Feature

Brother From Another Planet

"I think growing up in the family I grew up in was important," says Bradley. "My father was a small-town banker, and he had a lot of expressions. One of them was: 'You can never tell whether somebody is going to pay their loan by the color of their skin.' That's the earliest I can trace it to."

What Bradley's life in basketball may have enabled him to do is speak with more familiarity and less trepidation about race. (Or, as Bradley casually puts it: "I have a lot of friends who are African-American.") And because honesty about race is one of the qualities black Americans crave the most in their leaders, Bradley's unflinching candor is one of his best assets -- and weapons. He's the same guy at a lectern that he was on the basketball court: a straight shooter.

When Bradley spoke at the National Action Network three weeks ago, for instance, he didn't mince words. While condemning police brutality, he told a willful audience of 500 that no, he did not support a reparations bill to compensate its victims. "That struck me," says Sharpton, "because he wasn't just playing to the crowd."

In an interview with Spike Lee two years ago, he was even more blunt. The two men were sitting up in the Schomburg library in Harlem, talking basketball for Lee's book, Best Seat in the House. Over the course of the discussion, Bradley mentioned that his aunt -- "Aunt Bub" -- habitually used the term nigger to describe black people.

"I think most politicians would be leery about suggesting that any of their relatives used that word," says Lee. "And I know George Bush wouldn't confess to that. Hell no. Never."

Yet for a man who feels so strongly about racial unity, Bradley has alarmingly little to show for it on paper. His most significant legislative accomplishment was the big tax-reform bill of 1986 -- not exactly a priority for African-Americans at the time -- and the other subjects he mastered in Congress lay in obscure corners of public policy: Third and Second World debt relief, water subsidies for California farmers. When he announced his retirement in 1996, the pundits promptly mourned the departure of another moderate -- moderate -- from Congress; the health-care plan he unveiled last month is a far cry from the health-care plan he crafted with Senate moderates in 1994, which would have insured far fewer children and even fewer adults.

"I've often said that no one speaks more eloquently on the subject of race than Bill Bradley," says Charles Rangel, the Harlem Democrat who was serving in Congress when Bradley was still refining his jump shot. "But if my life depended on it, I could not think of what his legislative legacy is."

Nor did Bradley take much advantage of the Senate floor -- which, thanks to C-span, is one of the nation's greatest soapboxes -- to make a rhetorical contribution to the national dialogue on race. When Rodney King was brutalized by the Los Angeles Police Department, the New Jersey senator did give a moving speech, thumping the lectern 56 times to demonstrate just how many blows King had sustained. But it's one of the few speeches anyone can remember from his eighteen-year career.

Once he left Congress, Bradley started talking seriously about racial unity again. But to political veterans, mere talk was not enough. "I heard him deliver three major speeches in person this past summer," says Walters, Jackson's former aide. "He spoke in relative generalities, and I've been looking for the meat here."

Bradley begs to differ, saying that he has provided "specific, programmatic answers that really are aimed to reduce the number of children in poverty," such as universal access to health care and solutions for day care. Yet the one specific human-rights initiative Bradley has thus far proposed on the campaign trail -- extending the Civil Rights Act to cover gays -- has alarmed some black leaders, including Rangel, who supports Gore, and the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who has yet to endorse a candidate. They fear that ripping open the 35-year-old measure, the cornerstone of racial justice since the Johnson administration, will give the Republicans in Congress a chance to repeal it altogether. Who in the Congressional Black Caucus wants this bill in the hands of Trent Lott?

Of course, Gore's record on issues of concern to most African-Americans looks almost exactly like Bradley's. Both candidates have had their differences with African-American leaders: Bradley, by voting for an experimental program in school vouchers; Gore, by promoting with Clinton the most sweeping changes in welfare reform. (In "reinventing government," Gore also managed, inadvertently, to trim a disproportionate number of blacks from the executive branch of government.)

The critical difference between the candidates may not be about race at all, but about political style. While still in Congress, Gore was much more accessible to his colleagues than Bradley, who generally kept to himself. And Gore did understand that his pet issues, like the environment, weren't isolated from the issue of race. As James E. Clyburn, the South Carolina Democrat who heads the Black Caucus, points out: "When you talk about economic development and you don't deal with the environmental component of it, you are asking people of color to choose between a good job and good health. Gore understands that."

Over the past seven years, Gore also helped push several measures through Congress that black lawmakers had crafted -- most notably, Rangel's 1993 initiative to create dozens of empowerment zones around the country, which now total 31. Gore can also claim that he helped create the most diverse White House administration in history, and that he presided with Clinton over a booming economy in which median incomes of African-Americans rose and poverty rates dropped to the lowest they've been since 1959.

For many current members of Congress, feelings of gratitude and personal loyalty extend even beyond Al Gore. They go back to his father. "Those of us who came out of the civil-rights movement in the South became enamored with certain people who had the intestinal fortitude to stand up for the issues we were fighting for," says Clyburn. "And of course, Al Gore Sr. was one of those people -- he opposed the Southern Manifesto."

Then again, members of Congress, both black and white, are under considerable pressure to endorse the Establishment candidate. Consider: Edolphus Towns, a black House Democrat from Brooklyn, supports Gore. But his son Darryl, a Democratic assemblyman also from Brooklyn, supports Bradley. "I think my father's perspective is a little more Washington-based," Towns Jr. says judiciously.

Congressmen Towns and Major Owens didn't protest, either, when another Brooklyn assemblyman, Al Vann, invited Bradley to speak with a group of community leaders last June.

"Before I reached out," says Vann, who backs Bradley, "I talked to them, and they were very supportive of the move. They thought it was a good thing to do. That, in and of itself, gives you a strong indication of their feelings about him. They didn't say, 'No, we're with Gore -- don't do it!' I think they'll be going with Gore, but their hearts will be with Bradley."

Clearly, Bradley's best hope in this campaign is to circumvent the Establishment and take his message directly to the disaffected. But projecting empathy, sincerity, and compassion -- what we might call character, in short -- is not easy to do in a big forum or on the big screen. By definition, these are understated traits; to declaim them would negate them, or at the very least arouse suspicion. When Clinton famously declared that he felt our pain, we ridiculed him for weeks, and seven years later, we're still not sure he meant it. Bradley, who probably does feel the burden of his white-skin privilege and probably can feel the pain of those who don't have it, may never be able to convey that to a national audience. Or at least not to screaming stadiums of thousands, which he so ably commanded as a ballplayer two decades ago.

Bradley concedes that this may be true but believes he can overcome it. And then, he says, he'll be able to make his appeals straight from the Oval Office. "I think the bully pulpit of the presidency cannot be underestimated," says Bradley. But is it enough?

"Part of being good on race is not marginalizing the question of race," says Sharpton. "So do I want Gore, who'll do something for me in private, or do I want Bradley, who will speak to my issues in public?" He pauses. "I'll put it to you even more bluntly: Sometimes a mistress gets more gifts than the wife. But I want someone who will be seen with me when I go out."