MEDFORD--Democratic presidential candidate Bill Bradley trumpeted his foreign policy credentials yesterday during a lively question and answer session at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

The hour-and-a-half "town meeting" was designed to showcase the breadth of Bradley's expertise in foreign affairs in the wake of questions about the competency of the leading Republican presidential contender, Texas Gov. George W. Bush and also to distinguish himself from the policies favored by Al Gore '69, his leading Democratic rival.

The United States's policy towards Russia elicited Bradley's most trenchant remarks.

The former senator, who served eight years on the Senate intelligence committee, charged that the U.S. had bungled its policy towards Russia after the end of the Cold War.

"We spent more time acting as missionaries for a particular kind of international economics than acting in our own national interest," he said.

Worse, Bradley argued, was the fact that the U.S. still clings to an often ineffectual Russian leader, Boris N. Yeltsin.

"Our relationship with the Russian people has become our relationship with Yeltsin," he said.

Though he made no explicit reference to Gore, Bradley clearly tried to set himself apart from his rival for the Democratic presidential nomination and also one of the principal architects of the Clinton administration's foreign policies.