You know it's time to switch when you don't want your own leadership to come back into power. -- Rep. Billy Tauzin of Louisiana, who recently became the fifth Democratic member of the House or Senate to switch to the GOP since the 1994 election, commenting on Rep. Richard Gephardt of Missouri.

It is an interesting historical fact that the last time this many American congressmen and senators switched parties was during the 1850s, as the Whig Party disintegrated over the slavery issue, giving rise to the new Republican Party.

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Sen. Bill Bradley, D-New Jersey, is an interesting character whom I have followed since reading about him in Sports Illustrated and The New Yorker when I was growing up in the 1960s. Long before his election to the Senate he spoke at my high school commencement. If memory serves, he took the occasion to speak -- ploddingly, as always -- on foreign policy. To take an audience of antsy, all-night party-obsessed teen-agers through such an exercise in tedium comes pretty near an unforgivable offense. Come to think of it, memory doesn't serve very well: I doubt whether anyone present that night can recall a single word the Rhodes scholar said.

That was back in the days when Jack Danforth was trying in vain to persuade Bradley to return to Missouri and run for statewide office as a Republican (his father was a Republican banker from Crystal City). Bradley's spurning of his friend, then Missouri's attorney general, was of a piece with a life and public career that have seen him perform many acts the sophisticates call "counter-intuitive." (That's trendy talk meaning, roughly, "against the grain.") Just as he now is an unabashed free trader in an increasingly protectionist Democratic Party, a younger Bradley spurned basketball powerhouse schools to earn a degree from Princeton and lead the usually feeble Tigers to the Final Four (with 58 points, he was MVP). As Washington pundit Paul Gigot stated this week, "To his great credit, he was the only politician from either party to speak up against President Clinton's near trade war with Japan this year." So although he's one of the least exciting platform performers in big-time American politics, he remains consistently interesting.

There can be little doubt, as one timely report from Washington phrased it, that his decision to quit the U.S. Senate this week "has caused great depression among Democratic political operatives." Or again, from Gigot, addressing conclusions to be drawn: "A fair inference is that Mr. Bradley figures 1996 could be a Democratic debacle. And that to rebuild from the ruins for the year 2000, he is better off liberated from the embrace of Beltway Democrats" so that "he no longer risks guilt by association with the likes of (California Democratic Sen.) Barbara Boxer." Not to mention left-wing fever swampers such as those Hillary Clinton picked to represent us at the United Nations' Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing next month.

Let's hope Bradley doesn't go the third-party route in a White House run. We don't need Perot-style cranks delivering dubious lectures in pithy, oversimplified sound bites. We need two healthy, competitive, mainstream parties vying for the votes of every American of every color and persuasion.

If he can shed the I'm-delivering-the-tablets-from-on-high aura of deadly pretentiousness that surrounds him, Bill Bradley may be as well-positioned as anyone to face down the loonies who have marginalized Democrats and drag his party back toward the mainstream.

~Peter Kinder is the associate publisher of the Southeast Missourian and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.