There
are several long articles that have been rattling around my mind the last week,
and the one you’re about to read has the less real relation with the lion’s
share of my columns to this point. That said, with Election Day less than a
month away, that has been more than thirty-five years since the incident I
about to relate took place and given my knowledge on American politics and the
media well before and after the event, I feel I am qualified to write about
this. Since most of this article is inspired by Matt Bai’s All the Truth is
Out (later made into the movie The Front Runner starring Hugh Jackman
as Hart), I think it is fair to look at this article as just as much a criticism
of the books fallacies as by critiques of those of The Outlier and Jimmy
Carter’s political life were in an earlier article. Don’t worry, I’m not
becoming another political columnist on this blog. It has too many without me
muddying the waters.
For
those too young to remember going into the 1988 Election Colorado Senator Gary
Hart was the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, and after eight years
of Ronald Reagan, most likely the Presidency. Hart had obtained his
front-runner status when in the 1984 primary campaign, he had stunned the
Democratic establishment and the nation when he had won twenty primaries and
nearly upset the candidacy of front-runner Walter Mondale. The fact that Mondale,
after being nominated had lost to Reagan in the biggest electoral landslide in
history, led many to believe that Hart would have been a better candidate and in
this year, the right one. (I’ll get to the flaws in this argument below.)
Under
the glare of the media spotlight, which Bai argues was still too bright after Vietnam
and Watergate, the prickly Hart was uncomfortable and seemed not to be
forthcoming about what he considered trivial issues, like that he’d changed his
name and that he had lied about his age. More troubling to some was the fact
that he and his wife Lee had a political marriage more than anything and Hart
was a womanizer. Hart then made a statement in a press conference that will go
down in history (it even made a Jeopardy clue): “If anyone wants to follow me,
go ahead. They’ll be very bored.” Not long after that, Hart was spotted on a
yacht with the couldn’t-make-this name-up Monkey Business with secretary
Donna Rice.
In
his own book See How They Run written two years afterwards, Paul Taylor working
for the Washington Post, learned of the facts, and interviewed
Hart. Hart refused to directly answer
any question about what had happened on the yacht, claiming it was none of the
media’s business. To this day, neither he nor Rice have ever commented about
what actually happened. Bai feels very
strongly that Taylor overreached. Taylor felt just as strongly that it was the
media’s business. Whatever opinion you stick to, the results were the same. Hart
dropped out of the campaign rather than admit to anything, got back in briefly
a few months later, and finished dead last in the Iowa caucus and dropped out
again, his once-promising political career in ashes.
There
are several lessons that both politicians and the media seem to have taken away
from this, but they’re not the same lessons that Hart and Bai think are the
right ones. What this comes down to is that ever since Hart’s run ended, far
too many qualified candidates have refused to run for President because they
don’t want to face media scrutiny on trivial issues. I agree with that, though
not because of Hart’s experience. Even before Hart’s run for the Presidency,
several candidates on paper who were better known and better qualified had
decided not to run for President in multiple elections. (This opinion may have
held by many of Hart himself; well before he was out of the race the media
referred to him and the six other Democratic candidates as ‘The Seven Dwarfs.
That’s not exactly a term of endearment, much less respect.)
But
having read the book quite a few times, I think many of the basic principles that
both Bai and Hart are assuming are fundamentally flawed, given how politics is
today and even how it had been before that. What’s more, Hart himself should have
known as much.
Bai
argues that Hart was the last real candidate to run for President who had a
solid platform and was really an idea man. He argues every candidate since than
doesn’t take positions in order to be electable. That is true, but Bai neglects
the fact that the idea of taking a position during a primary campaign was starting
to go out of fashion well before the time Hart first ran for President.
As
I related in my article about Carter earlier, in his primary campaign the media
and other candidates were frustrated about Carter refusing to take a firm
position on any issue – but he still won the Democratic nomination and the
Presidency that year. Ronald Reagan is
famously known, charitably, for being very loose with facts and figures. Indeed,
by the time of Hart’s initial campaign in 1984, the concept of ideas winning
you the nomination was becoming less believable – and Hart knew that firsthand.
At a press conference Mondale said: “When it comes to Hart’s campaign, I keep thinking
of that commercial: ‘Where’s the beef?’ (a famous Wendy’s campaign slogan). The sound bite ended up beating the ideas in 1984.
The idea that somehow Hart could have stopped that by the time of the
24-hour news network, talk radio and social media came along, seems ludicrous.
Another
concept that I find harder to believe is that even though Hart was the frontrunner
in 1988, he would necessarily have won the Democratic nomination. Again, this
something Hart had firsthand knowledge about as he was George McGovern’s
primary campaign manager in 1972. He knew better than anyone just how a front runner’s
campaign can implode, as it had for Edmund Muskie in the New Hampshire primary
of that year. McGovern’s second place finish would end up help propelling McGovern
to the Democratic nomination. (That one was almost as disastrous for McGovern as
Mondale’s was twelve years later.)
So
let’s engage in some magical thinking. Say the media had decided, like they did
when so many other Presidential candidates had in the past, to let whatever
happened or didn’t happen on the Monkey Business slide. Does anyone really believe
that if any of the other Democratic primary contenders had found out about it
that they would have been so generous as to let this go if gave them a
shot at the White House? Another seemingly trivial incident occurred when Joe
Biden, who was then campaigning for President for the first time, was accused by
the press of plagiarizing elements of his speech from British M.P. Neil Kinnock.
Biden denied it, but the furor over it caused him to drop out of the race as well.
The story had been leaked by someone in the Dukakis campaign (who later
resigned). That really was trivial. I don’t know if the other candidates (they included
Richard Gephardt, Jesse Jackson, and Al Gore) would have played by the code of
conduct that Hart thinks everyone should have. Given what happened to Biden, I’m
very doubtful.
But
let’s take this one step further and say that Hart manages to get the
Democratic nomination. Does anyone truly believe that George H.W. Bush and the
Republicans, with the Moral Majority backing them and Lee Atwater managing his
campaign that they would have been so generous? Atwater was able to destroy
Dukakis’ election with a few base
innuendos that had little basis reality.
Anyone who knows him (and Mary Matalin who campaigned alongside him is
certain of it) knows that he would have cut Hart to shreds just by showing stock
footage of monkeys in the zoo. Hart wouldn’t be a possibility of what might have been. He would have been
another cautionary tale for the Democrats, who’d already had more than their fair
share.
So
unless Hart had been willing to forthright about his actions and the public and
media had let it go (which again I find unlikely) he most likely would never
have become President. But even if he had become President despite all that, I
don’t think it would have changed a single thing about how Presidential campaigns
work. Because whatever Hart might have been able to do as Presidents, there’s
one thing he couldn’t do: stop the tide of technology and progress.
CNN
had been existence for seven years before Hart’s campaign came to an untimely
end. Not long before that, The Fairness Doctrine had been repealed, which led
to the arrival of talk radio and partisan news networks. Spin doctors and sound
bites were already becoming part of the mainstream. And social media, in all
its glory and horror, were still going to happen.
Progress
has played as much a role as campaigning as who becomes President. FDR couldn’t
have been elected in the age of television. JFK’s lying about his health and
his sexuality activity would never have flown in the eighties. The idea of
Jesse Jackson as a serious President candidate was laughable during the 1984
and 1988 election cycles and even the presences of one in every one that
followed was considered a fringe candidate – until 2008. And I may draw flak
from my conservative friends for saying this, but I don’t think Reagan could
have been anywhere near the success he was in any decade but the 1980s.
In the era of the twenty-four-hour news cycle that would follow in the decades
to come, I don’t think he could have survived a primary run then.
So I don’t believe Gary Hart and the imbroglio
in 1987 ended the era of deep-thinking politicians and began the intense media
scrutiny that has affected our campaigns ever since that he and Matt Bai
believe happened. I believe the former was on its way out before Hart began his
campaign and that the latter era began, at most, a decade before it most
certainly would have. I agree that what
happened Hart was overkill, but it was the world-changing incident that he and
too many writers are convinced it was. A Gary Hart presidency probably would
have changed much about our recent history. It would not have stopped the political
morass that bogs down campaigns ever since from coming. That ship had almost
certainly sailed.
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