In any case, this constellation of superstars has clearly gotten to Gore. Whether his aides care to admit it or not, they're quietly waging a celebrity-endorsement war, and the subtext is race. Just two weeks ago, Bill Cosby provided the entertainment at a Bethesda fund-raiser for the vice-president, where Gore gleefully shared with the mostly black audience his latest letter of endorsement -- from Los Angeles Lakers center Shaquille O'Neal. ("My biggest supporter," the vice-president crowed.)

The Gore campaign also made a little splash last week by appointing veteran Capitol Hill pro Donna Brazile, an African-American woman, as the vice-president's campaign manager.

Bradley may have the political edge, though. By running to the left of the vice-president, he's floating policy proposals that appeal to many blacks who've lost faith in their representation. "There is an uneasiness between rank-and-file blacks and party people," says Ronald Walters, deputy campaign manager to Jesse Jackson in 1984 and a political-science professor at the University of Maryland, "because the Democratic party has shifted to the right, and Bradley could easily capitalize on that. The blacks he's going for are precisely the ones the party has alienated -- the ones in the hinterlands who don't see policies working for them."

And the political dilemma could become a financial one. "There is, potentially, a giant conflict in the middle of the black community on this issue," says Walters. "The sports and entertainment people -- these are the money people. If they start to give money to Bradley in large amounts, it's going to cut into the relationship with blacks and the Democratic Establishment in a very fundamental way."

So what is it about Bradley that has so many members of the African-American vanguard enthralled? Based on his television persona, he's just about the last man on the planet with whom one can imagine getting jiggy. He speaks in stentorian tones, he looks uncomfortably burdened by his own strapping bulk, and he seems almost estranged from an essential part of himself.

Get Bradley in a small room talking about the subject of race, however, and his audience is immediately spellbound. "He's the only white politician I've ever heard use the phrase white-skin privilege," says Tavis Smiley, the host of BET Tonight, one of the top-rated programs on Black Entertainment Network. "I mean, it just knocked you back in your seat. You could feel it in the room. I said to myself, 'My God, did that white boy just say white-skin privilege?!' "

Smiley is talking about a speech Bradley gave at a forum for black business and media leaders sponsored by Emerge in September. It was a beautiful Washington evening, the skyline was in full view, and Cornel West, prancing on tiptoe and speaking with his usual pyrotechnics, introduced the former senator. Smiley remembers thinking it could only go downhill from there. "I really only planned to walk in and do the courtesy visit," he says. "Instead, I found myself staying the entire time."

He isn't the only one Bradley has enchanted. Anna Deavere Smith felt compelled to channel Bradley's intellectual and, yes, emotional intensity about race in Twilight Los Angeles, 1992, her one-woman show about the aftermath of the L.A. riots. Dropping into a masculine baritone, she slipped on Bradley's persona and told a riveting story, using the senator's own words, about a young black law intern who got pulled over by the police in a posh white neighborhood of Los Angeles. He was on his way to a partner's Sunday social event. "What did the senior partner of that law firm do on Monday?" she re-enacts him saying. "Did the partner call the police commissioner? Did the partner call anybody? The answer is no. And it goes to, well, who's got responsibility here?"

It's tempting (and, indeed, clichéd) to trace Bradley's passion about racial equality back to his experiences on his integrated Little League baseball team in Crystal City, Missouri, and, later, as a basketball player for both Princeton University and the New York Knicks. But that doesn't do justice to either Bradley's supporters or Bradley himself.

True, Bradley experienced firsthand the effects of racism when his Little League team had to stay in third-rate hotels. And true, he discovered early in his Knicks career that he, not his black teammates, would be the one to receive offers for product endorsements. But Bradley also turned down those endorsements. A different person might have done otherwise.