A Sense of Where He Is

By Evan Thomas

Bill Bradley has usually had the good fortune to be underestimated. As a basketball player, he was widely regarded as too short and too slow, yet he wound up in the Hall of Fame. As a politician, he is often dismissed as too plodding and too pure. Yet this week, if as expected the Senate passes a < radical and sweeping overhaul of the tax system, Bradley will be able to take pride in the fact that, as he laconically notes, "I kind of suggested the idea."

This week's scheduled vote is not the final hurdle the measure will have to clear. The Senate bill must still survive a conference to reconcile it with a version passed by the House. Though both plans aim to cut tax rates through closing loopholes, the devil is in the details; the conferees are likely to fall prey to much back-room maneuvering over breaks for various special interests. "The game ain't over till it's over," warns Bradley. But even opponents of tax reform expect to see a bill on the President's desk for signing by Labor Day.

It was back in 1982 that Bradley, then a first-term Democratic Senator from New Jersey, first put tax reform on the national agenda. The idea of lowering rates for the many by eliminating breaks for the few was seen as noble but a bit naive in the real world of Washington politics. Well-financed special- interest groups, went the conventional wisdom, would quash any attempt to take away their favorite loopholes. But Bradley kept plugging away in his dogged fashion; he even published a book on the subject (The Fair Tax) that forcefully laid out the case for reform. This week his persistence will be vindicated by the votes of many of the same Senators who only a few months before had written off tax reform as a hopeless dream.

Inevitably, the credit Bradley is reaping from this political near miracle makes him a presidential prospect. To the Democrats, desperate for new faces, the emergence of a 42-year-old Rhodes scholar and sports idol who can claim to be the father of tax reform may be an act of political deliverance. Bradley seems in no great hurry to jump into the presidential race, but he is nonetheless quietly preparing himself for this last and greatest competition --if not in 1988, then in 1992. "Bill has always had a sense of where he wants to go," says his old Princeton roommate Coleman Hicks, now a Washington lawyer, "and he is very patient about getting there."

Bradley's life has been one long self-improvement project. As a high school basketball player in Crystal City, Mo., he practiced 3 1/2 hours a day with lead weights in his sneakers. As a Princeton star, he awed classmates by pumping in 30 points a game and then hitting the library until midnight. As a Senator, he slightly unnerves some of his colleagues by relentlessly writing & in a small notebook that he keeps in his inside jacket pocket. "He watches you," says Senator David Pryor of Arkansas. "It's constant."

Bradley's interest in tax reform was stirred, typically, not by a three- by-five card handed to him by a Senate aide but by his own firsthand experience. As a bonus baby for the New York Knicks in 1967, his eyes widened as his lawyer described all the ways he could shelter his six-figure income. "I wasn't just a player," he recalls. "I was a depreciable asset." On one road trip, when his teammates went to the movies to unwind, Bradley curled up with heavy tomes by Economist Milton Friedman and Tax Specialist Stanley Surrey and first read that tax rates could be greatly lowered if loopholes were closed.

Bradley tried to sell the idea of tax reform to Walter Mondale in 1984. Fearful of antagonizing the special interests, the Democratic presidential nominee was not interested. Instead, he alienated the voters by proposing a tax increase. Ronald Reagan, however, was wiser and adopted tax reform as his proclaimed "No. 1 domestic priority."

Even with the President's support, tax reform faced a tortuous path through Congress. When the bill finally made it to the Senate Finance Committee in March, Bradley was a lonely figure, often the sole vote to close loopholes that most Senators wanted to preserve or even enlarge. As ever, Bradley was patient. "The committee had to go through an educational process," he said last week. "You either get lower rates or loopholes, and they wanted both. So before long we were about $100 billion in the hole."

Despairing, Committee Chairman Bob Packwood, a Republican, finally came to Bradley in early May. "Bill," he asked, "how did you do it?" The package that emerged from a week of closed-door committee meetings came out looking very much like Bradley's Fair Tax plan, eliminating most tax breaks and dropping rates to 15% and 27%.

Bradley deserves credit for being "the idea man," says Oklahoma Democrat David Boren, a Finance Committee member. But credit for patching together the votes to pass a tax-reform bill goes to Packwood and to his House counterpart, Ways and Means Chairman Dan Rostenkowski. Behind the scenes, Bradley bitterly resisted an amendment aimed at preserving tax breaks for oil and gas that was necessary to win the support of Finance Committee members from the South and West. "Bradley wanted to bulldoze the bill right through without any ; amendments," says an oil-state Senator. "Packwood understood the need to get a strong vote out of the committee."

Bradley says he is willing to cut deals when necessary but adds, "It's best to trade votes without anyone knowing about it." His model is veteran Louisiana Democrat Russell Long, a cagey operator whom Bradley studies the way coaches watch game films. Still, some of Bradley's colleagues find him aloof. "Reciprocity is not the way he operates," insists one Democratic Senator. "He's viewed as a lot of taking and not much giving. It's not that he's holier than thou, it's just that he has his own personal agenda." Says Bradley's media adviser, Michael Kaye: "He's everyone's friend but nobody's friend. He's so concerned about what he wants to accomplish that he hasn't joined the club."

A voracious reader who lugs around sheaves of paper and stacks of books, Bradley believes that most issues are too complicated to allow for easy answers. Some colleagues say that he is a victim of what they call "the Jimmy Carter syndrome." Says one: "He can get all bound up in the trees and miss the forest." But others, like Rhode Island Republican John Chafee, argue that "Bradley can see the big picture," and cite his prescience in latching on to tax reform.

He enjoys being unpredictable. "He's not afraid to take a tough vote," says Chafee. Bradley angered some Democrats this spring by voting in favor of aid to the contra guerrillas who are trying to overthrow the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, he has come to believe that the Sandinistas are intent on exporting revolution in Central America. "I want to buy time for the fragile democracies down there," he says.

A rumpled dresser with a former athlete's disdain for exercise as well as a fondness for junk food that has doubled his chin, Bradley is not particularly telegenic. Although he has a wry sense of humor, he is too deliberate to be glib. But Bradley, who actually writes his own speeches, is trying to become less wooden. "You improve the more you speak," he says. "If you think I'm bad now, you should have seen me at the beginning. I'm up from zero." Having mastered what he calls his "inside game"--a thorough command of detail--he says he is working on his "outside game"--reaching voters with broad themes and symbols. Though Bradley can be standoffish to fellow Senators, he jokes easily with voters on the campaign trail. In an age of media-slick politicians, Bradley's very plainness can be refreshing. "There's a nice quiet irony and modesty about him," says Political Media Consultant Robert Squier. "He comes across as a thoughtful man, not necessarily a disqualification for being President."

Bradley is devoted to his family and adamantly insists on getting home by 7 p.m. to see his daughter Theresa Anne, 9. He is said to be reluctant to plunge his wife Ernestine, a professor of comparative literature at Montclair State College, into the hurly-burly of a national campaign. "If you backed me into a corner right now, I'd say I wasn't running in 1988," he says. In fact, he has laid none of the necessary groundwork, such as amassing a war chest or flying off to speak in early primary states like New Hampshire. Says Media Adviser Kaye: "He'll run when he truly believes he's ready. He's so much a student of the game, and he's still learning." Bradley's education, by his own definition, is never ending. But, like tax reform, his time may come.