Keeping Their Distance
Bill Bradley hammered Al Gore on health care and the environment on Monday as the vice president focused on education and black voters.
The two Democratic rivals for president campaigned on opposite coasts. In California, Bradley accused Gore of using "scare tactics" again to discredit his health care plan - this time, with gays. And Bradley ripped the vice president's environmental record as "window dressing."
Gore spent the day in New York State. First, he touted tuition tax credits and savings accounts at the University of Rochester.
"Yes, student loans are critical," said Gore. "But in some cases, students who have the burden of debt make career choices that don't always reflect what their deepest values would incline them to do."
"They make career choices that are biased by the deeper-felt need to pay off that debt."
After that, the vice president headed to Brooklyn to address students at Medgar Evers College, named for the slain civil rights leader.
Back on the West Coast, Bradley called Gore's latest charges against his health care proposals "the worst use of scare tactics I've seen in years."
"It made my blood boil," he said in San Fransisco after giving a speech on the environment.
Bradley condemned comments Gore made over the weekend in an interview with The San Francisco Chronicle. The vice president asserted Bradley's health plan would leave thousands of people with diseases such as AIDS without coverage. That's a powerful charge in the Bay Area, which has a large gay community.
Gore "should be ashamed," Bradley said on Monday.
The former New Jersey senator has proposed replacing Medicaid with subsidies so that the poor and disabled could buy their own insurance.
Bradley argued that his plan would serve AIDS patients and the poor better than Gore's, because it would allow them to sign up for the same coverage given to federal employees - a plan that prohibits discrimination on the basis of pre-existing conditions.
Some AIDS patients currently cannot sign up for private coverage because of their disease, Bradley said.
Local officials, gay activists, and an AIDS patient, Jeff Sheehy, joined Bradley to back his argument.
"For the vice president to try to frighten people who are in a precarious, marginal situation causes me to have serious questions about his character," said Sheehy.
Bradley was in northern California to announce his plan to preserve ecosystems - and to try to dim Gore's environmental halo.
Speaking at the Sierra Club's national headquarters, Bradley said if elected, he would halt all oil drilling off the California coast. The vice president has pledged to do the same, but Bradley questioned why Gore couldn't stop Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt from extending some three-dozen offshore leases to petroleum companies last year.
"That is not leadership, it's window dressing," Bradley sid.
He also claimed the Clinton-Gore administration has spent too little money from offshore oil drilling royalties on protecting public lands, has prosecuted too few polluters, and has done virtually nothing to rally the public behind the Kyoto Protocol climate change agreement.
And Bradley slammed the administration for failing to follow through on a project meant to better balance water use in California. He noted his plan would also create wilderness refuges in the oceans, similar to those in national forests.
But Bradley's speech was not enough to shake an endorsement from the Sierra Club, which is staying neutral through the primary season.
The group's executive director, Carl Pope, said Gore and Bradley have similar plans on the environment, but added that neither Democrat has a sweeping blueprint worthy of an endorsement.
Bradley did nab two green endorsements on Monday: one from Stewart Udall, Interior Secretary under JFK and LBJ; the other from Brent Blackwelder, president and founder of Friends of the Earth.
California and New York are among more than a dozen states which hold presidential primaries on March 7.