"Let's Let The People Decide!"

I can't let 2017 go without one more kick at the carcass that is Gary Hart's long-dead political career.  Yeah, I know his presidential campaign was three decades ago, and yeah, I know Martin O'Malley is one of his protégés, but who cares? I don't want to believe that Hart's 1987 sex scandal, which ended his presidential ambitions,  altered the course of American history all by itself and led us down the path to Donald John Trump, but I do concede that he at least may be responsible for the Bushes and the Clintons, which is damning enough.

I recalled Hart's 1988 presidential bid in a post this past May, but I only touched briefly on his attempt at a comeback after his May 1987 downfall.  That's why I'm back today.

It was thirty years ago this past Friday that Gary Hart re-entered the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination campaign, having decided that none of the other six candidates for the nomination were discussing the ideas he himself had campaigned on - namely, his ideas on national security, education and the economy.  "Let's let the people decide!"  he said, implying that the media had pushed him out  over his sex scandal without giving the voters a chance to make up their minds about him.  Hart (above, from December 1987) returned to the campaign after having dropped out seven months earlier . . . and having also forfeited his numerous advantages from when he was the next President of the United States - like resources and supporters.   

"This will not be like any campaign you have ever seen because I am going directly to the people," he said, announcing that he was "back in the race" at a courthouse in New Hampshire, site of the nation's first presidential primary.  "I don't have a national headquarters or staff.  I don't have any money.  I don't have pollsters or consultants or media advisers or political endorsements.  But I have something even better.  I have the power of ideas, and I can govern this country."

He also had something else - the reputation for being a jerk.

As I have argued here and elsewhere, Hart wasn't undone by his sex scandal.  He was undone by his arrogance, his aloofness and his duplicity, all of which came out when he tried to handle the affair.  He immediately became the front-runner again after he got back in the campaign, but this was due more to name recognition than to the idea that anyone would be sane enough at that point to actually support him.  His smugness was evident from the way he got back in, seemingly disparaging the other Democratic presidential candidates of 1988 for not sharing his vision and his policy proposals.  His opponents, who had expressed sympathy for the way the media hounded him out of the campaign, were now universally condemning him.  Missouri congressman Richard Gephardt declared that he found it hard to believe that Hart thought he had a monopoly on new ideas.  Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, the eventual 1988 Democratic presidential nominee, said that the issue wasn't who had the most creative ideas but who was best temperamentally suited to lead the nation.  Bruce Babbitt, later President Clinton's Secretary of the Interior, said that he didn't need Hart to teach him the most important thing about running for President - to tell the truth.  (Babbitt, a former Arizona governor, truthfully told the voters that the only way to erase the budget deficit was to raise taxes through the roof and cut spending to the bone; he was the only 1988 Democratic presidential candidate to drop out before Hart once the primary and caucus voting started.)  Jesse Jackson said that Gary Hart had "a superiority complex without the superiority."  Illinois senator Paul Simon joked about it with singer Paul Simon (of course) on "Saturday Night Live."  But the classic response came from Tennessee senator and future Vice President Al Gore - "Give me a break."

And Hart didn't help himself when he said earlier in 1987, "Only half of me wants to be President . . .. The other half wants to go write novels in Ireland. But the 50 percent that wants to be President is better than 100 percent of the others."

Hart started campaigning immediately once he got back in and tried to talk about his "new ideas," but once the novelty of his re-entry into the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination campaign wore off, the press lost interest in talking to him.  And while it was unfair to shut out his ideas over a cruise to Bimini with a second-rate model, it was all for the better, because when he did engage with the press over his reputation for womanizing, he only drew more comparisons to Richard Nixon, having already been compared to the former President for his deviousness and his hostility toward the press.  In January 1988, in an attempt to put the womanizing issue behind him, Hart, who had admitted the preceding summer that he'd been unfaithful to his wife earlier in their marriage, said in an interview, "I wouldn't be the first President to commit adultery, but I would be the first President who's ever confessed [to it]."  Thus, Hart downplayed his own guilt by citing others similarly guilty - just like Richard Nixon would have done.  In that same interview, he added, "One could argue - I wouldn't - that Ronald Reagan walked away from a marriage."  Thus, Hart pointed out something unpleasant about someone else while evading the credit for pointing it out - just like Richard Nixon would have done.

And there was a reason he had no money.  He still had $1.3 million in outstanding debts from his 1984 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination against Walter Mondale, and when he filed for federal matching funds after he got back in the 1988 campaign, many observers thought it was a way to get some dough to pay off his 1984 debt. It didn't help that $101,000 from his abortive start for the 1988 campaign was tied up in a lawsuit filed by campaign creditors from . . . 1984.

Wonder whom he would have appointed to be Secretary of the Treasury?

William Greider of Rolling Stone, in a 1988 column explaining why a Democrat would win that year's presidential election, pretty much got Hart right even as his prediction for that November turned out to be dead wrong.  "Gary Hart is everyone's favorite subject of conversation - until the talk turns serious," Greider wrote.  "He has a Nixonian shiftiness in his eyes, but Hart lacks the true venom of Nixon's twisted soul.  Hart got the full benefit of a media blitz during the primaries of 1984, but he blew his magic moment.  This time, I expect an early fade, once voters face the real question about his presidential character in the privacy of the booth.  Hart can depart with a semblance of honor, claiming vindication from the votes he will get.  Or he can make things even more sordid and painful for the party by sulkily clinging to a doomed venture.  I expect him to do the right thing when the time comes, partly in the mistaken notion that he can still become somebody's Secretary of State.  Forget it, Gary; it's over."

Hart had already burned his bridges in May 1987, when he let down his supporters by letting his campaign get derailed by an avoidable personal issue and blaming everyone but himself for it.  While he apologized privately for the scandal to his closest aides - including Martin O'Malley, who rejoined Hart when the former Colorado senator re-entered the presidential campaign - he failed to apologize publicly to the masses of people who'd gotten behind him, and while he remained a mentor to numerous Democratic politicians, he lost millions of admirers he would never get back.  I, for one, had washed my hands of Hart by December 1987; I was already supporting Dukakis, and I was in no mood to switch back to a quitter who was now trying to get attention to remain "relevant."

Just like Richard Nixon did so many times after 1974.

Hart stayed in the campaign through the first thee months of 1988, coming in last in both Iowa and New Hampshire; it was clear that the voters in 1987 had not loved him in December as they did in May.  By the time of the Super Tuesday primaries in March, he'd been promoting his policies more than running for the Presidency.  As Greider had accurately predicted, he dropped out a second time, conceding that the people had pretty much decided.  And when a Democrat finally won the White House in 1992, Hart's reputation was so damaged that it's easy to see why Bill Clinton chose Warren Christopher to be his first Secretary of State.

Hart, to be fair, redeemed himself in the field of foreign policy.  He remained a popular foreign-affairs expert on news talk shows in the nineties and two thousand zeroes, and he helped bring peace to Northern Ireland, which had endured a long sectarian war.  He served President Barack Obama twice - first as Vice Chair of the Homeland Security Advisory Council, then as Obama's special envoy to Northern Ireland.  And, to be honest, the current rash of harassment scandals makes Hart's boat ride to Bimini look quaint by comparison.  But his greatest claim to fame is still as the man who went from being the forty-first President of the United States to being a joke on late-night television . . . until late-night comics found someone else to joke about.  And he never overcame his reputation as a jerk; a ladyfriend of mine actually crossed paths with him in Los Angeles back in the 1980s and told me that she thought of him as a pompous sort who really fancied himself - the very definition of a jerk.  And when one woman was asked by Newsweek what Hart's wife should have done after he cheated on her, the woman replied, "I'd have told her to leave the jerk."

The jerk.

And that's not the end of it.  Coming in 2018 - The Front Runner, a Jason Reitman movie about the Hart scandal based on Matt Bai's 2014 book on the subject, starring Hugh Jackman as Gary Hart.

It's a comedy.

Ironies Of the Gary Hart Scandal

Things have a way of turning out ironically, and Gary Hart's aborted 1988 presidential campaign, the first attempt at which ended thirty years ago today with Hart's bitter rant against the media, is proof positive of that. Among the highlights:

• Hart's association with a woman not his wife was revealed after reporters from the Miami Herald tracked Hart down at his Washington townhouse, staked him out, entrapped him, and painted him into a corner.  The next day, E.J. Dionne's profile of Hart in the New York Times Sunday magazine appeared with the following title: "Gary Hart: The Elusive Front-Runner."
• Dionne's article included a quote from the candidate daring reporters to follow him around.  Not only had the Miami Herald decided to do so before the quote appeared in print, Dionne almost edited it out.  
• Hart traveled to the Bahamian island of Bimini on the yacht Monkey Business with his friend William Broadhurst, who acquired the yacht for the trip, and their two female companions.  It turns out that the provocatively named yacht wasn't Broadhurst's boat; he only leased it so he could pick up his own boat, which was anchored in Bimini.
• Hart - best known for a fleeting presidential bid - lives in Evergreen, Colorado.  His house is in a ravine called "Troublesome Gulch." 
• When Hart made his first public appearance after the sex scandal broke, as mentioned in my post from three days before, he denied any impropriety with the hope that he had ended the controversy.  Two days later, with the press still making him feel the heat, he turned to a campaign aide and said, "This isn't going to end, is it?"
• Hart denied that anything improper happened on the Monkey Business; a year later, it was seized by the Coast Guard in an unrelated drug bust. 
• When he quit his first presidential bid on May 8, 1987, he said he had planned to make a short statement announcing his withdrawal but then said that he thought to himself, "Hell, no!"  His supporters in the room cheered . . . for all the wrong reasons.  
• In his withdrawal statement of May 8, 1987, Hart declared, "I'm not a beaten man, but I am an angry and defiant man."  Yeah?  Then why was he quitting?  (As noted before on this blog, I have since referred to his May 8, 1987 withdrawal statement as his "Anger and Defiance" speech.)
• I was in college in the spring of 1987, and my final assignment for the writing course I was taking at the time was to write an article based on a pre-determined premise.  I originally chose to write a piece explaining why Gary Hart would be the forty-first President of the United States, but it didn't hold muster with my professor, and I ultimately wrote about something else. The due date for this assignment - which I was supposed to send on spec to a magazine - was . . . May 8, 1987.
• Hart's "Anger and Defiance" speech not only drew comparisons to Richard Nixon's Last Press Conference of 1962, it led to comparisons of Hart's personality to Nixon's, revealing many similarities (both were loners, both were secretive, both viewed the press with suspicion). Hart had been George McGovern's presidential campaign manager in 1972.  No prizes for guessing who McGovern's opponent was.     
• Hart had declared his 1988 presidential candidacy on April 13, 1987 - Thomas Jefferson's birthday anniversary, celebrated as Jefferson Day by Democrats, though, if that was an intentional historic reference, no one got it.  When he withdrew a month later, he paraphrased Jefferson in expressing fear that America would get the government it deserved.  Most reporters in the room felt Hart got what he deserved.  
• Hart's attempt to seem Kennedyesque seemed contrived to many people, but after his sex-scandal downfall, then-"Saturday Night Live" cast member Dennis Miller said, "You know, for a moment there, he almost did remind me of Jack Kennedy!"
• Hart had only 3 percent of the vote in polls ahead of the 1984 Iowa presidential caucuses . . . because no one knew who he was.  (He won 16 percent.)  He received 3 percent of the vote in the 1988 Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses after re-entering the 1988 presidential campaign . . . because everyone knew who he was.  (He withdrew from the 1988 campaign a second time a few days after.) 

Ah, irony . . .

Hart Failure

"I was a [Gary] Hart supporter.  I'm a Hart supporter because he f**ks.  Do you know what I mean?" - Jack Nicholson

"Life is a comedy . . . written by a sadistic comedy writer." - Woody Allen

*

It's been three decades since Gary Hart, former Democratic U.S. Senator from Colorado, went from being the soon-to-be forty-first President of the United States to being an political outcast.  We all know what happened; he took a boat ride to Bimini with a woman not his wife and two other people in late March 1987, and the revelation came out after the Miami Herald staked him out in his Washington townhouse in early May 1987 and found the woman in question - and the two other people from the Bimini cruise - in there with him.  Considered a savior of the then (and now) moribund Democratic Party when he announced his candidacy for the party's 1988 presidential nomination, Hart went from messiah to pariah a week after the sex scandal broke.  Many people believe that being caught with another woman caused his downfall, while others point to the bitter withdrawal speech he made when he ended his candidacy less than a month after declaring it.  I, on the other hand, think that Hart sealed his fate when he addressed a convention of newspaper publishers at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York thirty years ago today.

Hart's speech before the convention had been previously scheduled, and he'd planned to take advantage of such an influential audience to flesh out his policy proposals - those "new ideas" we'd kept hearing so much about.  Hart had also hoped to get in solid with the press, who never seemed to like him all that much.  But the Miami Herald's reporting on his dalliance with another woman while his wife was back in Colorado irked him, as it interfered with his ability to get his message out.  It also happened to call his judgment into question, as Hart had long before been accused of being a womanizer.  So on Tuesday, May 5, 1987, Hart, in his first public appearance since the scandal broke, preceded his prepared speech by denying that he'd spent the night with the woman in question (I don't mention her name when I bring up the Hart sex scandal, as I prefer to protect the innocent), explaining that she had in fact left his townhouse through a back door, and lashing out at the reporters of the Miami Herald for staking out his townhouse and reporting that he had spent the night with another woman.  Hart was careful to single out the Herald's reporters while lauding the commendable work the rest of the press did, saying he had no problem with the media overall.   But the notoriously private Hart was visibly peeved when he said that the Miami Herald's story was "written by reporters who, by their own admission, undertook a spotty surveillance, who reached inaccurate conclusions based on incomplete facts, and who, after publishing a false story, now concede they may have gotten it wrong."

Then Hart (above, at the newspaper publishers' convention) addressed the story itself, saying in a carefully worded statement that, while he made a mistake by "putting myself in circumstances that could be misconstrued. . .. That goes without saying" (gee, ya think?), he "absolutely did not" do anything immoral.  So satisfied, Hart then made it clear that he wanted to move on and went into his prepared speech.

Hart, in fact, had made two mistakes - both of them fatal.  First, though he was careful to attack only the Miami Herald reporters who had staked out his townhouse and not the press in general, he failed to realize, as Matt Bai explained in his book about the Hart scandal, "All the Truth Is Out," that reporters show solidarity with any reporters attacked by a politician.  As Bai wrote, reporters are like NATO member countries - they consider an attack on one of them to be an attack on all.

Hart's second mistake, a mistake Bai failed to grasp, was the tone of finality he used in his denial of having done anything "immoral."  By emphatically denying charges of impropriety and then making it clear that he didn't want to talk about it before going to his speech, Hart was telling reporters that he considered the matter closed and was putting it behind him.  Wrong, wrong, dead wrong!  When a public figure does something ethically dubious, be it in public life or private life,  it is up to the news media to report the indiscretion and let people make up their own minds as to whether or not it's something that should cause concern.  It is not for the public figure in question to dismiss the indiscretion out of hand and move on to other topics.  In those immediate moments before he gave his speech, Gary Hart showed arrogance, contempt for the press, and a desire to shape a narrative to his own benefit.  Yes, the issue of whether or not Hart was a womanizer was silly and meaningless.  But it wasn't what he did or didn't do that sank him; it's how he handled the issue.     

Hart should have known he dug the hole he was in even deeper when Richard Capen, the publisher of the Miami Herald, offered a rebuttal in the question-and-answer session that followed Hart's speech.  "He's an announced candidate for President of the United States, and he's a man who knows full well that womanizing had been an issue in his past," Capen said.  "We stand by the essential correctness of our story." Capen conceded that it was possible that someone could have left Hart's house through a back door, but he added that, ''clearly, at minimum, there was an appearance of impropriety."

So what did Capen think of Hart's policy proposals?  He didn't.  No one in the room thought anything of them.  Because after Hart told the press how to do its job, no one really cared what Hart was proposing.  Indeed, the question-and-answer session part of his appearance was devoted to questions about the sex issue and his Washington townhouse, not about taxes or spending, and Hart's answers were evasive and furtive.  (It was at this point that Hart addressed the Bimini trip and dismissed it by saying it was made "in open daylight," with no effort to conceal it.)  News reports on Hart's appearance at the convention didn't even mention the policy speech - not even the New York Times' report.     

Oh yeah, after Hart left that convention with his tail between his legs, the reporters who were there to cover it learned the name of the yacht Hart and his traveling companions used for their Bimini cruise - the Monkey Business.

Awk-ward!

And Hart's carefully worded denial of wrongdoing turned out not to be so carefully worded.  He only set himself up for a gotcha question the next day from Paul Taylor of the Washington Post at a campaign appearance in New Hampshire.  Hart had said he did nothing immoral.  This led Taylor to ask Hart if he thought adultery was immoral.  Hart said yes.  Then came the follow-up question from Taylor that changed American political journalism: "Have you ever committed adultery?"

"Uh," Hart sheepishly replied, "I do not have to answer that question."

And then came more reports of Hart's womanizing, questions of his judgment and lack of common sense - including a column from pundit William Raspberry, who said that Hart's lack of common sense overruled his keen intelligence - and finally, his withdrawal from the Democratic presidential campaign (pictured below) with a nine-minute statement that excoriated the press and left no doubt of his arrogance and his superiority complex, as he sought to "shift the blame for his downfall," as humor writer Paul Slansky put it, "from his own rampant libido to those who reported on it."  His lashing out at the press for not covering his candidacy fairly and his self-absolution of all blame for his rapid fall so deeply echoed Richard Nixon's famous "Last Press Conference" of 1962 that Nixon himself wrote Hart to tell him that he "handled a difficult situation uncommonly well."

Awk-ward!

No one outside Hart's family agreed with Nixon's assessment.  Even pundits who were appalled at the Miami Herald's journalistic conduct and its exploitation of tabloid-ready subject matter like a sex scandal didn't agree with Nixon's assessment.     

Hart, by the way, replied to Nixon, explaining that the gist of his withdrawal statement was his desire that Americans ''focus national attention away from what is temporal, sensational, and irrelevant to the real challenges confronting our nation and our world.'' 

"In other words," the New York Times later opined, "what's really important are the issues, but the media is focused on irrelevancies, like Gary Hart's veracity and character."

The flaws in Hart's character came out in how he handled the adversity of the sex scandal.  He thought he could control the narrative and move away from an embarrassing topic in the conversation, and he just couldn't handle the fact that he had no control at all over what the media were going to report about him . . . and when he wanted to proceed with his presidential campaign on his own terms, the media would . . . not . . . let him.  Life sucks when you can't make the world bend to your will, doesn't it?  Ask Donald Trump.

Hart's attitude not only destroyed his own political career (though he did return to the 1988 Democratic presidential campaign in December 1987 for, as it turned out, three months), it all but crippled the Democrats.  Left in 1988 with no viable presidential candidates with anything resembling national standing, the party crossed its fingers and ended up nominating for President Michael Dukakis, an honorable man who turned out not to be ready for prime time when he went against Republican presidential nominee George Bush, then the most beatable Republican nominee for President since Barry Goldwater.  Hart has since become a minor figure in history, an unknown cipher to the young people who were born in the late eighties and early nineties and who backed Bernie Sanders in 2016.  However, there is a whole generation of Americans who remember Hart as the guy who f**ked.

And on that fateful Tuesday at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, he f**ked . . . in public.