Playing Too Much Defense   

Candidates should open themselves up to the news media and the public.

IT BOTHERED ME a lot at the time, sure, but I don't hold it against Bill Bradley anymore.
This was in the late 1960s. Dollar Bill had just finished his Rhodes, and now he needed some additional postgraduate work to get ready for the NBA. And he picked the best possible place: the Baker League.
The Baker League was an impossibly entertaining summer basketball league featuring pros, ex-college stars still hoping to be pros and a glorious assortment of schoolyard and playground legends. The locus for the action was the Bright Hope Baptist Church in North Philly. I couldn't stay away.
One night the center for Bradley's team couldn't make it for a playoff game. So Bradley brought quite a substitute with him: his teammate-to-be with the New York Knicks, the dominating Willis Reed. Thanks in no small part to Reed's presence, Bradley's team vanquished my beloved Gaddie Real Estate, a flamboyant crew featuring the great Earl Monroe, the undersized dunking-machine Tyrone Britt and the cooler-than-cool Trooper Washington.
That's ancient history, and I have long since abandoned any hard feelings toward Bill Bradley, even after that mind-numbing editorial board meeting at the Trenton Times when Bradley (by now a U.S. senator) and my friend Larry Kramer (the paper's editor) went head-to-head on Eurodollars and international drawing rights.
Until now.
Don't get me wrong. There's much that's intriguing, and appealing, about Bradley's campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. But he made a serious mistake in trying to carve out what seems to me an excessively large zone of privacy when it comes to questions about Bradley the man.
As Craig Gilbert points out in his excellent AJR debut (see "The Authenticity Beat,"), the former senator tried to keep an astonishing list of things off-limits, including his intellectual influences, favorite books, policy advisers. When a reporter finally muscled him into admitting he liked a passage from Joseph Conrad's "Victory," he added snidely, "Now what does that tell you about my running for president of the United States? It tells you that I read the book."
Actually, it--and similar details--can reveal a great deal. We learned a lot more about President Bush from the detail-laden observances of Maureen Dowd than from volumes of more high-minded analyses. The inarticulate, somewhat clueless, stuck-in-the-past figure who emerged from her writings was clearly not a person who would put the stamp of greatness on his presidency. And he didn't.
Stands on the issues and position papers are fine. But stands evolve, and position papers are apt to be the work of aides.
In choosing a president, it's critically important to have a rich, full-blooded portrait of the person as well as the candidate.
A president will be tested--by crises at home, by crises overseas, by a dazzling array of circumstances that we can only guess at now. In picking our leader, we need as much information as we can get to help us divine how he or she will react. We need to know as much as we can about the character of the person who would be president, and all the fine print in the tax plan and the health care plan won't help.
That's particularly true in an era like the current one, without any huge ideological gulfs in the picture. As a forlorn George W. Bush supporter told a New York Times reporter after Sen. John McCain crushed W. in New Hampshire: "It's not about issues. It's about who's the better person, who's the better leader."
This is not to say that anything goes. The last thing we need is more ambush reporting: asking Bush the Younger to name foreign leaders, asking Hillary Rodham Clinton whether she had had affairs of her own. Such forays underscore the public's notion that the press is more interested in scoring points or wallowing in sleaze than informing. And in some cases, the public is right.
Nevertheless, being president of the United States is a huge responsibility. Anyone who covets the job ought to be more than ready to open himself (or herself) up to a broad range of legitimate personal questions (and questions about influences and advisers, not to mention irregular heartbeats, are legitimate). Even the impulse to be so guarded is telling, particularly in such vivid contrast to the legendary (if calculated) openness of the race's other maverick, McCain.
One last thought: If there were ever a time when we need to be certain about the character of our president-to-be, it's now, as we prepare to begin Life After William Jefferson Clinton.
The president doesn't have to be--shouldn't be--a Jimmy Carter-like First Moralist.
But he should be part of the solution, not part of the problem.