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.