KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS: [REGION Edition]

Abstract

Three days after they traded sharp jabs, the Democratic presidential candidates, Al Gore and Bill Bradley, wrapped up the first full week of the 2000 election year yesterday with a congenial debate that accentuated their disparate views of leadership and their often-similar positions on issues.

Here, in a nutshell, was the campaign for the Democratic nomination. Gore, a former member of the House and Senate, vice president for seven years, argued that he knows how to get things done, that he would fight for Americans by proposing programs that Congress would pass. Bradley, a former U.S. senator, basketball star and tax-policy wonk, contended that he knows how to aim high and bring the nation along, even if the task is daunting.

"They didn't say well we're going to cover 20 percent of the people and see how it works out," he said, in a thinly veiled criticism of Gore's health-care plan, which would cover children first, adults in phases. "They said we're going to cover everybody with Social Security, everybody with Medicare, just like I want to cover everybody with health care. And when they did that they made us all better off. And so bold leadership is important."

Bradley,

Gore pull

Iowa

JOHNSTON, Iowa -

Three days after they traded sharp jabs, the Democratic presidential candidates, Al Gore and Bill Bradley, wrapped up the first full week of the 2000 election year yesterday with a congenial debate that accentuated their disparate views of leadership and their often-similar positions on issues.

Here, in a nutshell, was the campaign for the Democratic nomination. Gore, a former member of the House and Senate, vice president for seven years, argued that he knows how to get things done, that he would fight for Americans by proposing programs that Congress would pass. Bradley, a former U.S. senator, basketball star and tax-policy wonk, contended that he knows how to aim high and bring the nation along, even if the task is daunting.

That, Bradley said, is what Franklin Roosevelt did when he created Social Security, what Lyndon Johnson did when he initiated Medicare and fought for civil rights.

"They didn't say well we're going to cover 20 percent of the people and see how it works out," he said, in a thinly veiled criticism of Gore's health-care plan, which would cover children first, adults in phases. "They said we're going to cover everybody with Social Security, everybody with Medicare, just like I want to cover everybody with health care. And when they did that they made us all better off. And so bold leadership is important."

It remains to be seen, however, whether voters, enjoying an economic boom, high employment, low inflation, modest interest rates and falling crime, are in the market for another FDR, LBJ or Ronald Reagan, or even for the more modest insurgencies of Bradley and Republican Sen. John McCain.

A new poll by the Des Moines Register of 1,001 Iowans who said they were likely to participate in the Jan. 24 caucuses found Gore leading Bradley by 54 percent to 33 percent among Democrats, with 13 percent uncommitted or undecided. The same poll, published yesterday, found the Republican front-runner, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, the choice of 45 percent of Republicans, with a wide lead over McCain in second place and New Jersey publisher Steve Forbes in third.

A new nationwide poll for Newsweek magazine, released yesterday, gave Bush a huge 6313 percent lead over McCain and found Gore leading Bradley 50-25 percent, but with 25 percent of the adults polled saying they were still undecided.

More than anything, the Democratic candidates' debate yesterday illustrated how hard it may be for some voters to decide between Gore and Bradley - and how hard each candidate will have to work to persuade them to choose him over his opponent.

Although Gore cautioned viewers not to "mistake the heated disagreements that we have about issues as disagreements about the character or basic goodness of the individual," the two agree on a good many things. From health care reform to school improvement, from aid to farmers to help for parents, from abortion to gun control to affirmative action, the distinctions are slight and often nuanced.

That leaves voters, the first of whom will weigh in at this state's caucuses on Jan. 24, with little more than subjective questions of leadership, experience and character on which to base their decisions.

"I believe Sen. Bradley is a good man," Gore said at the close of the debate. "But I do think we have a different approach, different experiences, a different philosophy of what a president should do.

"I don't think that the presidency is an academic exercise or a seminar on theory," he said, repeated his earlier suggestion that Bradley would be an ivory-tower president. "I think the presidency has to be a day-to-day resolute fight for the American people."

Bradley, who represented New Jersey in the Senate for 18 years, countered that the election would not turn on experience, of which a vice president might arguably have more. He did not repeat his more direct accusation of the week's first debate Wednesday, when he said Gore was living in a "Washington bunker" in which survival was more important than achievement.

"We both have experience," Bradley said. "It's about leadership. It's about presidential leadership. What leadership is about, I believe is, taking national problems - health care, education - turning it into a public issue and then engaging the idealism of the American people in order to make something happen."