He just couldn't open up. The following day, as he finished a press conference in a back room of a senior center, I managed to catch him one-on-one, and I asked him to name a few books that had influenced him. Books as character-enhancement prop were fairly fresh in the news then, W just having fished James Chace's Dean Acheson biography out of some fortunate memory hole as evidence that he did, in fact, read. We all know you genuinely do read, I said to Bradley; but what?

He smiled nervously, looked at the ground, shook his head, and fidgeted. "If I mention something," he said, "then that will get picked up, and that will become the book. So . . ." he carried on in that vein, but by this time three or four other journalists had gathered around, started gently teasing him. He had to say something now, so he came up with The Unconscious Civilization by John Ralston Saul. I vaguely know Saul (though I don't know this book) as a political philosopher from Canada whose notions about the Enlightenment are, well, resistant to category. But neither title nor author struck the slightest chord with the group. The conversation, no doubt to Bradley's great relief, went pffft.

That's who he is; it wasn't going to change. In 1978, during his first Senate campaign, staff and volunteers weren't allowed to pick him up at home. They met him at a nearby gas station. After he won, the Washington Post "Style" section -- a D.C. tastemaker, and a place where people pay flacks thousands to try landing them a nice write-up -- wanted to profile him, and he said no ("I wanted to be a U.S. Senator," he wrote in his memoir, "not a star"). This is reticence as eccentricity. The No-Talk Express.

Ideas, especially Big Liberal Ideas, have limitations, because only about a quarter of the country really gives a fig anyway. And ideas kind of throw people, even, or perhaps especially, their endorsers -- in a presidential race, to be too specific is to hand the foe ammunition, like letting the other army visit your gunpowder magazine. Bradley's health-care proposal is, as a matter of policy, a fine idea. But politically, it did a lot more for Gore, however dishonestly Gore represented it, than it did for Bradley, who was never able to defend it. The appeal of ideas -- Bradley -- is narrow, while the appeal of the personal confessional -- McCain -- is boundless. Some liberals love McCain, even though he votes for everything they detest, while the man whose ideas are the most liberal, they don't like so much. I guess it's what Bradley deserves, because he miscalculated, made lots of mistakes, came across as superior. But if you actually happen to believe in the things Bradley's been espousing, and suspect that he could be a better president than he is a candidate, it's a little depressing.

Gore understood this. He's not Mr. Personal Confessional, but he understood, and understands, that you don't win a political race with intellectual depth and abstraction. You win it by speaking at banquets, taking people's calls, and listening, just endlessly. That's what politics is, really. When Gore attacked Bradley for being a quitter because he left the Senate, it was ridiculous, in one way, because obviously a man should be free to pursue his own path in life. But it stuck as a charge; people who pursue their own paths in life don't win a party's presidential nomination. Party animals do.

So when the vice president was stumbling last October, when Bradley was comfortably ahead of him in New York, Gore didn't put out a raft of policy proposals. He went and spent the night at Eliot Spitzer's farmhouse up in Columbia County. He and Spitzer went for a jog. "I had a couple of hours to talk to him alone," Spitzer says, "and he did say to me that they did not take the Bradley campaign seriously until early September. It shows that the Washington operation was out of touch." The next morning, Gore, Spitzer, Carl McCall, Sheldon Silver, and a few others strategized in Spitzer's living room, talked about how to put the pieces of the campaign together. Afterward, Spitzer hosted a meeting of 150 party leaders from around the state out in a tent in the yard. "He was great," Spitzer says. "It was clear that he had released himself from the emotional baggage of Washington."

Also in October, Gore's New York people -- state director Eric Eve, communications director Peter Ragone, Karenna Gore-Schiff, others -- took control of a campaign saddled with way too many chefs. "There were a lot of factions," says one Democrat. "Andrew Cuomo's group, Silver's group, McCall's group. Not them deliberately, but their supporters. If any one segment tried to dominate, the others would act out." The Gore operatives corralled everybody. They met with various local party leaders around the state, and saw that local activists had face time with the candidate to "make sure there was a connection between Al Gore and the activist base," in the words of Long Island Democrat Robert Zimmerman. They sat with other local leaders -- for example, in Jerry Nadler's congressional district. Nadler had endorsed Bradley, and the Gore camp didn't want to see this virus spread any further. It didn't. Charlie Rangel got Harlem together. "We said, 'We've gotta turn this thing around,' " Ragone says. "We did."

That, too, is what a campaign's about. Bradley had a core New York group -- Nadler, Pat Moynihan, Ed Koch, former Cuomo aide Michael Del Giudice, a handful of elected officials. But against the Gore machine they were like the Polish army of 1939, on horseback. Naturally, it helps to be the sitting vice-president, and most of Gore's backers had already endorsed him months before. But give Gore credit for going to these people, asking for direction. By the time New Hampshire was over, Gore's New York people were able to watch their man fly into La Guardia after midnight and have more than 500 people there to greet him. Freezing-cold night, too. Let's face it, they weren't there because they adore Al Gore. They were there because he is the deal they've struck; they feel, all things considered, like he's earned it, and maybe he has.