The Only Game in Town.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Al Gore's stand on many issues is proving not to be as progressive as that of Bill Bradley's

For progressives, the primary season has turned into a trail of tears. Bradley is finished, and Gore is moving from state to state, churning up victims. At almost every stop, he produces more weepy testimonials from sufferers of every imaginable ill--cancer, discrimination, school violence, homicidal stalkers, brain damage, and depression.

It's not exactly inspiring. For all his promises to "fight fer you," Gore is no barn-burning populist. Like Clinton, he is the candidate of Wall Street and welfare reform, of unfettered global trade for corporations. And despite all his hankie-wringing, he proposes only tiny, incremental measures to help those left behind--unfortunate, underpaid, and uninsured Americans.

Every time Gore holds up the downtrodden at a campaign stop, he seems to race off to make an equal and opposite appeal to the heavyweights doing the trodding.

* On labor: Gore made headlines when he spoke with labor leaders in New Orleans, reassuring them that he would negotiate tougher accords to guarantee that countries like China respect labor rights. The next day, he sent a letter to the National Association of Manufacturers asserting that he supports the trade deal with China.

* On the environment: Despite Gore's record as an outspoken environmentalist, ABC News reports that the Vice President, as executor of his father's estate, holds stock in Occidental Petroleum, a company with a lousy environmental record in Latin America. Gore has refused to take sides in a dispute between that company and the U'wa Indian tribe in Colombia, where the tribe is threatening mass suicide in response to Occidental drilling on its lands. Gore's father's estate holds $500,000 in Occidental stock, and Occidental is a major Democratic Party donor.

* On affirmative action: At the Apollo Theater in Harlem, Gore took the opportunity to declare that he is a firm supporter of affirmative action--but, he said, he is against "quotas," or numeric standards for measuring affirmative action's success.

* On poverty: Gore has repeatedly pledged to help "those left behind" by the booming economy, yet he praises welfare reform efforts that deny education and training (not to mention health insurance) to workfare participants.

No wonder progressives don't sound too excited.

During the New Hampshire primary, Representative Dennis Kucinich, Democrat of Ohio, the leftwing former "boy mayor" of Cleveland, came out not to campaign but to promote his idea for a Department of...