Waiting for the UFOs

Since I last commented on the Chinese balloon that was shot down over the ocean off the coast of South Carolina, three more flying objects - all of them unidentified - have been shot down.

Two of them were spied near the Arctic Coast - one near Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, the other on the Canadian side of the border over the Yukon Territory.   The third was over Lake Huron between Michigan and Ontario.  Both the U.S. and Canada are working to see just exactly what these objects are, though recovering anything from the Arctic Coast and the Great Lakes in February can be a challenge.

It was obvious that the objects were not airplanes, and that they needed to be taken out, thanks to the intelligence supplied to President Biden and Canadian Prime MInister Justin Trudeau.  I feel more confident in President Biden's leadership than I would have if a certain blow-dried phenomenon who became famous in the 1980s were sitting in the White House.  And no, I'm not talking about Donald Trump.  I'm talking about Gary Hart.

In a 1984 Democratic presidential debate held in Atlanta two days before the Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses - the same debate in which former Vice President Walter Mondale said to Hart, a U.S. Senator from Colorado,  that he had seen his new ideas and was reminded of the fast-food slogan "Where's the beef?" - moderator and NBC News icon John Chancellor asked the candidates a hypothetical question about what they would do as President if an unidentified passenger plane from a Communist country - Czechoslovakia, Chancellor said - flew in American airspace and the pilots resisted efforts by U.S. air defense to be identified.  (A Korean passenger jet had been shot down by the Soviet Union in 1983.)  Hart's answer should have disqualified him from serving as President long before his dalliance with a Miami model did.  Walter Mondale gave a more intelligent answer, recognizing the high unlikelihood of the scenario that Chancellor laid out, but it was then-Ohio senator John Glenn, a former Marine pilot and an astronaut who had orbited the earth thrice in 1962, who provided the best answer to the question.  You can see the whole exchange in the video below.  

 

I'm sorry, I know he was Martin O'Malley's mentor, but thank God Gary Hart became irrelevant before Communism and Czechoslovakia did.  As for Glenn, alas, he would be out of the 1984 presidential campaign within a week after this debate.

Mondale's Wendy's-inspired sound-bite critique of Hart's "New Ideas" agenda overshadowed this segment of the debate, so few if any Hart supporters caught this embarrassing moment, but it still survives as evidence that a Hart administration was not the answer to America's problems.  This debate, incidentally, happened to occur 17½ years to the day before al-Qaeda brought down the World Trade Center towers with hijacked airplanes.  If Hart had been President in 2001 and even if his solution to identifying airplane pilots had been possible, the Air Force would theoretically have let the planes go because the pilots were wearing red bandannas instead of military uniforms. 

New Leadership? PAH!

"New leadership."  That's what Martin O'Malley (below) promised in his 2016 presidential campaign.  It was his campaign slogan - simple, direct, and to the point.  It wasn't mealy-mouthed pablum like Hillary Clinton's "Stronger Together." 

Recently, though, it seems as if Democrats can't be bothered with new leadership.  Because they did, after all, nominate Bill Clinton's wife for President in hopes that it would stoke nineties nostalgia in the Democratic base.  Oh sure, she was a woman, and that was new, but her policies were not only the same policies her husband pursued, a lot of them were like the policies Obama pursued.  Well, what was so new about that?

Despite the fact that he'd been in Washington for a quarter century, Bernie Sanders (below) offered new leadership in 2016 in the form of policy proposals that hadn't been pursued since the mid-sixties - universal health care,  free college like they used to have in California - but you were still talking about a candidate who was hardly a new face, having toiled in the House and the Senate pushing legislation that had no chance of passage.

For 2020, the Democrats don't seem to be into new leadership so much - new faces, younger faces, a new generation.  The obvious exception is Pete Buttigieg, who is a millennial, a gay man and an American of Maltese origin - and his youth and vitality are generating excitement all over Iowa.  Too bad his patronizing attitude toward blacks is so old-school.  

He tried to identify with black voters by saying he too felt the sting of discrimination as a gay man, but he sort of forgot that white homosexuals, unlike black homosexuals, can avoid discrimination by staying in the closet, whereas blacks, straight or gay, come out as black the day they're born.  And then there's that long-ago comment Buttigieg made about black children doing poorly in school because of lack of role models.  Actually, black students have several role models.  They just don't hear about them much because of a form of structural racism that ignores black accomplishments in America . . . except during February. If this is new leadership, it's no wonder Democratic voters outside Iowa are sticking with the tried and tried again and true.   

O'Malley, by the way, found out how little Democrats are interested in new voices and new faces when he backed Beto O'Rourke's presidential campaign - you know the story; I won't repeat it.  O'Malley clearly wanted to see another repetition, that of the Kennedy story, and so found in Beto the new generation of leadership America needs.  O'Malley is undecided now that Beto's gone, and with Tim Ryan having withdrawn from the presidential campaign, there simply aren't any Irish Catholics under 50 left for him to support. And though O'Malley supported Buttigieg for the Democratic National Committee chairmanship in 2017, I wouldn't expect him to be singing Mayor Pete's praises any time soon.

Especially when they're singing a quite different song about him in South Carolina.

Not too many of the younger Democratic candidates for President have offered much in the way of new ideas, so there's, say, little romance and excitement in Cory Booker possibly becoming our first Generation X President.  And then there's Elizabeth Warren, who at 70 may be the closest the Democrats come to new leadership - she's a woman, and she has detailed plans for her ambitious progressive agenda.

But she's a little shy in explaining how much they're going to cost.

But, when you think about it, Donald Trump has been an exemplar of new leadership in the past three years.  He's completely new when it comes to presidential governance.  He's new in that he'd never held political office or military rank (because of those nasty bone spurs! :-D ) before becoming President, and because he's doing things that quite frankly have never been done before.  Like breaking every international agreement the United States has ever committed itself to.  Or trying to get the Ukrainians to interfere in the next presidential election.  And letting Melania decorate the White House as something you might find in Stephen King novel for Christmas.  New leadership cuts both ways. 

In the end, Democratic voters might just forget about new leadership entirely and stick with Joe Biden, who feels as reassuring and as warm as a comfortable old shoe.  If only he would stop putting that shoe in his mouth.  But Biden (below), would bring a sense of newness to the White House in this respect; like Sanders, he'd be the first (and only, at this point) President from the Silent Generation, those Americans too old to have been at Woodstock (unless they were one of the performers) and too young to have been at Omaha Beach.  It is that same generation Gary Hart belongs to, and he famously said in his own 1984 presidential campaign that it was time for his generation to govern the country - a new generation of leadership with new ideas.  Yes - there it is!  Biden would bring the Silent Generation approach to governing (albeit, thanks to his gaffes, without the "Silent" part), something that the White House has never had. 

And he'd be bringing it to the White House 35 years and change late.

Heck, if Hart, who turned 83 on Thanksgiving, had run this year, we'd hear about his not-so-new ideas.  Whatever they are.

Meanwhile, Steve Bullock the Montana governor who campaigned for President on the promise of new leadership in all but name, withdrew as a presidential candidate, refusing to run for the Senate and possibly hoping he gets to be someone's Interior Secretary.  So did Joe Sestak, a forgotten two-term congressman who was neither new nor much of a leader. 

Maybe Americans - even Democrats - do want new leadership in the White House, however you define it.  But maybe they're wary of anyone who comes out and promises it.  From the 1972 failure of George McGovern, whose campaign manager, Gary Hart, was a mentor to Martin O'Malley, who backed Beto O'Rourke - born the same year that McGovern was running for President - to now, this promise of new leadership is getting pretty old.   

How the West Was Cursed

John Hickenlooper dropped out of the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination campaign. The former Colorado governor just could not get enough attention in an overcrowded field as this one.

I'll get to the specific reasons for Hickenlooper's departure later.  But for now, I just want to comment on how Hickenlooper is only the latest in a series of Democratic presidential candidates from the West - defined as any state west of the 102nd meridian - who couldn't get the presidential nomination.  Party elders and political experts have been looking at the West as an opportunity for Democratic growth to compensate for their eroding base of support in other regions, and they've made progress there in the past couple of decades, but the parry still doesn't seem to be interested in tapping talent from these twelve states to stand for the highest office in the land or even the Vice Presidency.  No Democrat from the West has ever been on a national ticket.

Gary Hart came the closest.  When he announced his candidacy for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination, he did so on April 13, 1987, on a big rock in a park outside Denver with his wife and daughter by his side.  The symbolism was twofold - he was making the announcement on the anniversary of the birth of Thomas Jefferson, the President who bought Louisiana and promoted westward expansion all the way to the Pacific, and he made it in a landscape that exuded Western culture and values as a way of sending the message that states like his own Colorado were the future.

Alas, the West had as bright a future in presidential politics as Hart did.  Democratic dominance on the West Coast would actually help make the West less relevant in presidential politics; California would become solidly Democratic after 1988, and Washington and Oregon, as well as Hawaii, would go so firmly in the Democratic column as well that no one was going to fight over any of these states in a general election.  Today, Democrats don't seem to be able to communicate with average voters from the Rockies to the Sierra Nevada or seem to understand their concerns on the economy or local issues like water rights and the like.  Democratic competitiveness in Arizona and Idaho have been a tough go, and Democratic successes in Montana and New Mexico have been qualified at best.  Alaska, Utah and Wyoming are solidly Republican, redder than the rock Gary Hart stood on while announcing his 1988 presidential bid.  And while Colorado, as well as Nevada, has to some extent, become competitive, no one in the Democratic Party thinks enough of Colorado to nominate someone from Colorado for President.

That includes Michael Bennet (above), who not only holds Gary Hart's old Senate seat and shares a birthday with Hart, he also shares the stigma of being a well-coiffed white guy who seems too perfect for women and people of color to trust.       

But even women of color like California's Kamala Harris (below, left) and Hawaii's Tulsi Gabbard have a problem.  It's not that a lot of bigoted people wouldn't vote for them.  It's that, judging from the Democratic presidential debates, they wouldn't vote for each other.

Man, did some sh-- go down in Detroit! 

Meanwhile, Washington State governor Jay Inslee (below, left) and Montana governor Steve Bullock are trying to be heard with their presidential campaigns, but people are so busy ignoring Tim Ryan that they don't even know they're running.   

Democratic presidential candidates from the West are candidates that members the Washington establishment of the party simply don't take seriously, just as they don't take the ranchers and farmers out there seriously and just as they take for granted that the contiguous Pacific coastal states and Hawaii will always vote Democratic in presidential elections.  The list of Western Democratic presidential also-rans is a list that also includes former Arizona congressman Morris Udall, former Arizona governor Bruce Babbitt, two-time California governor Jerry Brown, and former New Mexico congressman Bill Richardson, as well as non-candidates like former Montana governor Brian Schweitzer.

If the West is the future, Democrats, judging from their obsessions with the Midwest and with demographic voting blocs, seem to be living in their own past.

As for Hickenlooper (and perhaps Bennet later), I come to praise, not bury, which is why I salute his presidential efforts with one of my favorite songs from the first album from Stephen Stills' group Manassas.

It Was Never a Contender

I finally saw The Front Runner, the movie about Gary Hart's disastrous 1988 presidential campaign starring Hugh Jackman as Hart (below), and while the movie wasn't bad, it wasn't great either.  The critics found it unpersuasive as an argument for Hart's candidacy, and I found it unpersuasive in terms of reality.  

The Front Runner gets a few things right about the boiler-room atmosphere of political campaigns, and J.K. Simmons' performance as Hart campaign manager Bill Dixon is right on the money, as it shows how Dixon lost his idealism over the Bimini affair (Dixon never ran a political campaign again).  Also, you feel for Vera Farmiga's Lee Hart, who, as the candidate's wife, was humiliated by the scandal.  However, the whole film plays and feels like a cable-TV movie, and not necessarily one made for a premium channel.  The Front Runner, in that respect, feels rather thin and underdone.  It also relies on a composite character - not one of my favorite cinematic devices - in the form of a black actor playing a hybrid of E.J. Dionne and Paul Taylor, the two reporters who, respectively, interviewed Hart for the New York Times' Sunday magazine and asked Hart if he'd ever committed adultery.  Though based on Matt Bai's book about the Hart scandal, "All The Truth Is Out" (the title of which was taken from a line in Hart's favorite poem, William Butler Yeats' "To a Friend Whose Work Has Come To Nothing"), and though Bai co-wrote the script, the book concentrates on only a few characters and almost entirely on the immediate period of the scandal, in May 1987.  Cutting out the introductory scenes set in 1984, when Hart first ran for President, and delving into his attempted comeback in early 1988 would have made for a more well-rounded character study.

Director Jason Reitman pretty much took the Hart scandal and made it less compelling than it was in real life.  And oh yes, the movie is indeed clearly in Hart's corner, playing up his public virtues while shrugging off  his aloofness, his arrogance, and his inability to handle damage control - three deficiencies you don't want in a President.  Though, if you want an actor to play a charismatic politician with what Daryl Hall once called in one of his songs "movie star eyes," you can't go wrong with Hugh Jackman.

I only wish Reitman hadn't gone wrong in his filmmaking.

Hart Versus Bush - It Finally Happened!

Gary Hart's withdrawal from the 1988 presidential campaign eighteen months to the day before the general election over a sex scandal cheated the nation out of what was expected to be the classic presidential-election match-up everyone was hoping for and expected - Gary Hart versus George Bush.  The fall of Hart, whom Bush respected and had predicted would be a worthy opponent, paved the way for Michael Dukakis, whom Bush had less regard for, to oppose the Vice President.  Well, we finally got the contest Washington insiders had hoped for - Hart versus Bush, in the form of the media attention both men have gotten in the past couple of weeks.  Hart, whose unraveling in May 1987 is the subject of the currently running theatrical movie The Front Runner (starring Hugh Jackman as Hart), has been looked at anew, while George Bush, who died recently at the age of 94, has undergone a reappraisal.

It's over - Bush won.

George Bush was heralded this past week as a decent man even by his onetime Democratic opponents, and he was credited for leading the nation with integrity and dignity and for putting country over party.  He helped revive the domestic economy by, after vowing to oppose new taxes, agreeing to raise the old ones.  He masterfully led a decisive military campaign in the Middle East to restore Kuwaiti sovereignty.  His modesty allowed Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to allow the Communist bloc nations of Eastern Europe to break free from Soviet domination and open the Berlin Wall, leading to the breakup of the U.S.S.R. and the end of the Cold War (though I still give Pope John Paul II the most credit for ending it).  A lot of people who refused to support him back in the day - even I - acknowledge that was the right leader at the right time.

So where does that leave Hart?  Pretty much nowhere.  Speculation on what might have been had Hart been elected President in 1988 focuses on how he proved to be right about so many things - the rise of a post-industrial economy, the destabilization of the Middle East and the rise of stateless terrorism - and we've been told how, had Hart defeated Bush, there would have been no George W. Bush Presidency, no Iraq War, no deterioration of the middle class thanks to Hart's domestic "strategic investments," and possibly no Clintons.  Maybe we would have even had a renewable-energy grid.  This speculation has been fanned not just by The Front Runner and by interviews with Hart himself but by a recent article by James Fallows of The Atlantic reporting that Bush campaign henchman Lee Atwater - who died in 1991 - revealed on his deathbed that he helped set up Hart's boat trip to Bimini to get Hart in a compromising position with a woman not his wife. And the argument for the Hart Presidency that never was is tempting to ponder.

Unfortunately, no one's buying it.

Hart is viewed as more of a curiosity than as a relevant politician, and the arguments in favor of how we would have been better off with Hart as President don't hold water.  Appraising him anew only reminds us of what we didn't like about him - his arrogance, his aloofness, and his cockiness.  Those traits all came out when he tried to deal with the allegations of infidelity that resulted from the Bimini affair.  We can't imagine him dealing with Congress with that sort of temperament.

Even his foreign-policy credentials have to be called into question.  What many people have forgotten is that Hart was actually friends with Gorbachev and planned to work with him closely once he was elected - not inaugurated, elected - President.  Hart had planned to negotiate a drastic arms reduction agreement with Gorbachev between his election and his inauguration, the agreement likely to be sent to the Senate on Day One of a Hart administration, and Hart even planned to invite Gorbachev to his inauguration.  And Gorbachev likely would have accepted.  I can just imagine the heads of all the Republicans exploding over that - ironic in light of the all-too-cozy relationship between Trump and Putin today.  But may I play devil's advocate here?  What if President Hart's friendship with Gorbachev had so annoyed the Kremlin hardliners that it led them to attempt at purging Gorbachev earlier than they actually did, in August 1991 - and what if, had it been attempted earlier, the purge had succeeded? And what if the U.S.S.R. had survived and canceled the arms agreements? Or what if the agreements the Soviets had made with President Hart had given Gorbachev the opportunity to keep the Soviet Union together? This all could have delayed the fall of the Eastern bloc and a unified Germany in NATO and completely prevented the independence of the Baltic States.

And  The Front Runner?  I haven't had a chance to see it yet, but I did read the Matt Bai from 2014 that it's based on, "All The Truth Is Out," which argued that the tabloid-like media attention on the Bimini affair diverted the press from focusing on policy in covering politics and toward covering personalities and intimate details of politicians' personal lives - and how Hart's tabloid-driven fall led to the Bushes, the Clintons, and a President who was elected more on star power than policies (Obama).  As I wrote in my review of this book in December 2015, I acknowledged that the media went too far pursuing the Bimini affair but I added that Bai failed to convince me that Hart could have been a great President.  It appears that the movie hasn't made a persuasive argument in favor of Hart either; not only have critics been unmoved, no one has gone to see it.  Hart's efforts in the 1988 Iowa caucuses following his re-entry in the presidential campaign - where he finished last with a pathetic 0.4 percent of the vote - probably attracted more Hart supporters to precinct meetings than this movie has attracted audiences to theaters.  Chuck Todd did interview Bai and The Front Runner director Jason Reitman about the movie, but not on "Meet The Press" - he had them on his much less prestigious MSNBC show.  And while you would expected the PBS NewsHour to have a story on The Front Runner, the NewsHour's arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown went to the Toronto Film Festival, where it was screened, and did stories on several movies shown there.  Tellingly however,  The Front Runner was not one of them.

(Aside: I probably won't be impressed by this movie - which I said back in December 2017 was supposed to be a comedy, as I had read somewhere, but that turned out to be erroneous - when I do see it, as it not only makes an argument for Hart that I already rejected, but it also uses fictionalized composite characters.  That's an artistic device common in BOATS, or "Based On A True Story," movies, and it's a device I have always hated.  Hart protégé Martin O'Malley is not a character in this movie, despite having been featured in Bai's book; that may turn out to be a good thing.)

Was Bush a great President?  No - Clarence Thomas will forever be a blot on his legacy.  But was he at least a good President?  Overall, yes; he had the right temperament for the job at a critical time in American history.  And truth be told, even if Hart, who had had episodes of womanizing in his past, had avoided a sex scandal and had kept his arrogance in check, he might still have lost, given the rightward drift in American politics at the time, though whether or not there was ever a chance to prevent Ronald Reagan's legacy to be locked in by a Republican successor is still subject to debate.  But I think the debate over what might have been is over.  The American people just looked at Bush and Hart and clearly made their choice. Bush was a leader and the once iconic Hart was and is, as Gail Sheehy called him, a joke.

And Hart will forever be seen as a joke.  That is never going to end, is it?  Go home, Gary.  Go home. 

"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.