As I wrote when
I dealt with Gary Hart many years ago and restated at the start of this series
there are so many fallacies behind Hart’s fate in 1987 and beyond. In the three
previous Presidential elections between Hart’s entry into Presidential politics
in 1972 and his exit in 1988 Jimmy Carter had earned first the Democratic
nomination and then the Presidency by being deliberately fuzzy on what
positions he held. This was followed by Ronald Reagan’s two consecutive
landslides involving a long career of simply making stuff up and winning the
two biggest electoral victories any Republican running for President ever has.
The idea that the electorate was hungering for a candidate who was both
intellectual and had good ideas is inconsistent with those facts and the idea
that Hart could have stemmed, much less turned the tide back towards that kind
of politics is at odds with the rise of cable news that was beginning just as
Hart was starting his final run for office.
But Gary Hart
did leave a lasting legacy on Presidential politics that, intentionally or not,
has been one of the greatest hindrances to the Democratic Party over the last
half-century. And it remains genuinely unclear if the Party will ever be able
to overcome it.
Hart’s role as
the chief strategist behind George McGovern’s insurgent campaign for the
nomination was notable for what was by far the most leftist nominee of a major
political party in perhaps the history of elections. And sadly there are far
too many similarities between the young members of McGovern’s campaign and so
much of the young electorate of this generation. They are true believers when
they are on a college setting but to the rest of the electorate, including the
Democratic base, their ideas and rhetoric appeal to almost no one. They are
superb at organizing in the smaller, caucus states but they can’t win in the
larger more urban ones – save California and New York. They reject firmly the
idea of politics as usual and argue that because they have won the primaries
they have no need of the Democratic establishment to win election. On the
contrary, they argue the idea of accepting the help of the establishment is
anathema to what they stand for. They believe very much in diversity and
representation at the expense of the rank and file Democratic politicians. And
they firmly reject the blue collar voters – then represented by George Wallace
and throughout the South in particular – as someone they should even talk too,
much less moderate their campaign for. As I’ve stated Watergate did much to
whitewash the horrible inadequacies of the McGovern campaign from the moment of
the convention in Miami to every aspect of their fall campaign. All of the
groundwork they might have done for future Democratic coalition doesn’t change
the fact they lost 49 of 50 states and suffered the biggest loss a Democratic
nominee for President has ever gone through in the history of the Republic. The
Democratic Party was absolutely right to reject McGovern’s campaign strategy
for the next several Presidential campaigns; they were fortunate that they were
able to recover from that debacle.
Hart brought
that same kind of insurgency to his run for the Democratic nomination in 1984
and showed that he had fundamentally learned nothing from it when it came to
his own branding. The Hart campaign mirrors the McGovern campaign when it comes
to its success: doing well in small caucus states, doing horribly in the South
and the larger urban states, again with the sole exception of California. Mondale
was, in my opinion, a far superior candidate than Hart both in the primaries
and indeed in the general and the brand of liberalism he fought for is
infinitely superior than the kind of progressivism McGovern and Hart
represented – and that we see on display today. Mondale might very well have
been backed by more of the establishment than Hart was but he was also a better
campaigner and made almost no blunders compared to those Hart made during his
run. That his brand of liberalism was destroyed in another 49 state landslide
does not make Hart’s approach superior. We know only that Hart might have done
better in the fall because it would have been impossible to do worse – though
as history shows Hart’s last attempt to lead a campaign had in fact been
rejected as soundly by the electorate as Mondale’s was. Hart could no more have
won the Presidency in 1984 than Mondale could have.
Both of the
campaigns Hart led may not have been that of progressive ideals but the fact
that Hart chose to view them as victories for the cause shows the kind of moral
fuzziness that I’ve come to expect from the left in my experience of following
them over the years. In neither of those elections did Gary Hart win anything:
the establishment resoundingly rejected McGovern in 1972 and primary voters did
so in 1984. But Hart and his followers view them as successes because they were
‘moral victories’. As I’ve written before those are the only kind the left
seems to recognize – which is to be expected since they manage so few real
ones.
And the fact
that Gary Hart has been so willing to embrace the mantle of martyr – a title
the left prefers – may very well be why he’s held in such high regard today. It
hides the very real fact that Hart resumed his campaign for the Democratic
nomination after ending it and was resoundingly rejected by the Democratic
voters. Regardless of what Hart says then or now, the public did have an
opinion on his behavior and they made it emphatically clear to him. But just as
with his previous rejections by the electorate Hart has managed to absolve
himself of responsibility for his electoral defeats and place the blame on
everyone else. This is part and parcel of the modern progressive and it
is a different kind of election denialism which is more insidious. There wasn’t
voter fraud but the voters themselves were either misinformed or not smart
enough to understand what we stood for.
That kind of
moral behavior stands as a stark contrast to the three Republicans who won
election in all three cycles Hart was a part of – and, in case you’ve forgotten
as Hart’s followers have, they didn’t win by small margins. Nixon got 60
percent of the popular vote and every state but DC and Massachusetts; Reagan
just over 58 percent and every state but DC and Minnesota, and George H.W. Bush
defeated Michael Dukakis, the eventual winner of the Democratic nomination,
with 426 electoral votes. If there is a commonality between all three
Republican campaigns, it’s that in all three cases they were more than willing
to make the election about character and didn’t have any problem with the
high-mindedness that Democrats were willing to do. To be sure all three men
campaigned with a fair amount of negative advertising and often racist rhetoric
that Democrats and the left look down on to this day. But strictly looking at
the results it was a strategy that worked for them and still does.
Another perhaps
unintentional legacy of Hart and his followers is the frustrating
high-mindedness of almost every Democratic Presidential nominee in my lifetime.
Wittingly or not with the sole exception of Bill Clinton and perhaps Barack
Obama, they have been more than willing to let Republican attacks on their
character go unanswered, treating even engaging with it as beneath them. There’s
the certainty that if we make the campaign about ideas and refuse to deal with
these issues the electorate will either out of admiration or because they
prefer them choose the Democratic nominee over the Republican. Well we saw how
that played out with the White House between 1968 and 1988: the Republicans won
the Presidency five times out of six, all but the first time in electoral
landslides. And the pattern repeated itself during Al Gore and John Kerry’s run
for the White House in 2000 and 2004: both times Karl Rove and the Bush
campaign chose to make the election about the ‘lack of character’ of the
Democrats, both times the nominees didn’t engage and both times they (narrowly)
lost. (I’ve dealt with 2000 in a previous article, so express your comments
there.)
This approach
of winning on morality was perhaps best encapsulated in Michelle Obama’s famous
line at the 2016 Democratic Convention: “When they go low, we go high.” It was
met with tremendous applause – but both at the time and in hindsight, it was
one of the dumbest things she could have said. How well has going high ever
worked for the Democratic Party in the past? Of course the Republicans will go
low. Even before Trump became their perennial nominee going low was not only
their strategy but an effective one. The left has always been above
politics and tends to hold itself in a kind of moral universe. But that kind of
world only works if everybody plays by the same rules. The rest of the world
isn’t bound to play by the rules the left does and the Republicans never will.
Why should they? It works for them. You want to argue that negative campaign
lowers the tenor of political discourse? Fine. I’d argue that’s basically all
political discourse but you’re entitled to your opinion. But the fact
remains negative and unpleasant campaigning is almost always effective. LBJ
proved that point in 1964 and it helped him win a landslide. Moral victories
are meaningless in a world where you have to win elected office in order to get
anything done. The right has always understood this reality. The left, even
after two hundred years, seems unwilling to acknowledge it exists/
Gary Hart was
like so many progressive candidates over the decades: he wanted to
define what his campaign was about and any other interpretation was beneath him
to even acknowledge. This is a horrible approach to take even if your private
life is beyond reproach; when it was messy as Hart’s was leading up to his
final campaign, he was practically asking for what happened to him. And he took
no responsibility for it at any point leading up to it, when he withdrew from
the campaign for the first time, and decades after the fact. He didn’t fail: the
system failed. It’s kind of terrifying that so many intelligent people still
feel this way after nearly forty years.
And his legacy
lives on in other ways that not even he could expect. When Cori Bush was
elected to Congress, she took on a far left campaign and refused to do anything
the establishment wanted. She proudly called her first run ‘an insurgent
campaign’ and when she was elected she made it very clear after the
attacks on October 7th that she was as radical as so many Democrats
thought McGovern was in 1972. They were wrong about him, but they were right
about her.
The Jewish community locally had viewed her with
skepticism along with her associations with people with anti-Semitic views. But
rather than engage with Jewish community leaders, Bush ignored them, meeting
with them only once after four years in office. Numerous organizations made
requests for her time and Bush’s
response was glib “my trick to dealing with groups with whom (I) disagree is to
simply ignore their calls.” Even after Bell emerged as a challenger against
her, Bush continued to double down on her rhetoric, equating the Middle East to
her own actions as an activist in Ferguson. And after she was defeated in her
primary by Wesley Clay, she made it very clear she hadn’t lost: “The one thing
I don’t do is go away,” she said after the results were in. “They thought this
would be…They thought I was radical before. I’m going to be more radical now.”
That is hardly the sound of a gracious loser. I wonder
if Gary Hart sent her the same kind of letter that Nixon sent him once.
No comments:
Post a Comment