Bradley Courts Minorities in S.F.
By Jason Ma

Presidential candidate and former New Jersey senator Bill Bradley became the first candidate to speak to a pan-ethnic gathering of the press last week when he appeared for a brief question-and-answer session in downtown San Francisco.

Sponsored by New California Media and the Chinese American Voters Education Committee, the Sept. 28 press conference drew about 30 Asian American, African American and Latino journalists.

CAVEC Executive Director David Lee said Bradley’s appearance before them “speaks to the growing influence of the ethnic media.” Added moderator Emil Guillermo: “He is the first we know of to seek out the ethnic media.”

Ad-libbing before Bradley’s late arrival from an event in Oakland, Guillermo added that Bradley had racked up a number of impressive endorsements, including ones from filmmaker Spike Lee and Soon Yi Previn, the adoptive daughter of actress Mia Farrow. She made headlines two years ago when she married Woody Allen, Farrow’s longtime companion.

During the forty-minute briefing, Bradley spoke with the most candor on the subject of race and affirmative action, saying the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act was his inspiration to enter politics.

“You should be able to use race as a criteria, after you meet a minimum standard,” said the candidate. Almost as if to distance himself from President Bill Clinton’s glib qualifiers of “mending, not ending” race-based preference programs, Bradley said, “I strongly support affirmative action. It’s common sense.”

Without such programs, he added, minorities would be condemned to “second-class status.”

The former New York Knicks player noted, half-facetiously, that he too had benefited from “affirmative action for athletes” at Princeton University. Though his grades were not the best, he said, he had demonstrated the potential for high achievement through his success in basketball.

When asked about how he would placate the “angry white male,” the candidate urged the minority journalists to “perform a role as an educator to explain white-skin privilege,” saying that whites need to understand that they have been accorded certain advantages because of their race. When he himself was a Knicks forward, he recalled, advertisers sought him for product endorsements, overlooking better black players on the team.

Bringing up practical considerations for his focus on race relations, Bradley pointed to demographic trends that, he said, could make the country’s workforce majority minority by 2010. “The economic future of America depends more on non-whites.”

But for his own administration, Bradley did not go as far as GOP candidate John McCain, who said earlier this year that if elected, he will appoint an Asian American to his cabinet. Bradley promised only that his administration “would reflect the talent in our country” and give Asian Americans “significant responsibility.”

Accusing other candidates of skirting the politically touchy subject of race relations, Bradley asserted that he committed himself to confronting a matter that he said a majority of Americans are concerned about.

“The premise of my campaign is that greater than 50 percent of whites want more racial unity,” he said, concluding the press briefing. “I’m willing to put [my political] life on the table” for it.

On other issues, Bradley was less clear-cut. He called Prop. 187 -- a 1994 initiative that sought to curtail most public aid to illegal immigrants in California -- ”dead wrong.” But he added that he would strengthen laws against hiring illegals, calling it “important to control borders.”

Throughout the press briefing, Bradley made it clear that he was trying to set himself apart from Vice President Al Gore, his main opponent for next year’s Democratic nomination.

He and Gore differed substantially on at least three main issues: national registration of handguns, the elimination of “soft money” in campaign finance, and health care for at least 95 percent of all Americans.

Rebutting criticism of his health care plan’s affordability, Bradley said the budget surplus could be used to subsidize health-care coverage for children and to extend to low- and middle-income families the coverage that government employees now enjoy.

Moreover, cutting down on red tape in health care companies with better technology could save up to $450 billion, he said.

Gore’s health care proposals, on the other hand, make change only “a little bit around the edges.”

Bradley also singled out personal background as a distinguishing factor between he and the Vice President. While Gore had spent most of his life in Washington, D.C., first as the child of former Senator Al Gore Sr. and then as a senator himself, Bradley grew up in a small, diverse town in Missouri and had a Japanese American roommate at Princeton who was born en route to an internment camp.

He added that his wife was an immigrant from Germany and would be the first immigrant First Lady if he won the Presidency. “I’ve lived with that experience of being caught in two places,” he said.

“Who do I trust with a life experience that is similar to my own?” Bradley asked rhetorically, putting himself in the place of the average voter. “He’s had a life that’s been primarily based in Washington.”