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Bill Bradley plays offense, reluctantly
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Jan. 30, 2000 | CONCORD, N.H. --
Speaking at a campaign-finance reform rally here Sunday morning, Bradley cited an article in Forbes magazine on Gore's 1996 fund-raising trip to a Buddhist temple near Los Angeles, which the magazine calls "the very symbol of campaign-finance chicanery." "Quite frankly I think that more explanation is needed ... about his participation. And I believe that unless that explanation is forthcoming that the public will reject a candidacy in the fall that fails to come to terms with this circumstance in our Democratic Party in 1996. It's as simple as that."
Gore spokesman Chris Lehane was quick to pounce on the Bradley announcement. "Sen. Bradley has made his own personal journey of the last couple days. He began saying he wasn't going to run negative ads, saying he was a different kind of politician. Now he's ending his campaign as the [typical] politician, one who can't defend his issues on the merits and resorts to negative personal attacks. It's the politics of desperation." "He's listening to his consultants, his handlers, his pollsters. He's made a raw, crass political calculation that his agenda wasn't working, that the music of his message wasn't playing," Lehane said. But Bradley spokesman Eric Hauser defended the new aggressive stance. "Al Gore brought this on himself with five months of often purposeful distortion of his record, our record and reality," said Hauser, who disagreed with the charge that Bradley had gone negative. "We wanted to stay positive. We're still being positive. The only thing we're doing is pointing out facts." Hauser said the campaign was not necessarily implying that the vice president was involved in shady fund-raising practices as much as Bradley was focusing on the lack of lessons learned by the vice president. "If there's a commitment to it, one would think it would show up in the biggest political speech of his life, his announcement speech, where it didn't even show up." If nothing else, Bradley's tactics today have kept Gore on defense today in New Hampshire. "There is no question that in 1996, the RNC and DNC both had issues with the fund-raising," said Gore spokesman Lehane. Bradley's new offensive Sunday shows that the hard-liners in his campaign have won his ear, getting him to finally shelve his noticeable reluctance to hammer Gore on the campaign fund-raising scandals that mired the administration in 1996. For weeks, Bradley's top advisors, among them Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, have advocated a more aggressive approach, while Bradley has resisted. The internal conflict is difficult to miss. Throughout this last week, Bradley advisors have privately pulled aside certain reporters to "give them a heads-up" on an impending, full-fledged attack about Gore's fund-raising calls from his White House office and his visit to a Buddhist Temple to raise money for the 1996 campaign. But until today, Bradley had stopped short of a frontal attack linking Gore to those scandals. "Is it going to be today?" Bradley's press corps asks daily, always up for some old-fashioned hand-to-hand combat. Time and again, Bradley came to the brink. At a Democratic Party fund-raiser in Manchester Thursday, Bradley aides were alerting reporters that their man would go after Gore in his speech there. But while his remarks did include his most animated language on the issue to date, he stopped short of mentioning Gore directly. "The Democratic Party has to own up to our own fund-raising scandals in the 1996 campaign. If we don't clean our own house, the Republicans are going to clean it for us in the fall," he told the crowd. Afterward, Bradley spokeswoman Anita Dunn denied that the speech was anything new. "I think he's consistently said that both the Democratic and Republican Parties have a lot to be ashamed of in 1996. And clearly, if you look at what John McCain or any of the Republicans say as they campaign, they've made it very clear they plan to use it as an issue against the vice president." That's the best argument in the hands of the Bradley partisans pushing to hit Gore hard on the issue: If you don't do it, the Republicans will. Proving the point, McCain Saturday said he would "beat Al Gore like a drum" on the issue of campaign-finance reform and that he would "turn to Al Gore and I'm going to point my finger at him and I'm going to say, 'Al, you and your buddy Bill Clinton debased the institutions of government in 1996.'" While Bradley's spokesman Eric Hauser said "we're not about to open the window," on the internal debate, Bradley sources confirmed that Kerrey has been one of the chief advocates for Bradley to come after Gore as aggressively as possible.
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