Gary Hart

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“It Was Kind Of An Earthquake Inside The Democratic Party”

October 3, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Gary Hart

There’s a fairly convincing counterfactual in which the Reagan Revolution was reversed in 1988 by President Gary Hart, a Democrat prescient about the effects technology and globalization was beginning to have on working-class America. His ascent would have prevented Middle American whites from becoming GOP stalwarts, making impossible three terms of Bushes. His monkey business with Donna Rice, it is said, dashed his dreams and ours.

But who knows?

In a smart Vanity Fair “Hive” interview conducted by Abigail Tracy, Hart bemoans that “the media has become more intrusive in people’s private lives and the loss of privacy on the part of candidates has caused an awful lot of people of quality to choose not to seek public office.” In this comment, I think Hart has had history pass him by. It was certainly true for awhile, certainly when Bill Clinton became caught in his zipper before the entire nation, but infidelities don’t seem a deal-breaker anymore, in much the same way that divorce or avoidance of military service are no longer disqualifying. It still not fair or pretty, but eyes prying into bedrooms seem beside the point.

Donald Trump (adulterer) didn’t ascend to the Republican Party nomination to oppose Hillary Clinton (married to one) because really gifted politicians were cowed by fears over past indiscretions. Fellow candidate Governor John Kasich is a gifted politician and true conservative who was rejected by GOP voters because he failed to pass a self-destructive purity test, refusing to spurn Obamacare in Ohio or engage in name-calling with the first African-American President. That’s a question of priorities, not prudishness. So is ignoring the amazing gains in household income made by non-rich citizens during the last eight years to support a party dead set on reversing policies that led to such an improvement. In our time, someone’s peccadillo may be an excuse to not vote for someone, but it’s certainly not a driving force.

One exchange from the Q&A:

Question:

How has the Democratic Party changed, in particular, since you were seeking the presidential nomination?

Gary Hart:

I was first elected to the Senate in 1974 and re-elected in 1980, and I began to realize that there were shifts, like tectonic plates under the surface, going on and it had to do with the beginning of globalization and the shift of the base of the economy from manufacturing to information. And with that shift, we began to see the Rust Belt, manufacturing states in the Midwest and the Northeast—Ohio, Pennsylvania, upstate New York, and other places—beginning to lose jobs, and communities beginning to decline. Whereas at the same time, you go to the West Coast and it was booming because of Silicon Valley.

This was all beginning in the 1970s. Foreign competition was beginning. Nations, which we had defeated in World War II, just 30 years before, were now exporting to us—cars and tech, and all kinds of consumer goods, which we had previously, in recent years, dominated world markets. So I began to talk about it and think about what the implications of this were. In 1984, I placed a great deal of emphasis on the long-term impacts of these shifts.

My principal competition in the Democratic primary, Vice President [Walter] Mondale, and I ended up dividing the country. I won 25 states and he won 25 states. No journalist to my knowledge ever tried to figure out if there was a pattern there, but there definitely was. I carried almost every state that was benefitting from world trade—the West Coast and other parts of the country—and he got the support of those areas in decline. So it was kind of an earthquake inside the Democratic Party as to who was winning and who was losing.•

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“The Question Is How We Measure Moral Fortitude”

October 9, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Matt Bai penned one of 2014’s best articles, a New York Times Magazine piece about the Gary Hart scandal and what it tells us about modern politics and media. It’s an excerpt from his new book, All the Truth Is Out: The Week That Politics Went Tabloid, which delves far deeper into the subject. He’s doing an AMA at Reddit, and it breaks my heart a little that Ray Liotta currently has 70 times more questions. I understand it, but I don’t like it. Three exchanges follow.

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Question:

Do you think that a candidate’s moral fortitude should play a role in their political success?

Matt Bai:

Yes. I want moral leaders, don’t you? The question is how we measure moral fortitude. Do we measure it by a single unflattering moment, a single gaffe or stupid decision? Or do we measure it in the full context of a life and political career. If a candidate has lied to his wife, but hasn’t lied to his constituents, or ducked tough votes, or been accused of corruption, then isn’t that worth something? Moral people do immoral things. Truthful people tell lies. I think we all want to be judged with some context (when we want to be judged at all), and so should our politicians.

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Question:

I grew up in NH and witnessed many presidential candidates up close over several election cycles. Gary a Hart was easily the most impressive, decades ahead on a whole range of issues. He also gets little credit for the strength of character it took for him to buck the party crowd in Washington that was mired in the past. How do you think the world would be different if Hart had been elected President?

Matt Bai:

He would appreciate hearing that, and you would love my book. Hart himself told me that had he been elected, George W. Bush would never have become governor of Texas, and we wouldn’t have invaded Iraq. This haunts him. I can’t say how the world would have been different, but I know Hart had thought an awful lot about governing during a time of economic transformation and after the Cold War, and I think there’s a good chance he would have helped us navigate those changes sooner and better. That’s just my own gut feeling.

______________________

Question:

What institutional source of congressional gridlock do you think has been underreported on?

Matt Bai:

Always willing to look at new ideas, thanks. As for gridlock, I really feel like we don’t talk enough about the primary system and how antiquated it is in an age where fewer people want to join anything local, much less a political party. You have a system where fewer and fewer people — the hardcore ideologues — are making choices for the rest of us about who can be on the ballot, and I don’t think that’s sustainable. What happens in Congress is that the representatives are more worried about that small number of activists than they are about the policy or their broader constituency.•

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“I’m Sorry To Ruin His Life”

September 19, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

In an excellent New York Times Magazine article that completely untangles for the first time the players and particulars of the Gary Hart political scandal of 1987, Matt Bai reminds us what was lost for good when a confluence of factors brought down the front-runner for the American Presidency. Hart was an astute observer of his time, aware long before his peers that stateless terrorism and the Information Age were twin challenges that would soon require aggressive management. But his mastery of the moment was laid to waste by indiscretion. The Colorado candidate wasn’t collared only by ego, stupidity and the media’s shifting rules of engagement–when the get became more important than what was gotten, when the political became truly personal–but seemingly by a streak of common jealousy. An excerpt about a key figure who escaped notice at the time:

Dana Weems wasn’t especially hard to find, it turned out. A clothing designer who did some costume work on movies in the early 1990s, she sold funky raincoats and gowns on a website called Raincoatsetc.com, based in Hollywood, Fla. When she answered the phone after a couple of rings, I told her I was writing about Gary Hart and the events of 1987.

“Oh, my God,” she said. There followed a long pause.

“Did you make that call to The Herald?” I asked her. 

“Yeah,” Weems said with a sigh. “That was me.”

She then proceeded to tell me her story, in a way that probably revealed more about her motives than she realized. In 1987, Armandt sold some of Weems’s designs at her bikini boutique under a cabana on Turnberry Isle. Like Rice, Weems had worked as a model, though she told me Rice wasn’t nearly as successful as she was. Rice was an artificial beauty who was “O.K. for commercials, I guess.”

Weems recalled going aboard Monkey Business on the last weekend of March for the same impromptu party at which Hart and his pal Billy Broadhurst, a Louisiana lawyer and lobbyist, met up with Rice, but in her version of events, Hart was hitting on her, not on Rice, and he was soused and pathetic, and she wanted nothing to do with him, but still he followed her around the boat, hopelessly enthralled. . . .

But Donna — she had no standards, Weems told me. Weems figured Donna wanted to be the next Marilyn Monroe, sleeping her way into the inner sanctum of the White House, and that’s why she agreed to go on the cruise to Bimini. After that weekend, Donna wouldn’t shut up about Hart or give the pictures a rest. It all made Weems sick to her stomach, especially this idea of Hart’s getting away with it and becoming president. “What an idiot you are!” Weems said, as if talking to Hart through the years. “You’re gonna want to run the country? You moron!”

And so when Weems read Fiedler’s story in The Herald, she decided to call him, while Armandt stood by, listening to every word. “I didn’t realize it was going to turn into this whole firecracker thing,” she told me. It was Armandt’s idea, Weems said, to try to get cash by selling the photos, and that’s why she asked Fiedler if he might pay for them (though she couldn’t actually remember much about that part of the conversation). Weems said she hadn’t talked to either woman — Rice or Armandt — since shortly after the scandal. She lived alone and used a wheelchair because of multiple sclerosis. She was surprised her secret had lasted until now.

“I’m sorry to ruin his life,” she told me, offhandedly, near the end of our conversation. “I was young. I didn’t know it would be that way.”•

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