The biographer of Huey Long recounts a story which gives much of the flavour of traditional American politics. Long, a Baptist, was campaigning in Catholic south Louisiana. The local apparatchiks were concerned about the impression the great American demagogue would make and they took Long aside to remind him this was south Louisiana and not north Louisiana. He dismissed the warnings airily.
Long was charming that day. At each stop he would tell a tale from his boyhood. At 6 a.m. every Sunday, he would rise and hitch the family horse to the buggy and drive his Catholic grandparents to Mass. Then he'd bring them home again, a little Catholicism having rubbed off on him. At 10, he'd hitch up the old horse again and bring his Baptist grandparents to their church.
At the end of the day, one of the local politicos approached Long apologetically. It had been presumptuous to think that Long would make a poor impression among Catholics. If only they had known that he had Catholic grandparents.
"Don't be a fool, son," said Long. "We didn't even have a horse."
Huey Long won't have been resting easy in his grave last week. A great tradition of crowd-pleasing is dying. The best moments of the first debate between Democratic presidential nominees Bill Bradley and Al Gore took place at the beginning and end of the "townhall forum" debate in Dartmouth, New Hampshire, last week.
Al Gore came to the event dressed like a guy heading for a night at the singles bar. Gore had turned the colour up on his personality too, forcing himself to be peppy, preppy and eager. Before the cameras rolled, Gore and Bradley sat on their stools fidgeting as the room filled. Finally, Gore could bear it no longer and rose to smear the crowd with his energetic affability. He asked them to ask him questions. He shot back arrows of love. He felt their pain.
Bradley just sat on his stool, lugubrious and laconic. Then the audience began to laugh. Gore swung around in mid-empathy to find Bradley on his feet, his 6 ft 6 in frame stooped theatrically, as he blew kisses to Tipper Gore seated in the front row.
Later, when Bradley fielded the first question of the night, he made a point of welcoming Tipper Gore to the debate. The audience, already cut in on the joke, were his for the taking.
An hour later, as the debate wound down, Gore's manic need to empathise overcame him again. He interrupted the CNN hosts to announce he would stay back afterwards to answer more questions. The cameras swept to Bradley, anticipating a similar offer. Bradley just shrugged his shoulders and looked across at Gore, the beginnings of a grin playing on his mouth. It was an excruciatingly embarrassing moment for Gore. Eager, straining and somehow phoney.
Last week was a big one for Bradley, whose campaign has been on a roll since late summer. Polls give him anything between a two point and a nine point lead in New Hampshire, the little state which begins the primary season next February 8th. He has crawled into the race by cover of night almost and his first big exposure as a candidate was always going to be critical. People liked what they saw. A fatherly, thoughtful type of man with big convictions and an apparent indifference to the thought that people might not like him. That's the risk of leadership, he says.
After New Hampshire, the game shifts to a different pace and Bradley has conditioned himself for that in the best way possible. He has fund-raised relentlessly, declining (like Gore) contributions from interest groups and restricting himself to donations of not more than $1,000 from individuals. He has more money left than Gore has and runs a tighter ship. If he can do well early on, he is in for the long haul. After New Hampshire, he has targeted March 7th as his next big test. That day, New York and California stage primaries which together will provide one-third of the 2,168.5 delegates needed to secure nomination.
None of this arithmetic of possibility is especially surprising to a man who has been talked about as a prospective president since he was a teenager. The son of a banker and raised in Crystal City, Missouri, Bradley has been in the public eye since he was a kid.
Bradley's boyhood passion was basketball. He taught himself the game, devising his own learning tools. He borrowed his father's glasses and taped cardboard over the bottom half of the lens so he could learn to dribble without looking down at the ball. He tied weights to his ankles to improve his jump. He developed ways of improving his peripheral vision. He assiduously studied the science of being a team player.
At college he became one of the most famous athletes in America, single-handedly turning the Ivy league school into a basketball powerhouse.
His final game for Princeton is legend. Bradley cut loose. The crowd chanted the words "I believe, I believe" as he scored 58 points, 26 of them in the last nine minutes. Then he disappeared from view, finished his thesis, became a Rhodes scholar at Oxford and returned to enjoy a glittering 10-year career with the New York Knicks basketball club.
From the time he left school, people were tipping him as a future president. Now, having retired in 1996 from an 18-year Senate career, declaring politics to be "broken", he has re-emerged. He is determined to shape a presidential bid in his own quiet style.
Bradley is the anti-Clinton in many ways. His political technique is to have no technique. He is the un-politician. He shambles through crowds, contenting himself with being diffidently likeable rather than dynamic.
He makes no small plans. His themes are universal healthcare, gun control, campaign finance reform, the elimination of child poverty, the promotion of racial healing. He refuses to enter into arguments with Gore, declining the offer of what he terms "poison-dart politics".
A team-mate once said of Bradley that he was everything his parents thought he was. In the post-Clinton era that might just be what America wants. A man with no back doors.