AT LEAST HE INHALED
Bill Kauffman on the uninspiring jock
who could be the next President of the United States
WHITE men can't jump, but they can raise large sums of money from other white men: witness the $12 million that former New York Knicks basketball for- ward Bill Bradley has amassed to fuel his challenge to Vice-President Gore for the
Democratic presidential nomination. (Gore has shaken the money tree for $18 million.) Bradley's team-mates used to gibe that he couldn't leap over a Sunday New York Times, and the joke still works. Bradley has never transcended the sodden clichés that make the American newspaper of record so reliably dreary.
But whereas Albert Gore is widely and rightly — derided, the equally wooden Bradley, a Wall Street Democrat who rep- resented New Jersey in the US Senate for 18 years, is 'the thinking man's politician', in the characteristically fatuous phrase of Time. (You could have fooled the staffer who tutored Bradley on tax policy when he joined the Senate Finance Committee: he once described his charge as 'the dumbest Rhodes Scholar in history'. Quite a distinc- tion, really, when you consider the proces- sion of numbingly 'well-rounded' mediocrities who have taken Cecil Rhodes's blood money.) But not only is he regarded as an intellectual, he is also a seri- ous challenger to Gore — a poll this week showed that he was neck-and-neck with the Vice-President in New Hampshire.
The legend of Bradley, son of a Crystal City, Missouri, banker, was made on the basketball court at Princeton. He was the golden boy of sportswriters with literary pretensions. The great white basketball players tended to be unlettered hicks (Jerry West from Cheylan, West Virginia, Larry Bird from French Lick, Indiana, John Havlicek from Martins Ferry, Ohio). Suspicious of polysyllabic words, they lacked the student-council-president polish of 'Dollar Bill' (an eerily prescient sobri- quet, given Bradley's skill at coaxing mil- lions of dollars from investment bankers and Hollywood moguls). When sportswrit- ers discovered that Bradley could speak four consecutive sentences without a sin- gle `y'know', he was portrayed in breath- less profiles as the Heidegger of the Hardwood. The believe-it-or-not treatment — a bas- ketball player who reads books! — carried over to Bradley's Senate career, which he spent upholding the middling middle and being lauded as an independent, a man of conscience — even, absurdly, a maverick, despite his voting with Wall Street on Nafta and Gatt, and with the Cold War- riors on US intervention in Nicaragua.
After a lifetime of having his banalities treated as pearls of sapience, Bradley has become insufferable in the fashion of a third-rate intellect convinced of his own genius. He is self-consciously aloof. He has mastered the art of answering questions haltingly, as though his forehead should be bannered 'Cerebration in Progress'.
Bradley's opinions are hackneyed. In the early Nineties he said his priorities were `kids and the environment'. Then Rodney King was beaten by Los Angeles cops and Bradley called for `an honest dialogue about race in America' — although 'extremists' were to be barred from the dialogue, along with inconvenient facts (extraordinarily high black crime rates). In recent months he has taken up the gun confiscation cause much favoured by the professional class. At each step he has merely mouthed the platitudes of the day, yet through it all his reputation as a cerebral stud with an independent streak endures. (There is one anomaly in the Bradley record: raised Presbyterian, he was active in the evangelical Fellowship of Christian Athletes — a serious faux pas, for proselytising Christians are as marginalised a group as exists in the New York-Washing- ton-Hollywood axis along which Bradley travels. He has been quiet on the God stuff throughout his career, but the Monolithic Middle has recently embraced 'faith-based
charity' — that is, funnelling welfare monies through religious organisations — and Bradley has picked up the tune.) The Gore forces do not underestimate him. Bradley will receive adulatory press coverage. Unlike the Republican front-run- ner, he denies being a coke-head, though he has confessed to taking a few forbidden puffs on marijuana cigarettes. A genuine maverick would follow this admission with a call to legalise pot and call off the drug war, but have we mentioned that Senator Bradley cares deeply about children and the environment?
Bradley's greatest liability is his per- ceived weakness in the South, which was critical to the election of Democrats Carter and Clinton. Vice-President Gore, after all, is technically a resident of the Upper South state of Tennessee, although he was raised in the Fairfax Hotel in Washington, DC, and sent to ruling-class prep schools. Bradley's native state of Missouri shares a border with Tennessee: riven by the Civil War, the state was a hotbed of unregener- ate Confederates, most famously Jesse James, no friend to Missouri bankers or their sons. Yet Bradley, whose Missourian qualities have long since eroded, has been written off in the South — unless, that is, there is no more South. For, as the Bradley campaign chairman has explained hopeful- ly: 'Even in the South, you drive down the street and you see the same Blockbusters, the same McDonald's. Now, Wal-Marts are in the North-East. There are both regional differences and huge commonalities.'
These 'huge commonalities' — the swamping of local idiosyncrasy by tyranni- cally homogeneous global capitalism — are what gives a placeless person like Bradley a shot at winning this election. Appositely, one of the fat cats bankrolling Bradley is Howard Schultz, chairman of Starbucks, which operates on the premise that there is no real difference between Birmingham, England, and Birmingham, Alabama. Maybe the accents lack consonance, but television will take care of that soon enough.
`I have always preferred moving to standing still,' Bradley began his memoir Time Present, Time Past, and it is this hypermobility, the refusal to stand in one place and defend its integrity, that is at the root of the 'loneliness' that Bradley senses, correctly, among his countrymen.
Having lived his entire adult life on the run, without a sense of place, a President Bradley would be forever lecturing the dwindling band of rooted Americans on their 'international responsibilities' to wage war on various swarthy renegades and, in general, to make the world safe for Microsoft. He calls himself a 'citizen of the world', which means he is a citizen of no place in particular. But, then, isn't it time that Starbucks had a president?
The author's most recent book is With Good Intentions? Reflections on the Myth of Progress in America.
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