On the Bus with Bradley.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Presidential candidate Bill Bradley

I was standing next to Washington political analyst Stuart Rothenberg in New Hampshire when he started chuckling about the morley group of progressives out stumping for Bill Bradley. There's Senator Paul Wellstone, Democrat of Minnesota, who dropped out of the Presidential race himself because of his bad back and marched, with a pronounced limp, onto the stage for Bradley. Wellstone was followed by Representative Jerry Nadler, Democrat of New York, probably the roundest man in Congress, and by the diminutive Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, who made the obligatory short joke and endured a "high five" from the six-foot-six-inch candidate. Finally, there's the incomparable Cornel West, the African American Studies professor from Harvard, who at one event got so wound up while giving an introduction for Bradley that he began flapping his arms Vigorously like a bird about to take flight, shouting out that Bradley has gravitas, that he speaks veritas, that he shows caritas. "It's like the bar scene from Star Wars," Rothenberg chortled.

It's true, this is no hyper-slick, carefully produced, Al Gore-style campaign. These are my people--scruffy leftwingers, riled up about the possibility of enacting universal health care, ending child poverty, and launching a new, progressive era.

But why are they following Bradley? I chased the Bradley campaign through the early primary stares to try to find out.

Bradley was a pro-NAFTA, pro-contra, Reagan-tax-cutter during his days in the Senate. His campaign has as much money as the Al Gore fundraising juggernaut--about $20 million at last count, a big chunk of it from Bradley's buddies on Wall Street. At every Bradley event, I encountered a pack of his loyal Princeton classmates--amiable, S.U.V.-driving, wealthy white guys.

The Princeton alums like Bradley because he's a great athlete and a straight shooter. "It's amazing how many people who went to Princeton with him are now working for him," said Henry Von Kohorn, a Bradley classmate and commercial real estate developer from Westport, Connecticut, who was sitting next to me at the bar during Bradley's Super Bowl party in New Hampshire. "It doesn't matter what your politics are, he's a hero to people in my generation." Von Kohorn isn't even a Democrat, he told me, but Bradley's message about economic inequality got to him: "We have unparalleled prosperity in this country, and we've got to take care of the people who've been left behind," he said.

Our conversation was drowned out as the speakers blared the Rolling Stones' "Start Me Up" and Bradley arrived, to be mobbed by volunteers. As the Stones sang, "You make a grown man cry," Senator Bob Kerrey...