Scholar. Sports hero. Senator. Soon Bill Bradley will be unemployed--butnoot unchallenged. He's leaving public office, but not public life, to tackle America's thorniest issues--and he's speaking from the heart.
PT: At the beginning of your book Time Present, Time Past, you talk about how we've lost our values. There are daily reminders that our standards have slipped or they never were. You attribute it to people's self-indulgence and what they expect from government, implying that they don't really do very much in return. How do you see us combating this loss of values?
BB: The best way is to focus on things outside yourself, make the community and the world a better place through your actions. Through that direct contact with another human being to whom you've given something, you will transcend what otherwise might be a self-oriented existence.
Another way is to see that the pursuit of material goods in and of themselves is essential but often exaggerated to the exclusion of other deeper values, not the least of which are spiritual values.
PT: How do you talk about these things without sounding preachy?
BB: It's very difficult because we've gotten to a place where even raising the issue of unselfishness or materialism is thought to be out of style. Yet people are crying out for a deeper dialogue about meaning in their lives.
The way you start that dialogue is by telling stones--stories of people and situations where selflessness entered the picture. By telling stories of how people are living for something bigger than themselves, you begin to build an alternative set of meanings and counter what often comes across on television.
PT: Who's responsible for telling those stories-the media? Political leaders?
BB: It starts in the family. Mothers and fathers telling stories that begin to give meaning to their children's lives. Other institutions, especially the media, can offer stories acknowledging values that span generations and centuries.
PT: Ideally, politics provides a good forum for influencing values. But the media analyzes politicians' political motivations. You give as an example your 1992 convention speech. You say nobody reported on content, only the political reasons for the speech. Is that frustrating?
BB: It diverts from what is important. The media tends to report horse races, gossip, the event of the moment, which is one of the things that blocks our ability to confront where we are as a country, and in some cases, as individuals.
In their desire to be objective they have difficulty being positive. As a result, everything gets trashed and very little gets championed. People then feel that our circumstance is worse than it is.
PT: There is a lot of good news around. The Cold War is over, inflation is low, crime is supposedly down. Yet people are in this kind of funk. Why is that?
BB: Because of the rising economic insecurity in people's lives. When people's prospects of taking care of their families are endangered because of the economic transformation we're in the midst of-the downsizing of corporations, the introduction of information technology to the production process in the 1980s and to the service sector in the 1990s--they feel insecure.
People also have greater fears for their physical person. The rise of violence on all levels--whether it's domestic violence in the home, which often goes un-reported, or murders on the street--makes people very insecure.
Add to that the fact that politicians really don't speak to this. The political language doesn't reach people where they live. They don't believe that a politician is thinking about them or speaking to them, or that what a politician does will actually improve their economic circumstance. So they turn off politics.
PT: How does a politician rectify this? Or is there no hope?
BB: One of the geniuses of the American system is its capacity to rejuvenate. Each generation redefines who we are as Americans. That's a tremendous opportunity. First, you have to have politicians who talk in a language that reaches people and who take the risk of being the truth teller. Second, you need campaign finance reform so that money can't shape the political process as much as it does. Then you need to make it easier for people to register and vote.
PT: But then someone like you announces he's leaving office and there's one truth teller down the drain.
BB: I don't think so. The mistake is to assume that to be in public life today you have to be in elected office. I'm leaving the Senate. I'm not leaving public life. Only from the outside can you step back to project a larger vision of where the country should go and then use your efforts to further that vision.
PT: A number of larger reforms that have been attempted recently--health care, campaign finance reform--have failed dramatically. What needs to be done to get a big reform passed?
BB: Fundamental campaign finance reform cannot take place in Congress as it is now, Many politicians say, "Oh, we've done campaign finance reform." But they haven't removed the pervasive influence of money from the political process. That can only happen from the outside.
A good example of the kind of big reform that can happen in the political process, if you run it in a certain way, is tax reform. People said that would never happen, but it did. Everybody said the California Water Bill [which overhauled distribution of water in the West] would never happen. It did.
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ins,
material goods,
mothers and fathers,
political leaders,
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race,
reform,
reminders,
scholar,
self indulgence,
selflessness,
spiritual values,
sports hero,
unselfishness
