Bradley Defends His Record After Attack From Gore

WASHINGTON — Presidential candidate Bill Bradley, accused by rival Al Gore of being a disloyal Democrat, said Wednesday that he toyed with the idea of leaving the party in 1995 and mounting an independent White House bid “to revitalize democracy.”

But, in an interview with the Associated Press, Bradley said he never seriously considered it. “I took no real steps toward it all.”

Bradley’s flirtation with a third-party bid--along with several of his Senate votes--have become ammunition for Gore since recent polling established Bradley as a major threat to the vice president’s nomination quest. Suggesting that Gore’s strategy has irked him, the former New Jersey senator said he is fighting the urge to retaliate with attacks of his own.

“The one word that comes to mind is discipline,” the Hall of Fame basketball player said by telephone from his New Jersey headquarters. “It’s part of the discipline of competition.”

Gore has criticized Bradley for casting a vote in favor of President Reagan’s 1981 spending cuts and leaving the Senate after his third term ended in 1997--two years after Republicans took over Congress.

Gore’s new “Stay and fight” slogan is a thinly veiled device to label Bradley a quitter.

“I did not walk away from the fight when [former House Speaker] Newt Gingrich took over the Congress. I did not walk away from the fight when ‘Reaganomics’ was put up for a vote on the floor,” Gore said Saturday.

Bradley fueled speculation about a challenge to Clinton in the summer of 1995, when he said he would not seek a fourth term and he declined to rule out an independent campaign for the White House.

Bradley said he talked to “a few people, close friends and advisors” about the possibility of running as an independent. “I said, basically, ‘What do you think of this?’ ” he said, adding that he didn’t ask the question for long.

“It was apparent very quickly that my feeling is I’m a Democrat. I’ve always been a Democrat. You’ve got to make a change in the Democratic Party,” Bradley said.

“I didn’t rule it out immediately when people asked me, because I was concerned at the time--as I am now--that democracy for a lot of people is like a broken thermometer. You turn the dial and nothing happens. And I thought that might be a way to revitalize democracy.”

Defending himself on another front, Bradley said he was chosen by Democratic leaders to lead the fight against Reaganomics in 1981, a point never mentioned by Gore. When the tax cuts passed over Bradley’s objection, he said, he voted for the Reagan budget reductions to avoid a massive deficit.