New York, Oct. 21—The same man who dubbed economics “the dismal science” also got off the line about politics being the preoccupation of the quarter-educated. By extension, a political contest between two men fighting over economic issues should be the ho hum of the season. Instead, the fight between Jeff Bell and Bill Bradley in New Jersey is probably the most exciting political contest of the year.
It began with the experts assuming there would be no contest. How could there be? Bill Bradley is as well known in New Jersey as Coca Cola. For those who do not know what Coca Cola is, Bradley is the former basketball star who went to Princeton, then to Oxford, then to a professional team in which he distinguished himself sufficiently to have got written about by John McPhee of The New Yorker, a distinction which has got to be on the order of a garden getting itself painted by Monet. So much for Bradley, whose distinctiveness, alas, collapses the moment he opens his mouth to release Democratic platitudes.
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