YH

Bradley: cuter than Ringo

But as I rounded Toad's Place on my way home, I felt a sudden surge of excitement the likes of which I hadn't experienced since I got that big fat envelope from Yale my senior year of high school. A large crowd was still gathered outside the heavy wooden doors, screaming and cheering. Grinding music pumped into the street. Cameras flashed. A giddy girl screamed, "I love you, Bill!" Before I knew what I was doing, I was in the crowd, screaming and cheering like I had just spotted Elvis. I strained to see. I pushed. I scratched. I elbowed my way to the front of the crowd, my heart racing—and burst through to the yellow police tape just as Bradley disappeared inside. "We are not admitting any more people," the guard at the door said. My heart sank. I felt like I had been turned away from a Beatles concert.

I'd heard it all before—that political campaigning was all about buying votes and wooing the gullible public with handshakes and charming smiles. I'd heard that the more television time a candidate had, the more likely he was to be known; the more cities he could hit, the more likely he was to be liked; the more he was liked, the more likely he was to be elected. I was cynical. I was informed. And I was not going to fall for it. I was above all that. I was going to educate myself in an objective way, and base my vote on the policies and beliefs that each candidate had, not on their charming smiles or meaningless rallies.

And then I found myself screaming over a political candidate like he was John Lennon.

What's more, I didn't give up in my attempts to see him perform. And neither did a group of about 50 other determined souls. We argued with the guard, we argued with the police, we argued with the Secret Service men. We heard cheers filtering through the heavy wooden doors, and we wanted to be cheering too. Most of us didn't really care what the audience was cheering for. We didn't really care how Bill Bradley's Medicare plan differed from Al Gore's, or how many more dollars he was going to set aside for education. But we did care that someone famous was talking inside, and we were missing it. And so we argued, and we complained, and we strained to hear. And we waited.

Half-an-hour later, the doors opened and the crowd filtered out. "How was it?" we asked breathlessly, and the answers came. "He was cute," one girl giggled. "He wasn't as tall as I thought he would be," a disappointed fan said. "But what did he say?"

"Oh, not much," they said. "But look—I got his autograph!"

Seeing an opening in the crush of exiting students, I slipped past the guard and through the door. A crowd of students and television cameras was still bustling around the stage. I pushed my way through again—and there he was, nodding at a student who was gushing his praises. I tried to think of something, anything to say, but I had no burning questions, no words of praise or of censure. I did, however, have a piece of paper and a pen.

So I got Bill Bradley's autograph, right under my drawings of Drosophila larvae. And as I walked out of Toad's, past a group of students waving banners and chanting Bradley's name at the cue of a Connecticut news reporter, I realized that the magic of big bucks and empty handshakes had worked its magic on me, just as it had on so many others who fought their way into Toad's that day. Campaigning really was as simple as star power. Because now I had to vote for Bill Bradley. If he didn't win, that autograph wasn't going to be worth very much.

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