Going For Broke

By NANCY GIBBS

The New Hampshire weather was conspiring to freeze Campaign 2000 in its tracks--stranding Alan Keyes in Detroit so he couldn't celebrate his Iowa surprise, waylaying John McCain's bus as it plowed through the snow--but Al Gore at least was on fire. He stayed in Iowa barely long enough to thank voters there before Air Force Two was in the air, heading to Manchester for a predawn arrival, just ahead of the storm. By 7 he was ensconced at a local diner, giving nine television interviews in an hour and a half, before the campaign entourage dragged itself back to the hotel for what everyone hoped would be an hour of rest. But not for the Veep. Gore was padding up and down the hallway of the Sheraton Nashua in his white bathrobe, pounding on the door of spokesman Chris Lehane and senior adviser Mike Feldman, barging into their room, rousing them from sleep in his desire to keep the fun going.

They made their way to a rally in a high school gym; but when aides pointed out that it was hard to schedule more events in a state gripped by a blizzard, Gore said, "No way! What else can we do? Who else can we see?" So off they went to a Dunkin' Donuts, ice-flecked cameras in tow, to buy up some doughnuts to deliver to the snowplow guys at a city garage.

As the polls floated upward in the gust from his Iowa blowout, Gore was just being himself, only more so: more manic, more combative, more determined to take every position Bill Bradley has ever held and try to strangle him with it on national television. It was Bradley last week, under rising pressure, who looked into the abyss and concluded it was time for a change in tactics. And in the end, that could turn out to be Gore's sweetest victory of all.

When the whole rationale for your campaign against a sitting Vice President who has vice-presided over historic national contentment is that you will offer a new, ennobling kind of politics, a cleaner breed of campaign, you shed that skin at your peril. Bradley advisers had been pushing him for weeks to hit back at Gore's relentless attacks, even at the risk of compromising the whole reason for his race. But last Wednesday, when he arrived at the last debate before the Feb. 1 primary with his fists clenched, it became clear why, apart from high principle, Bradley doesn't like to go negative: it's just not his game--he's not a natural spitballer--and so he managed to look both negative and uncomfortable at the same time.

Gone were the nutritious, high-policy debate-club encounters of recent weeks: Wednesday night's match was petty and bitter, as Bradley all but called Gore a liar and Gore all but called Bradley a whiner and a fraud, while both insisted none of this constituted a "negative attack." Of the two, Bradley was playing for higher stakes: he was the one with the most ground to make up after Iowa, and he was the one who risked looking just like any other desperate politician. Except that he doesn't have the halo of the greatest economy ever shimmering above his head.

As if that point weren't clear enough, Gore brought former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin to his side in New Hampshire on Friday and let campaign aides suggest that Rubin might make a perfect running mate. But the point was also clear the night before, when Gore got 89 minutes of prime time to spend gazing over the shoulder of the triumphal President, as Bill Clinton declared that "the State of the Union is the strongest it has ever been." Having forced Bradley to play by his rules in the campaign, Gore now got to watch his partner make the rules for the whole political battle for the rest of the year, with countless proposals so poll-tested and bulletproof that Republicans were clapping him on the back when it was all over. Clinton promised tax cuts and health-care reform, debt reduction and gun control, reaping credit for everything but sunshine and inviting voters to ask themselves, Do you really want to change drivers now, just as we're heading for the promised land?

To the extent that Gore has changed tactics as well in the past few weeks, it shows in his relationship with Clinton and in his willingness to position himself as ally and heir. "You remember what it was like in New Hampshire during the Reagan-Bush years?" Gore asked a gymful of high school kids, who probably didn't. On the day Clinton proposed the largest expansion of health-care programs since the creation of Medicare, Gore was neatly staging his own health-care event based on the same proposals.

Although Clinton and Gore no longer have their weekly private luncheons, the two talk regularly, sometimes twice a day. Besides Hillary, the only phone caller for whom Clinton regularly clears the room of his close aides is Gore. Top Gore lieutenants had a seat at the table for many of the key budget meetings in December and early January, and sources tell TIME that just last week some in the Administration were promoting steps that would probably benefit Gore politically by taking the edge off fuel prices and helping keep inflation at bay. The plan would inject millions of barrels of oil from America's Strategic Petroleum Reserve into the market, a move that could begin to deflate high heating-oil prices in places like New Hampshire (see story on page 64).

By last week the coordination seemed to the Bradley campaign almost spiritual, as if Gore had truly channeled Clinton when he stared Bradley down in the debate and declared, "There has never been a time during this campaign when I have said something that I know to be untrue." That statement, by Clinton's definitions of truth, may be fair enough, but it left Bradley virtually speechless at the daring of it; by the next day his campaign was madly e-mailing examples of what it considered Gore's distortions on everything from health care to welfare to how many openly gay people Bradley has on his slate of delegates in New York. By Friday Bradley was all but making the connection himself, evoking both Clinton and Richard Nixon when he talked about Gore's "tricky" way with words: "When you listen to Al Gore speak, you have to listen very carefully; you have to look at every word and every clause," Bradley said. "Words can be used in a tricky manner."

But words can be wasted too, and until last week, just about every time reporters were told they were going to see sharpness, Bradley showed up instead with a butter knife. "He didn't do it. What do you want me to say?" a frustrated aide said after a disastrous January debate--a response typical for every encounter in which Gore drew blood.

Bradley was also forced once again to deal with questions about his heart. In a generally positive story last Sunday about his health, the New York Times asked Bradley about his irregular heartbeat and whether, if elected President, he would invoke the 25th Amendment and temporarily hand over power to the Vice President if forced to undergo a cardioversion. In the procedure, which uses electricity to jolt the heart back into its rhythm, the patient is given anesthesia and is briefly unconscious; Bradley has undergone the procedure three times. "The 25th Amendment sounds a reasonable way to go," said the candidate.

What really set Bradley on edge last week was Gore. In part it was fury and frustration that Gore's attacks seemed to be working, defining Bradley as the airy professor who didn't know how the real world worked. But perhaps sensing that a sudden turn to slash-and-burn might not gladden the hearts of his supporters, his aides looked around and found another explanation: Bradley "owed" his backers something better than defeat. He didn't want to go negative, but after listening to the voters and seeing the college kids jam room after room, the idealism shining on their faces, well, "He just said enough is enough," says a top aide. Bradley's slogan, "It Can Happen," now applies to the old-fashioned politics he has spent months deriding.

But deciding he had to respond didn't mean he necessarily knew how. Gore has had a lot more practice at this, in the years of private battle against a bitter Republican Congress. Some aides claimed that Bradley waited until the debate to get maximum attention; others had a more gentlemanly spin: "He wanted to look Gore in the eye when he did it," says an adviser. So Bradley did, and said this, "I wonder...if you're running a campaign that is saying untrue things, whether you'll be able to be a President that gets people's trust." Gore hit back again and again, and the underlying message was clear: I'm just tougher than you are.

The Republican National Committee, as it happens, was busy underscoring that point. It launched an ad that shows Gore's awkward flip-flops over litmus tests involving gays in the military, which suggests that Republicans have already decided where the threat lies in the fall, and it's not with Bradley. Gore is mounting a two-front war, against both Bradley and Bush. At a Manchester software firm called Silknet, housed in a reborn brick factory, Gore argued that "if you squander the surplus, either on a tax [cut] scheme or on a spending scheme, it's gone either way."

But that general-election showdown won't really start for more than five weeks, after the next round of primaries on March 7. So both Democrats are weighing where to fight through the month-long lull. Gore expects to contest New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts, to squash Bradley where he is strongest. For their part, Bradley aides were saying last week that if they did well enough in New Hampshire to get some good free media, they could afford to challenge Gore in more places. A bad showing would force Bradley to focus more on New York and California, but the terrain would suddenly be much rougher. For one thing, a senior Bradley aide admits, "you are responding to 110 questions of 'Why are you in the race?' and 'Are you hurting the party?'"

California holds dangers all its own, mainly its potential virtually to bankrupt either side. Neither camp has much organization on the ground there, where it takes a lot of money to build one--as much as $10 million, according to political consultant Bill Carrick. Bradley's senior adviser there, Gale Kaufman, is trying to construct one that deploys volunteers, using e-mail to rally supporters and keep the momentum building, and offsets Gore's advantage of having the labor unions.

Last week Bradley announced he would have $20 million in his war chest as of Feb. 1; the Gore camp claims a similar figure for itself. That will be crucial for a state like California, in which it takes at least $1 million a week to reach television viewers five times in the state's four major markets. "Ten million dollars is not a helluva lot of money out here," says California Democratic Governor Gray Davis' top political strategist, Garry South. Davis' gubernatorial campaign spent $1 million just in the last 48 hours of its race. Bradley has already spent considerable time on the coast throughout the fall--and among Democrats, Gore still leads him better than 2 to 1.

--Reported by Tamala M. Edwards with Bradley, Jay Branegan and Karen Tumulty with Gore and Eric Pooley/New York

With reporting by Tamala M. Edwards with Bradley, Jay Branegan and Karen Tumulty with Gore and Eric Pooley/New York