By then, Bradley's heart was fibrillating, though experts caution that there's no evidence the condition is caused by the sight of outrageous political posturing. Furious that his campaign had descended to Gore's level, Bradley had Berman issue an apology to Gore. That must have been more uncomfortable than the fibrillation. You don't have to have discipline to just attack and misrepresent. That's the self-indulgent way politics has been practiced in the recent decade.
Reasonable people understand what's going on.
Like Stevenson and the other iconoclasts who descend from him, such as Eugene McCarthy and Paul Tsongas, Bradley has a poetic cast that hides the deepest self-regard and a reluctance to mix it up that threatens to turn him into just another noble failure. This is what it takes to run for President now. Bradley sometimes seems nostalgic for a politics that never was. American elections have always been pretty rough. The Thomas Jefferson-Aaron Burr battle of 1800 was a major slugfest, and during the 1956 Democratic primaries, Estes Kefauver accused the sainted Stevenson of Mob ties and racism.