Bradley buzz starts to woo US electors US electors

WHEN EX-SENATOR and sports star Bill Bradley arrived in New Hampshire on his fourth visit since the turn of the year to this key election state, he was suddenly not a hopeless outsider but an acknowledged presidential prospect with the political wind behind him.

The very antithesis of the fast-talking, sharp-dressing performance artist, the Senator (as they defer to him hereabouts) is New Hampshire's sort of politician: shambling and avuncular. And the awful thought dawning in the minds of his opponents is that he could just be America's sort of politician as well.

What has changed is not his position in the ratings - he trails Vice- President Al Gore for the Democratic nomination by as much as 30 points - but the buzz that is starting to surround him. He is liked, he is respected, and he could be loved; above all, he connects. In his three-day, eight- town progress around the southern half of New Hampshire this week he held the rapt attention of audiences as large as 500 and as small as 30, as old as 90 and as young as 10, as rich and white as New England stockbrokers and as poor and racially mixed as an inner city youth club.

As if his all-American name and slightly stooped 6ft 5in height were not enough, Bill Bradley has a CV that most American presidential hopefuls can only dream of: a Princeton degree, an Olympic gold medal, a Rhodes scholarship, 10 years on the professional basketball circuit (including two NBA championships), 18 years in the US Senate, two university fellowships and four books.

He has a college professor wife, no shortage of money and a private life unblemished in 55 years.

To explain how he got where he is, he credits his parents: his schoolteacher mother wanted him to be a success; his father worked his way from coin- polisher to chief shareholder of the local bank, "never foreclosed on a house" during the Depression, and wanted him to be a gentleman. Neither of them wanted him to be a politician. His wisest decisions, he says, were marrying his wife and leaving the small Missouri town of his birth for the big wide world of Princeton.

"Everything flowed from that," he says. If only, his audiences seem to be saying as they glance to each other, their own lives were so straightforward.

Bill Bradley's old-style upbringing and manner exert a strong appeal, even to the newest elite. An hour before sunset on a perfect spring evening this week, upwards of 100 gleaming cars were already parked just anyhow on both sides of Amherst's Fair Oaks Avenue, the kind of discreet wooded road that leads to the houses of the seriously rich. Anne and Boyce Greer - she a lawyer turned full-time mother of three young children, he the head of money marketing at Fidelity Investments - were hosting nearly 150 friends and associates at their sparkling new mansion.

The house was vast and light, with verandas looking out to an infinity of forested hills; the drink was abundant, the asparagus spears bigger than any you have ever seen, and all the guests wore name-tags headed: `Hello!' But Mr Bradley was as comfortable in such company as with the clergy and students of his first meeting that morning and the pensioners in the dingy church basement that afternoon.

"You thought you had a nice view till you came to Boyce and Anne's house, didn't you," he quipped as he stood at the microphone on their lawn and the sun slipped down behind the trees and the birds sang. He then regaled his audience with the mixture of homespun morality and "big ideas" that are becoming his stock in trade.

"I've been on the road for 30 years," he says. "The accumulation has given me a sense of who the American people are, and there is goodness in most of us. The job of President is not to take the spotlight, but to call to action millions of Americans to make the country a better place." And he talks about a "triangle of trust: trust in institutions, the trust that the President has in the people and the trust of the people in the President."

These potential voters grown rich in the hi-tech economy appreciate his appeal to trust and values no less than other audiences. "He strikes me as a very prudent guy, very sensible," said Mrs Greer. This is the first time that she (at 33) and her husband (at 43) have ever been politically active, she says; their friends likewise.

"Everybody wanted to meet him and wanted to bring another 10 people. People are dying to know about him. If they'd said get 300 people, we wouldn't have had a hard time," she said. There had been a waiting list of 100.

"He's a very viable and intriguing candidate," her husband said, approving the "simplicity and fairness" of his position on taxes ("the lowest taxes for the greatest number of Americans", as Bradley puts it). She added: "He thinks on social issues like I do: gun control, pro-choice, spending ... "

Bill Bradley's affable "remarks" (he eschews formal speeches) at the Greers' were not a fund-raising exercise; that is to come. But he elicited a cheer when he called for reform of the campaign financing system, saying: "Money fundamentally distorts the democratic process in America."

Not all concurred that the Clinton scandals had tainted the presidency, or that Al Gore was necessarily handicapped by his loyalty to the President. More prevalent was the positive view of Mr Bradley. When asked how he knew him, Harold Janeway, a local investment adviser, said: "I didn't really, I just liked him." And Ruth, a guest probably in her 60s, spoke for many in his different audiences when she said: "He challenges us, doesn't allow us to take the easy way."

The reception at the Greers' might have been the stuff of nightmares for Mr Gore. The new-tech set are the very people he regards as his constituency, thanks to his championing of the Internet. Tellingly, however, Mr Bradley raised 10 times more than Mr Gore from one large hi-tech company in California recently; he credits the personalities he established with many of Silicon Valley's chief movers during a year's fellowship at Stanford University in 1997.

Mr Gore's difficulty in "connecting" is something that Mr Bradley is quietly starting to exploit. A frequent question is how he differentiates himself from his rival - after all, they were Democrats together in the Senate for more than a decade and almost contemporaries.

Mr Bradley's reply is threefold: "I had a life before politics"; leadership style ("the VP is more cautious", he says, citing his own greater willingness to countenance big and conten-tious issues such as race relations and taxation); and his "wider appeal" to independent voters, of whom there is an ever increasing number.

The criticisms of Bill Bradley are that he is boring, which bothers him not at all, given the fixed concentration with which his audiences hang on his words, and that he has set out no detailed policies. He responds that autumn is soon enough for policies.

He is his own man and will not be rushed.