Bradley poised to endorse Dean today in N.H.
CHARLES CITY, Iowa -- Howard Dean, whose campaign has already won the backing of former vice president Al Gore, will receive the endorsement of former US senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey today, aligning the 2000 campaign's Democratic rivals behind the former Vermont governor in a way Dean hopes will show him to be a unifying force for the party.
Dean will pick up the endorsement this morning at a hastily arranged breakfast in Manchester, N.H. He and Bradley will then fly to Des Moines, where they will make a joint campaign appearance before Dean participates in a candidate forum.
With Iowa's kickoff caucuses less than two weeks away, Dean had been scheduled to attend a pancake breakfast in Muscatine, Iowa, this morning. His campaign quickly reworked his schedule when Bradley decided to publicly back him.
"I'm probably not supposed to say this, but last month Al Gore endorsed me, and there's a news story out, that I won't comment on, that Bill Bradley is going to endorse me," Dean said last night to an overflow crowd of 700 attending a town hall meeting in Fargo, N.D. He was referring to a Globe story on Boston.com that first reported the news yesterday morning. "If there's a candidate in the Democratic Party who can bring together the two candidates for president the last time that fought like crazy, maybe we're not the weakest candidate; maybe we're the strongest candidate, and the only one that can unite all the Democrats around the country who get disappointed in Democrats in Washington," Dean said to applause.
One New Hampshire political analyst said that Bradley's endorsement is of questionable political value for Dean, but that it will provide him with positive news coverage.
"It's another nice surprise that the Dean campaign can hatch, but I think the Bradley voters were already trending heavily towards Dean," said Dante Scala, a political science professor at St. Anselm College. In winning Bradley's support, Dean not only garners the backing of a candidate who nearly won the New Hampshire primary in the last campaign, but also a candidate like himself who made expanding health insurance a central theme of his campaign.Like Bradley, Dean started his campaign as a long shot for the nomination. Bradley was a retired senator who, despite running against a sitting vice president with the support of most Democratic establishment figures, pulled ahead of Gore in public opinion polls around Labor Day of 1999 only to fade during the primaries.In a recent interview with sfpolitics.com, a California website devoted to politics, Bradley said of Dean: "[Dean] has used technology exceedingly well. He could be the beneficiary of a tremendous yearning for grass-roots expression and for people finding a voice that is heard, and if that develops as it has up to now, and accelerates, then I think that it will be an extremely important phenomenon in this country." The endorsement also provides a last-minute tweak to Dean's main rival in New Hampshire, Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts.
Asked about Kerry by
sfpolitics.com, Bradley said only: "Well, let's go on."
Glen Johnson can be reached at johnson@globe.com.
