Player Bradley, Hero McCain: Who Scores?

Bill Bradley and John McCain made significant speeches this week, offering refreshing, if not completely convincing, breaks from Beltway business-as-usual.

Of all the White House hopefuls, the former Democratic senator from New Jersey and the Republican senator from Arizona enjoy the best buzz; indeed, Bradley is surfing a wave that threatens to capsize Vice President Al Gore. As far as the media are concerned, Bradley’s middle name seems to be “Thoughtful.� For his part, McCain seems to have “Independent� sewn into his suits. But image is not enough: Bradley has yet to demonstrate that his thoughtfulness is matched with trustworthiness, while McCain must show prudence as well as independence.

Bradley’s proposal for universal health care, delivered in Los Angeles on Tuesday, shows that he paid attention during the Clinton-care debacle of 1994. Whereas the Clintonians proposed restructuring of the trillion-dollar health sector, Bradley’s plan is much simpler, aimed at “giving Americans a real choice of affordable health insurance plans.� To do that, he suggests opening the existing Federal Employees Health Benefits Program to all, enabling every American to choose from a smorgasbord of competing plans.

Choice? Competition? Whatever happened to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s monolithic “health alliances�? Hanns Kuttner, a former health care advisor in the Bush White House, says the Bradley plan resembles proposals from the conservative Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s. Indeed, Kuttner chortles, “Bradley’s proposal follows down the same path as the late Bush administration.�

Of course, anybody--especially a come-from-behind presidential candidate--can slap together rhetoric for a speech and wonk-words for a fact sheet. So the real question is: Will Bradley follow through on his refreshingly right-tilting proposal? After all, eight years ago, candidate Clinton brimmed with “New Democrat� new ideas, and yet once in office, he put forth his wife’s Brezhnevian plan.

The Oct. 4 issue of the New Republic suggests a similarly Clintonian propensity. While Bradley’s health plan leans right, his core campaign staff is far left. Bradley press secretary Eric Hauser, for example, declares, “We’re all passionate progressives.� With such a crew in the White House, would the Bradley plan cost just $65 billion, as promised, or would trial lawyers and other special interests balloon the price?

McCain, of course, wants to destroy those same special interests. As an opening salvo, on Tuesday he advocated ending federal subsidies for ethanol, sugar, gas and oil and using the $5.4 billion saved to fund a school voucher program. It’s hard to think of a better suggestion than that--empowering poor children to choose their schools by defunding corporate welfare kings--but it’s hard to imagine McCain spearheading it into reality.

McCain’s nonconformism sometimes comes at the expense of common sense; consider this headline from an Aug. 5 press release, in all its illogical glory: “McCain says tax bill unacceptable but only hope for working tax relief.�

That’s honesty for you, but it’s only a small stumble from iconoclast to outcast.

To be sure, McCain is at least trying to shoot straight, while Bradley, who once supported such limited-government proposals as eliminating ethanol subsidies and dispensing school vouchers, now has flip-flopped under the unlimited-government glare of Iowa farmers and teacher unionists. But for all Bradley’s eye-on-the-electoral-ball calculation, at least he understands how the game is played. If McCain really thinks, as he said on May 24, that the enactment of such conservative goals as school vouchers must wait “until we first reform the way we finance our political campaigns,� then he needs more time in the minors.

The left has embraced McCain’s cause--abolishing “soft money�--because it looks forward to the day when Democratic labor unions once again have more clout than Republican fat cats. If and when that day comes, liberals will thank McCain for his efforts, but they will never reward him further by supporting anything on his Republican agenda.

But at least a straight-arrow President McCain would be surprised by such a turn. By contrast, a President Bradley, if his issue-shuffling past is any guide, would smile as his GOPish health care plan is replaced by something more to the liking of the left-wingers who gave him the White House. Bradley the player, unlike McCain the hero, would know the fix was in from the first.