ballot box: Politics and policy.

Be Like Bill

Jacob Weisberg
Posted Monday, Nov. 1, 1999, at 3:57 PM ET

This Gore pre-emption thing is getting a bit out of hand. First the alpha-veep eats Bill Bradley's lunch on the issue of health care by announcing his own plan a few days ahead of Bradley's proposal. Then Gore steals Bradley's thunder on the topic of child poverty by unveiling his own ideas one day before Bradley was scheduled to give a major speech on the subject. "This campaign is not going to stand for officious intermeddlers when it comes to an agenda that we've been working on for years," Gore's spokesman Chris Lehane told the New York Times.

Now Gore is trying to scoop Bradley's endorsements. One of the more helpful ones Bradley is expected to pick up sometime soon is from that of Michael Jordan, the basketball star Gore once confused with Michael Jackson. But Gore has outfoxed Bradley yet again by securing the support of one Deloris Jordan, described in a Gore press release as a member of the policy advisory board of the Jordan Institute for Families at the University of North Carolina and an activist in the James Jordan Boys & Girls Club and Family Life Center, a community group in Chicago.

Deloris Jordan has one other distinction not mentioned in Gore's press release. She is Michael Jordan's mom.