

All this squabbling over personal style brings to mind the old saw about academic infighting: in this case, the battles are so bitter because the differences are so small. Listening to Gore and Bradley, you'd think they were worlds apart in personality and policy, but in truth they are strikingly similar; in crucial ways, their personalities and habits of mind tend to mirror each other, so that choosing between them can seem like picking a sweater from the J. Crew catalog: Do you want it in slate or charcoal?