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It's a surprise not that the Crystal Group exists, but that there were such efforts to keep it under wraps. Bradley told TIME recently that he intended to "run a campaign that's not packaged," yet he'd already been meeting with his packagers for more than a year by then. "We never met in restaurants," a participant told Adweek. "Bradley's kind of tough to hide." So why all the subterfuge? Is there a candidate in the past 30 years who hasn't had his outside airbrushed, his long-winded message sharpened, his stump speech spiced up, his policy positions honed, a bit of poetry added to his homily on Medicare reform? And most voters don't expect or want their candidates to be too unvarnished. It's not such a bad thing, when these guys are going to be in our living rooms for a year, for someone to suggest wider ties, whiter teeth and a little wit.
Bradley has shown that he does manage his image, if only by omitting parts of his story. He likes reporters to follow him while he does his own grocery shopping, but gets cranky if anyone comes around when he's taking one of his frequent flights on a corporate jet. He talks about teaching at Stanford University after he left the Senate, but not so much about the hundreds of thousands of dollars he earned as a consultant to J.P. Morgan, or the more than $2.5 million he made giving speeches. Even his family may get marketed. One of the Crystal Group members is reportedly at work on a Bradley-clan bio modeled after the Clinton spectacular A Man from Hope. Could the Anti-Clinton be Clintonized? As they say, it can happen.
Not so long ago, Bradley was reticent about his sports stardom (although he did make discreet use of it in some of his Senate campaign ads), but now his bumper sticker could be a Nike swoosh. He deploys it constantly, as he did for his highly choreographed fund raiser in Madison Square Garden last Sunday, which called on such gods of basketball as Walt Frazier and Willis Reed to relive those wonderful days of yesteryear. Bradley has a right to relive them--his basketball is a big part of who he is--but at a certain point, this basketball business will become a hazard, like John McCain's 5 1/2 years as a POW: you can't saturate the country with your past and not look like you're dwelling on it, at the expense of the here and now. We get what you were; now tell us who you are.
--With reporting by Michael Napolitano