Virtually every negative that Joe Conason listed about Bradley I considered a positive. Reagan's budget cuts, his support for the freedom fighters in Nicaragua; these were great acts by a great man. If Bradley was wise enough to see the wisdom of these acts perhaps he is presidential material. As for Conason, it smells like that same old stinky '60s progressivism is still being peddled to the brain-dead.

-- Chip Schoch

Joe Conason writes, "Otherwise, when [Bradley] faces the voters, he may turn out to be just another beautiful loser."

May?! Here's a question for all those sunshine Democrats who, like their hero of the hour, Sen. Bradley, stood on the sidelines while Bill Clinton and Al Gore went 15 rounds with the Gingrich bully-boys. Just what do you think all those banks and financial firms are giving all those millions to Bill Bradley for? Do you seriously think they would be giving that much money to someone who would go against their agenda?

Or, here's another theory, perhaps more paranoid, but, given what we have seen the last two years, not beyond the realm of the possible. Suppose, just suppose, that these big-money boys know that Bradley, if he is the candidate, will be, indeed, "just another beautiful loser"? What better way to break the rebuilt Democratic Party and destroy the new Democratic coalition? Do you really think that the big-money boys want a liberal Democrat as president? That they don't prefer George W. Bush? What better way to secure the election of the candidate they want then to engineer the nomination of a sure loser by the opposition party? And is that scenario more far-fetched then the one we have seen enacted over the past two years to bring down the Clinton presidency?

Think about it.

-- Ann Davidson
Philadelphia

How, pray tell, could Bradley get elected without money? The people with the money happen to mostly be rich. The snide subtext of the article implies a corruption in Bradley that the article does not prove. I support Bradley because he seems to me to have a sense of what's wrong with the country as it is currently constituted. He is only being realistic as he reaches for the money he needs to be an effective, possibly winning candidate. I learned in the '60s that all political purity gets you is the satisfaction of losing well, without effecting the changes that one espoused. I'll take a guy whose message I believe and who has the smarts to get elected.

-- Mike Spindell

I think Mr. Conason misses the mark when he questions why liberals such as myself support Bradley.

It is not so much that we favor Bradley as that we dislike Gore, and Bradley is, at least currently, his only opposition.

I cannot agree that there is no difference between the two on the issues, since I perceive in Gore (and Tipper) a long-standing lack of understanding of anything outside of their rich, white, Protestant ethos.

The day Gore declared, "Freedom of religion need not mean freedom from religion," I signed up with Bradley.

-- Patrick O'Neill
Houston

What, asks Joe Conason in a piece so pathetically pro-Gore that it might have been ghostwritten by Marty Peretz, has presidential candidate Bill Bradley ever done to deserve the support of liberals?

Simple. While the vice president has tried to market larger labels on prescription medication and other micropolicies aimed at appealing to the affluent middle class as the future of progressivism, Bradley has brought back the Big Idea and dared us to question whether we as a nation are ready to return to an era of liberal activism and civic renewal.

Clinton and Gore would have us believe that the era of big government is over and that free markets are the be-all, end-all of a Democratic foreign policy. Bradley instead encourages us to think big, and to recall the time when an activist federal government rallied the nation against poverty, injustice and intolerance.

In his bid to make race relations a dominant issue of the 2000 campaign, Bradley is appealing to the better angels of our nature. In contrast, by enlisting bean-counting rhetoric and conservative catch-phrases to evoke the usual anti-liberal paranoia in a desperate bid to retain his lead, Gore has appealed to the same Atwater-style leftist-bashing that has infected our politics since 1988. Are you telling me that Gore somehow deserves the support of liberals?

As for the "stay and fight" argument, I have yet to understand how any self-respecting liberal could say that Al Gore held the banner for liberalism during the Republican revolution. To my mind, saying idiotic things like "the era of big government is over" and passing an atrocity like the 1996 welfare reform bill is much more of a surrender of progressive ideas than is Bradley's choosing not to run for another term.

Conason states that the gestalt of the times "has been marked by the struggle of Democrats and progressives to contain and defeat a powerful, ambitious and well-funded right-wing movement." He neglects to mention a concurrent trend marking our era -- the consistent weakening of progressivism by A) Clinton-Gore attempts at electoral triangulation and B) the damage done to our party by the frequent bouts of pathetically obvious Clinton-Gore obfuscation ("that woman" or "no controlling legal authority," for example).

Conason trots out that pathetic Gore warhorse of the 1981 budget cuts -- without mentioning that A) Bradley was chosen by the Democratic Party to publicly refute the Reagan administration in the first State of the Union and B) Bradley voted against the corresponding Reagan supply-side tax cuts -- his deficit hawk position was one staked out by many Democrats of the time, including ones supporting Gore. To attribute the "devastating impact on poor children and minority communities" to Bradley's vote and yet to say nothing of the effect of the 1996 Clinton-Gore welfare bill smacks of intellectual dishonesty.

As an in-house writer and aide-de-camp for James Carville for the past two years, including throughout the pathetic Lewinsky imbroglio, I have dedicated my working life to this struggle against the right that Conason deems our "gestalt." It depresses me to no end that such a talented and courageous progressive as Conason has joined the ranks of the Bradley-bashers and turned that struggle against his own party.

-- Kevin Murphy
salon.com | Nov. 9, 1999

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