Former Senator Bill Bradley Shares Insights at Williams
 Bill Bradley, past NBA star and presidential candidate, speaks the state of American politics Monday night at Williams College. |
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Former U.S. Sen. Bill Bradley came to the Village Beautiful on Monday with a message of hope — for everything from the future of American politics to the woeful NBA franchise he once led to a world championship.
Bradley on Monday joined Williams College political science professor George Crane on the main stage of the '62 Center for an hourlong discussion that covered a wide range of topics and offered some anecdotes from the former senator and Rhodes Scholar's legendary careers in politics and sports.
On the latter, he offered a brief thought on the state of the New York Knicks. Specifically, he thinks his former teammate Phil Jackson has a plan that will bring a contender to Madison Square Garden within three years.
Most of the night was spent on much larger issues relevant to the Bradley's second career: as a three-time senator from New Jersey, an unsuccessful candidate for president and a best-selling author.
His latest book, "We Can All Do Better," look at how the American political system — though imperfect — and be made better and how government can play a role in building a better future for the nation.
"I think the problems of American democracy are structural," Bradley told the crowd on Monday night. "I don't think it's a matter of bad people or even extreme people, even though many people take extreme positions. I think it's structural. And you can can change money, you can change gerrymandering, and you have a major possibility of getting some better laws.
"I've always said the problems of democracy are not solved by running away from democracy but by having more democracy and figuring out how to do it."
Among the structural problems currently plaguing American democracy in Bradley's view: the unchecked influence of money in state and federal elections, gerrymandering that creates "safe" congressional districts for members of each of the two major parties and a media that feeds on and benefits from the "blue state/red state" and political extremism.
Bradley admitted that he had no answer for the third concern. For the others, he offered solutions that are easy to understand, but which would take considerable effort to attain.
He recognized that the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission is not likely to be overturned any time soon and therefore advocated for a constitutional amendment that would allow federal, state and local governments to limit the amount of money spent on campaigns.
Gerrymandering - the practice of drawing congressional districts to preserve seats for whichever party controls a state legislature - has led to ludicrously shaped districts and, worse, representatives with no reason to consider voters from the other party, Bradley said.
"If I'm a Democrat running in a 60/40 district, I'm not even going to listen to Republicans," he said. "But if I'm in a 52/48 district, I may need some of those votes. So I listen to them, and I find out what would appeal to them, and in the process of running, I establish a habit of listening that will serve me well if I'm in Congress and have to deal with Republicans."
Bradley said the current system of state legislatures drawing districts should be replaced by one in which bipartisan commissions tackle the task with an eye toward making districts as contiguous and balanced as possible.
Bradley shared a story from his days on Capitol Hill to illustrate how cooperation is supposed to work in the nation's capital.
"[Wyoming Republican] Alan Simpson was the senator who led the effort for the last immigration bill we had [in 1984], and I remember going into his office a few weeks before the vote, and I had 22 questions on a legal pad," Bradley said. "I agreed with 16 of his answers. I didn't agree with six. At the end of the meeting, I said, 'Look, you have my vote,' and I didn't even know what the Democratic Party's position was.
"That's what true legislating is. It's a matter of listening to the other person carefully and figuring out where there can be common ground. That's what we don't have now. We have a partisanship that's fanned by the media, where complex issues are oversimplified and sensationalized. And it's not serving the American people."
In addition to his solutions for the the two-party system, Bradley — who ran in the Democratic primaries against Vice President Al Gore in 2000 — had some thoughts on how a legitimate third party could strengthen political dialogue.
At the presidential level, he said third-party aspirants are hampered by a FEC rule that limits third-party participation in debates to candidates who are polling at 15 percent or higher. Bradley said that no third-party candidate had met that threshold in all the years we've had presidential debates.
"You say, 'Ross Perot was there,' " Bradley said. "That's true, but he only had 6 to 10 percent of the people in 1992. It's not that the people wanted him. It's that [George H.W.] Bush and [Bill] Clinton both wanted him because they thought he would hurt the other guy."
Bradley espoused abolishing the 15 percent rule and replacing it with the criteria that third-party candidates be eligible if they are on the ballot in enough states to give them 270 electoral votes, and the eligible third-party candidate with the best polling numbers as of April 30 be invited to the debate.
"That would give that person from May 1 to November to get known," he said.
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