BRADLEY RESPONDS TO SAVAGE GORE ATTACKS WITH ANYTHING BUT PASSION

In a lifetime of watching political candidates from both parties and all philosophical persuasions dating back to the 1960s, I can recall none who so completely failed to understand the nature of the contest in which he found himself engaged as does Bill Bradley. Here is a respected (if ponderous) former U.S. senator with impeccable liberal credentials who has found himself savaged by Vice President Gore as the campaign heated up this winter. The vice president has played the race card, and this against a man whose principal enthusiasm in public life is an obsession with race that evidently dates to an epiphany he had showering in the Knicks locker rooms of a generation ago. Gore savaged Bradley's dubious health-care scheme with an utter shamelessness he learned well from his mentor, the president.

A new high in shamelessness was reached last week when a peeved Bradley finally mentioned Willie Horton, and Gore accused Bradley of introducing the race card to this campaign, when it was Gore who first raised the issue against Michael Dukakis in the 1988 primary for president.

Bradley has met his brutal mugging with the diffidence so characteristic of him since his school days. Musing aloud in boring, interminable speeches that sound as though he thinks the campaign were a graduate seminar at Oxford or the Kennedy School at Harvard, Bradley has mostly flopped. A persuasive speaker, any high school speech teacher could have instructed the former Rhodes scholar from Crystal City, must bring a certain controlled energy, if not passion, to his or her presentation in order to accomplish the mission of moving an audience.

Of course styles will differ. Think of the dissimilarities between, say, 20th-century masters Franklin D. Roosevelt, Sir Winston Churchill and Ronald Reagan. But the speaker must convey energy, or he might as well have stayed in bed. In this Bradley is as lacking utterly today as he was when addressing my high school commencement in the early 1970s. Five minutes after his remarks on that long-ago June evening, not a person in the large and respectful audience gathered to hear this certified celebrity could have told you what he said.

Through it all, as indeed through all his 18 years in the U.S. Senate, Bradley exudes a sort of I-am-delivering-the-tablets-from-on-high sense of deadly earnestness, and you can't escape the touch of arrogance. Referring to this last troublesome quality, columnist Wes Pruden of The Washington Times, who is about the closest thing to the legendary H.L. Mencken as we have writing today, muses whether the former New Jersey senator might "run out of money before he runs out of sanctimony." This will take some doing Bradley outraised the V.P. in the last quarter of 1999 but Bradley may be about pull it off.

If so, this will be a pity and not just for the long-in-waiting Bradley coronation crowd. It would have been a service to the country for a member of Gore's own party to point to the Everest of indisputable facts that make this administration among the two or three very most corrupt in American history, if not number one in disgracing our cherished institutions. Now that essential but difficult task will have to wait for the fall, and a Republican nominee with the stomach to take on both the media and the opposition, for the fight Bill Bradley thought was beneath him.