• U.S.

INDEPENDENT EXPOSURE

5 minute read
Karen Tumulty Washington

Back in the days when Bill Bradley was playing forward for the Knicks in Madison Square Garden, it often seemed that his greatest gift was something akin to clairvoyance. He sensed not only where every other player on the court was at any moment but also where they would be next. Well before he felt the ball on his fingers, Bradley was already in position to score.

That instinct for opportunity put him in the Basketball Hall of Fame, and it may have been at work again last week. The New Jersey Democrat announced that he will retire at the end of next year from the Senate, where he has spent a third of his 52 years, and that he is weighing the idea of making a bid for the White House as an independent candidate. That alone would have been enough to throw both political parties momentarily off balance. But when Bradley also revealed-almost offhandedly-that he had phoned Colin Powell and was trying to get in touch with Ross Perot, all sides were hit with the realization that they are facing a presidential race in which the prospect of one or even several credible independent candidates will have to be factored in, and that some sort of alliance could result in an independent ticket featuring, say, Powell and Bradley.

The odds are still stacked heavily against independent candidates, particularly when it comes to the grind of fund raising and organizing without the power of party machinery. This is especially true of Bradley, who reportedly was having trouble raising money even for a Senate bid and whose moves last week had a distinctly extemporaneous feel to them. Nor would his personal style or inclination toward scholarly disquisitions on Third World debt lend themselves to his becoming the high priest of a political movement a la Perot. “He’s a man who disdains sound bites. He resists making complex things simple,” says Ross K. Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University.

Still, a number of forces are working to make the prospects for independent candidates the best they have been in modern U.S. history. Most important, over the past 20 years or so, the two parties have been losing the grip they once had on the majority of voters. “People no longer care about parties the way they once did,” says University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato. “Seventy percent of the electorate is up for grabs.” Voter mistrust of both parties is running as high as it was during Watergate-by some surveys, higher. That sense of alienation is coming not from the perennial malcontents of the left and the right but from the center. “The political debate has settled into two familiar ruts,” Bradley told TIME. “Neither party speaks to people where they live their lives.”

It took the wild ride of Perot’s 1992 candidacy to awaken the rest of the political world to the possibilities of running outside the sinking two-party system, and Perot has not ruled out the idea of tapping his billions and trying it again. He remains such a force that virtually every politician of national renown-with the notable exception of Bill Clinton, who nonetheless sent an emissary-braved the August heat in Dallas to lavish tribute on the jug-eared Wizard at his Oz of a political convention.

But now there is also a growing field of potential independent candidates whose reputations are not built on being eccentric, rich or quixotic; instead, when they talk about change, voters hear the reassuring, cautious and familiar voices of the Establishment. “We’re excited that someone of Bradley’s caliber-very intelligent, with the image of a statesman-would consider pursuing politics outside the two-party system,” says Nicholas Sabatine, a Wind Gap, Pennsylvania, lawyer and Perot ’92 alumnus who is struggling to establish his Patriot Party in every state. Similar to Bradley in pedigree are two other former Senators who are considering an independent race: Connecticut’s Lowell Weicker and Oklahoma’s David Boren, both of whom have been Governors as well.

The name that brings the biggest rush is that of Powell, the Persian Gulf War hero who exudes strength, common sense and human values like no one else on the scene. However, his stance thus far has been an exquisite tease: no one knows what he thinks on many issues, or whether he is even interested in breaking away from the two-party system.

From the left, Jesse Jackson is thinking of making a third try for the White House, this time as an independent. Older, paunchier and less energetic, he stands little chance of winning, but he could drain enough of Clinton’s constituency to doom the President’s chances of re-election.

It is far from clear how Bradley would figure in this calculus. The only certainty is that his retirement, following similar moves by five other Democrats, has been a serious blow to the party’s already slim chances of winning back the Senate. Most in the White House are skeptical about whether Bradley will actually make the race next year. Harold Ickes, Clinton’s deputy chief of staff in charge of politics, speculates that Bradley is raising the possibility of an independent candidacy to ensure that his ideas will continue to matter. “In this political environment, it’s very hard to continue to be heard unless you leave some opening,” Ickes says.

Still others suggest that Bradley’s sights are actually set on the year 2000. If that is true, retiring from the Senate and positioning himself as an independent could distance him from Washington. It would also allow him to claim a coveted title: “Outsider.”

–With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett, James Carney and Michael Duffy/ Washington

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