Book Excerpt: 'Smashmouth' by Dana Milbank (Pt. 2)

— -- Sure, I had been warned: a Bill Bradley speech could be something less than electrifying. Still, I am not quite prepared for what happens when the aspiring presidential candidate takes the podium at the University of Notre Dame one night late in the fall of 1998.

His lecture is titled "Meaning in American Politics," but it might have been better titled "Dreaming in American Politics," for it proves a powerful soporific.

As Bradley stands with his glasses low on his nose, a red necktie not quite covering his lengthy torso, he reads straight from his prepared text in a slow drone. After ten minutes, many of his three hundred listeners begin to rest their heads in their hands; after twenty minutes, several are slouching in their seats. After half an hour, a guy in front of me in a Notre Dame jacket falls asleep, his head hitting his chest, bouncing up, and hitting his chest again. I look down the row and find several others in various states of repose. The university's venerable president emeritus, Father Hesburgh, who is sitting next to me, emits what sounds very much like a snore.

Oblivious, Bradley drones on, about how "capital follows knowledge" and how "we can reclaim the public sector as a venue for the source of our fulfillment." Bradley roams from religion to income inequality, from Edmund Burke to Virginia Woolfe. After forty-five minutes, it begins to sound like a filibuster. Bradley waves his right hand in a continuous circle. Is it a hypnoic gesture? Is there enough oxygen in the room? I am growing sleepy. Sleepy. Sleepy. Fortunately, Father Hesburgh snores again, breaking the spell.

"I was listening to everything he said — when I was awake," admits Tim Casale, the fellow in the Notre Dame jacket, when I confront him after the speech. Casale, a junior, is from New Jersey, and he wanted to see whether Bradley really sounded like the kind of guy who could challenge the vice president in 2000. "You look at the Democratic Party and you see Al Gore getting the nomination," Casale says. He's more convinced of that than ever after Bradley's talk. "He made a lot of interesting points, but nothing huge," Casale says. "It seemed there was something missing, like a spark."

That question, whether Bradley has the spark, is the central issue facing the candidate as he prepares for a presidential run. He has the resume, the policies and the instinct to mount a challenge to Gore, but does he have the fortitude? Can he bring himself down from his lofty heights to engage in a tough and nasty fight with Gore? Can he play smashmouth politics?

Bradley is again flirting with a presidential run, just as he flirted in '88, '92 and '96. This time, it appears, he's actually planning on doing it. With Gephardt declining to run, he's arguably the only Democratic candidate with a national stature that could rival Gore's. His famous resume can be recited by nearly everyone: basketball All-American at Princeton, captain of the 1964 Olympic basketball team, Rhodes Scholar, Hall-of-Famer who led the Knicks to two NBA championships before getting himself elected to the U.S. Senate on his first run for office in 1978. His attraction now is he's the un-Clinton: straight as an arrow, earnestly bookish, squeaky clean.

And boring. Bradley has developed a reputation for being one of the most cerebral and remote figures in American politics, a man not of the people, but above the people. Americans will indeed be looking for an honest man like Bradley to replace the shifty Clinton. But when they get a glimpse of the clean and good Bradley on the campaign trail, they may decide a rascal like Clinton isn't such a bad thing, after all. Ideologically, Bradley is little different from the Democrats' standard-bearer, Gore; stylistically, he is even more plodding. Bradley stands a chance if Gore stumbles in a campaign finance scandal or an economic downturn. But after Clinton's resurgence in November's midterm elections, Gore, as the heir-apparent to a popular president, appears invincible.

"People always said I would pick the time when it was hardest to do," Bradley told an audience recently. "We may be approaching that time." All signs are that Bradley wants to run. Officially, he says he will decide by January whether he and his wife "want to jump off a 50-story building," as he puts it. But Bradley is being less coy than usual, and his friends and advisers are putting out the word that he'll do it. "It certainly seems like it," says Marcia Aronoff, his staff chief for 12 years in the Senate. "He's serious about it," says Ed Turlington, who runs Bradley's three-person office now.