Scanning the Presidential Playground.

• Author: COCKBURN, ALEXANDER

As the new millennium crept over the Eastern horizon, Americans welcomed in the fresh era to the sound of Vice President Al Gore denouncing his rival for the Democratic nomination, former New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley, as being a red. Gore thus recruited to the radical tradition a man who sat in the U.S. Senate for eighteen years a state of torpid obedience to capital so diligent that his main legislative achievement in that span was the attachment of no less than thirty-five riders written by lobbyists for the pharmaceutical industry, whose well-being is the prime concern of all mature legislators from New Jersey.

Why do liberals like Bradley? It's one of the marvels of the season that Bill Bradley has been able to muster to his cause such bankable liberal names as Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone, Harvard Professor Cornel West, Robert Reich, and the editor of The Nation, Katrina vanden Heuvel, plus a sizable slab of the liberal Hollywood crowd.

But on the big issues--trade, labor, defense, crime, health care, and the environment--Bradley and Gore are pretty much indistinguishable. Both supported the contras in the 1980s. Both follow the neoliberal line charted by the Democratic Leadership Council back in the late 1980s. In the past, Gore has pandered to the right on issues such as race, crime, and tobacco. Bradley's signals to Wall Street that he's their man are, even in these lax times, shameless well beyond the point of indelicacy. In the one-paragraph statement on economic policy on the Bradley web site, phrases such as "prudent fiscal policy," "open markets," "lowest possible tax rates," and "keep capital flowing freely" bow and scrape from every line.

Most "left liberals" (these days the taxonomy of progressiveness inside the Democratic Party is a tricky business) should have known something was amiss when Bradley sought and got the endorsements of New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey. If that wasn't evidence enough of Bradley's neoliberalism, surely the sanctioning of his campaign by former Fed chief Paul Volcker and Wall Street investor Warren Buffett should have driven the point home. Even Bill Clinton's man Paul Begala has a hard time telling the difference between Gore and Bradley: "There is no true liberal to be found in this race ... just two centrists that, watch them very closely, will become more so."

There have been some principled votes in Bradley's career: for national health insurance, against welfare "reform," against the nomination of Alan Greenspan to chair the Federal Reserve. But Al Gore claims that Bradley has a habit of quitting when the going gets tough, and the Vice President has a point. Though he now proclaims that a President has "to confront challenges," Bradley has been a timid politician, rarely sticking his neck out.

Despite being endorsed by several antiwar groups, Bradley has a mixed record on military issues. Early in this campaign, he positioned himself as the only candidate calling for a cut in the Pentagon's budget, targeting weapons systems that "primarily benefit arms companies." But even before the first primary, Bradley scuttled back in pell-mell retreat from this daring onslaught on the Merchants of Death and from his earlier view that the U.S. no longer needs to maintain sufficient forces to fight two major wars simultaneously. He has prudently deferred most specifics on military matters, telling the Des Moines Register, "I don't want to battle the doctrine till we do the analysis." On the Star Wars absurdity ($55 billion and counting), Bradley has maintained a sphinx-like silence. His own shield against troublesome questions about his posture on the Pentagon budget runs as follows: "The Pentagon's budget should be spent more efficiently, not cut or increased."

Bradley's oft-proclaimed concern for children in need might have found appropriate expression in a denunciation of the U.N./U.S. sanctions against Iraq, which are killing 5,000 kids a month. Instead, Bradley has come out for tougher sanctions. In a debate on Meet the Press on December 19, he criticized Clinton and Gore for agreeing to a proposal at the U.N. Security Council that conceivably could ease sanctions sometime in the remote distance: "I think the only reason the Security Council should have acted would be to tighten sanctions," said Bradley. "And what this did was loosen them up.... I happen to think that it's a very serious mistake. We should not have gone in that direction."

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