The Concord Coalition he leads with Mr Rudman crusades for a balanced budget, while Mr Tsongas has publicly urged Gen Powell to run. At the very moment Mr Perot entered the 1992 contest, Paul Tsongas briefly led the chase for the Democratic nomination, warning in his austere cross-party “Economic Call to Arms” of the disaster looming if America did not put its financial house in order.The former Massachusetts senator is now an unabashed independent. The same polls moreover show that at least as many Americans consider themselves independents as Republicans or Democrats, and that up to half the electorate would welcome a third choice if the main party contenders next year are a distrusted Bill Clinton and an uninspiring Bob Dole.Thus does the pool of non-aligned voters seeking a “new politics” steadily grow, and so does the number of those who offer it. Well before Mr Bradley, prominent senators of both parties, like the Republican Warren Rudman and the Democrat Timothy Wirth, decided that the game was no longer worth playing.

And all the while, the disaffected centre has grown, culminating in the extraordinary 19 per cent of the popular vote garnered three years ago by Ross Perot.Mr Perot would still attract over 15 per cent this time round. But as the endless speculation about the plans of General Colin Powell testifies, rarely has America’s political terrain been as favourable to an independent candidacy.Bill Bradley is but the latest potential recruit to a cause stretching back at least as far as John Anderson, who won 6 per cent of the vote when he challenged Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter in 1980. “Where the road leads, I do not know,” he said, even as he noted that he was “not ruling out an independent route” Probably Mr Bradley is genuinely undecided. Bill Bradley, however, is more than just a celebrity defector from a party in a mess.

Wittingly or otherwise, he has become symbol of two realities of American public life: a growing disillusion among its more thoughtful practitioners at how two-party, adversarial politics currently function on Capitol Hill; and the increasing readiness of a frustrated electorate to look outside the system for independent candidates.
Those seeking firm commitments and the rhetoric of an incipient campaign did not gain much comfort from the senator. But none of this entirely explains why so much ink should have been spilt over the premature retirement of a Democratic Senator from New Jersey last week, even when he is a former Rhodes Scholar, basketball hall-of-famer and one of the most esteemed figures on Capitol Hill. These are of course the dog days, when news is scarce, when sane human beings do anything to escape the sub-tropical steambath that is Washington DC in late August. The “spiking” allegations, said a Philip Morris spokesman, had been a driving factor behind Congressional hearings into the industry and the FDA investigation, and had been seized on by anti- tobacco groups: “It will be interesting to see if they too offer an apology or whether they pretend the issue never existed.”. From these charges, supported by leaked internal company documents, stem several lawsuits brought both by smokers and by states seeking to recover hundreds of millions of dollars spent treating lung cancer, emphysema and other smoking-related diseases.But yesterday brought relief, however fleeting, and the companies were making the most of it.