When Sweet Talk Falls Flat

By ERIC POOLEY

Arguing against welfare reform in August 1999 is a bit like arguing against the Apollo moon shot in August 1969. The Eagle has landed, and the naysayers appear to be on the wrong side of history. But at least one of them remains unmoved by the news--because nobody loves a lonely, principled fight more than Bill Bradley.

Before he left the Senate in 1996, Bradley voted against the landmark welfare bill. Today Al Gore's lone challenger for the Democratic nomination is still speaking out against that reform. Welfare is "a disastrous system," Bradley recently told TIME, "but the way to deal with it is federal commitment and state experimentation, not the Federal Government washing its hands [of the problem]." Holding that view requires courage. In a survey commissioned by the G.O.P., 60% of those polled said they were less likely to vote for Bradley after hearing his position on welfare. If there's anyplace in America where people still swoon over that kind of rhetoric, you'd think it would be the annual convention of Jesse Jackson's Rainbow/Push Coalition.

Think again. At a labor breakfast there attended by 800 Rainbow members, Bradley extolled his own commitment to racial and economic justice, then took aim at Clinton and Gore's. "After seven years of the first two-term Democrat since Franklin Roosevelt, the number of children in poverty in America barely blipped down," he said. "One year after the Welfare Reform bill passed--which I voted against--there were 29% more children living in...deep poverty... Reducing [that number] should be the North Star for our society." The line got a big hand. But later people were curiously unmoved; they'd been cheering the sentiment, not the sentimentalist. The response of these Democratic regulars--those who man phone banks and get out the vote--shows how hard it will be for Bradley to wrest the nomination from Gore. "Bradley didn't say anything to change my mind," said Bertrice Hall, a union administrator and enthusiastic Gore supporter (yes, they do exist). Hall and others had real problems with Bradley's pitch, including his now familiar refusal to share his plans for achieving these big ideas. "He said he's in favor of insuring 'as many Americans as possible.' What does that mean?" asks activist Pia Davis. "He wants Gore to get Clinton to sign an order banning racial profiling. Why should Gore have to do something now, when Bradley gets to wait until fall to tell us what he's going to do?"

When Bradley criticized Clinton, he also ignored a fact known to everyone in the room: with Newt Gingrich and now Tom Delay running the House, no President could launch a war on poverty. It was all Clinton could do to beat back the 1995-96 G.O.P. tide, and the Rainbow members are grateful for it--but Bradley never acknowledged that, and the omission undermined his credibility. Problem is, it's hard for Bradley to draw stark contrasts with Gore, who was cheered wildly by the Rainbow on Saturday. Bradley said he wouldn't try to reverse welfare reform but would look for ways to "improve" the bill. That's what Clinton and Gore have already done. And Bradley's argument that the welfare bill "cuts the bonds between mother and child" by requiring single mothers to work after two years did not go over well with working mothers who had to go back to their jobs after six months. "Every working mother," Bradley said after the speech, "has a choice." Hall chuckled at that one. "I didn't have a choice," she said. She will in the primary.