Hartache

This isn’t the first time that this take has been ventured—the late Richard Ben Cramer made Hart the hero of What It Takes, his 1992 door-stopping account of the 1988 presidential race and its many participants—but this is the first stand-alone effort, and also the first to be seen against the backdrop of the collapse of the presidency of Barack Obama, who is in some ways a Hart-like politician, though their failings are not all alike. Whatever his faults, Obama would have dropped dead many times over before he posed in a Monkey Business T-shirt with a blonde in his lap, but as political phenomena they share some points of contact: the phenomenal rise, the aspirational note, the appeal to the hopes of a new generation, and the claim to great brains plus the stylistic appeal of a pop culture icon, which played to the wish of a key demographic to be trendy and grave at one time. Each got his start in the Iowa caucuses, when he sandbagged an older and more baggy-eyed veteran presumed to be the frontrunner: Obama in 2008 when he stunned Hillary Clinton, and Hart in 1984 when he finished second to former vice president Walter F. Mondale and went on to savage him in New Hampshire only a few weeks after that. What else and what more may they have in common? Let us go back to that long-ago season, to look for what we can find.

To begin with, each burst on the scene as a quasi-messiah, a sage and a rock star in one. “Hart is no longer simply a candidate. .  .  . He is a political phenomenon—in part a craze, but also something beyond that,” wrote Elizabeth Drew in the New Yorker on April 12, 1984. “Nothing like what has happened in the past week has ever happened before in American politics. No candidate has ever been so quickly transformed into such a political force .  .  . or become the -subject of so much excitement. .  .  . The very fact that numerous people now tell reporters they favor Hart even though they don’t know much, or even anything, about him, is part of the phenomenon. He is young, good looking and fresh, and offers himself as someone who will change the ‘old ways.’ ” 

Does this sound familiar? Hart was the “ink blot candidate” onto whom people could project their own aspirations, and Obama would describe himself as a Rorschach test in which people could see what they wished. Hart was telegenic, and so was Obama, both slim and supple men who wore their clothes well. “His high cheekbones and lean face are just right for the cameras, and his cool demeanor is just right for the medium,” Drew said of Hart. “Americans love something new—an attractive and articulate something new. .  .  . Americans are addicted to the idea that things can be better. .  .  . By condemning the old ways .  .  . he is suggesting that there is a .  .  . reason things have not gone better, and that he can change that.” Does this sound familiar? It does. 

“The coverage was fawning,” wrote Paul Taylor, the reporter for the Washington Post who in May 1987 would ask Hart the famous adultery question. “Not since the Beatles,” he wrote in See How They Run, “had any new face so quickly captivated the national culture. Indeed, the velocity of Hart’s rise in the polls was unprecedented in American political history. .  .  . By one estimate, he was picking up a million new supporters a day, many of whom had no idea .  .  . why he had become their man.” Obama inspired similar feelings. Each claimed to speak for a new day, a new age, and a new generation, and to represent not just a new kind of politics but a moral renewal that could cleanse and redeem the world. The coalitions were similar: Hart drew on the Atari Democrats, as Drew said, “the young and the upper-middle-class trendy,” or as Hart put it, “The core group is in its twenties to forties, generally middle to upper middle income—teachers, paraprofessionals of all races. I’m beginning to inherit post-Great Society black and Hispanic leaders who have a feeling of political independence that hasn’t yet been described.” Each believed he was born to head a great movement, and to seize a key moment in time. If Obama said, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” Hart claimed to speak for a new generation. If Obama was “the One,” referred to with almost biblical reverence, Hart had a strain of this, too. He talked “mystically about himself,” Drew wrote in 1984, “saying that it was his ‘destiny’ to become president.” If in 2008 Obama said, “I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions,” in 1987 Hart said, “This is not just a political race, it’s really a cause,” and three years before that he had been still more audacious: “The cause is the redemption of this land.”

Hart and Obama each had an iron-clad faith in his own claim to genius, and many believed them, partly because they looked like the kind of people journalists thought should be intelligent, and partly because their sort of intelligence—glib, facile, and good at the right sort of patter—was the same sort that these journalists had. Thus presidential historian Michael Beschloss called Obama (before he took office) “the smartest man ever elected as president,” and Bai takes Hart at his own self-estimation, as a “brilliant and serious man, perhaps the most visionary political mind of his generation .  .  . the flat-out smartest politician I had ever met.” Hart’s gift, as Bai put it, “was to connect politics and culture and theology and technology seamlessly and all at once—to draw from all available data points .  .  . a larger picture of where everything was headed. .  .  . Hart himself would tell me, ‘I have only one talent. I can see farther ahead than most people. And I can put pieces together in constructive ways, both to avoid disaster and to capitalize on change.’ ”

Alas, as it happened, “avoiding disaster” was not one of Hart’s strong points, and the man many thought capable of saving the world and the country proved a genius at destroying himself. Hart worshipped John Kennedy and imitated him down to his gestures and weakness for women, seeming to think he was back in the ’50s and ’60s, when presidents’ affairs and those of their peers had gone unremarked on, or perhaps in the days of the 1940 election, when Wendell Willkie made campaign speeches from his girlfriend’s apartment and Franklin Roosevelt’s train would make stops in New Jersey so the president could see his old flame. Hart’s first mistake was to ignore the extent to which Chappaquiddick and Watergate had collapsed the old walls between public and private, increasing suspicion of public officials and making dissembling seem the worst of all sins. His second mistake was to lie, which turned his private life into a public and character issue, into which the press felt entitled to dig. In Whose Broad Stripes and Bright Stars, their book on the 1988 contest, Jack Germond and Jules Witcover give a detailed list of the people Hart lied to, including reporters, old friends, and campaign consultants who had agreed to work for him only after being assured by him or his allies that the rumors about his many adventures with women were either false or else a thing of the past.  

Nonetheless, one woman refused to join the campaign, saying, “Everybody here knows that he’s fooling around with a woman in Florida, and that he came out of a bar a few nights ago with another guy and two other women. .  .  . I can’t work for him.” He assured aides that nothing was wrong even as he was arranging a weekend in Washington with the woman in Florida. Reporters from two different news organizations warned his campaign they were thinking of tailing him, which perhaps was in Hart’s mind when he dared E. J. Dionne to “follow me around. I don’t care. I’m serious .  .  . go ahead. They’ll be very bored.” The New York Times story with this quote in it hit the newsstands the day after the Miami Herald, on a tip from a reader, had put a tail on him and seen him entering his townhouse in Washington with a beautiful blonde. He seemed to be thunderstruck when this occurred, and, instead of refusing to answer questions, reeled off a series of answers that sounded insane. What was his relationship with the woman who came out of his townhouse? “I’m not involved in any relationship.” Was the woman now in the townhouse? “She may or may not be.” Why had Hart and the woman entered the townhouse? “The obvious reason is I’m being set up.” This from the greatest political mind of his generation. 

Hart never accepted responsibility, blaming insidious forces who feared him because he was a rebel. In a 1993 article in the New Yorker, David Remnick reported, “A prominent Washington journalist once told me that Hart, after a couple of drinks in an airplane five years ago, described his own fall in 1987 as a conspiracy of power elites: the military establishment, the energy industry—in short, all the institutions he intended to reform as president.” An old friend would later tell Remnick, “I came to believe that Gary Hart felt that the fate of Gary Hart was that he was destined to be president of the United States, and he was not bound by the disciplines that impinge on the rest of us. .  .  . I believed he felt himself in a way to be divine.”

Hart left the race on May 8, 1987, giving a speech in which he described himself as a leader stabbed in the back in the heat of the battle, and vowed that his cause would live on. Germond and Witcover saw it quite differently: “The Hart swan song was an incredible exercise in self-justification and .  .  . self-delusion [recalling] Nixon’s infamous ‘last press conference’ in November 1962.” And indeed, Hart did get an unwanted note of sympathy from the disgraced former president: “Nixon was congratulating Hart for behaving exactly as Nixon would have done.” Hart looked at things differently, calling his fall “an accident, a car crash in history,” in which the worst casualty was not his career but the country’s loss. “Gary feels guilty, because he feels like he could have been a very good president,” Hart’s wife would tell Bai. “It’s what he could have done for the country that I think bothers him.” He told Remnick that he felt guilty during the Gulf war in 1991. Had he been president, he would have been less belligerent—“If thousands of American lives had been lost, I would have felt personally responsible.” And he later told Bai he also felt responsible for the Iraq war launched by George W. Bush in 2003, because, if he, Hart, had defeated George H. W. Bush in 1988, Bush’s son would have never gone into politics. The burden of this seemed to weigh on him heavily: “You have to live with that, you know?”

According to Bai, Hart didn’t think much of Bill Clinton either, expressing contempt for his triangulation, which he believed was a “cynical strategy, a way of simply stealing the conservative argument that liberalism was dead, rather than breathing life back into the liberal ideal.” But it turned out that there was a politician whom Hart did admire: In December 2006 he reviewed a new book by an aspiring candidate, saying, “In a very short time, Barack Obama has made himself into a figure of national interest, curiosity, and some undefined hope.” Reading this, the Economist deduced Hart had seen his younger self in Obama, and it turned out that he had. 

“Through some miracle of timing, luck, and good fortune, Barack Obama has seized the moment,” Hart blogged on the Huffington Post on January 14, 2008. “He is not operating on the same plane as ordinary politicians. .  .  . His instinct for the moment and the times is orders of magnitude more powerful than the experience claimed by others. .  .  . Some see him as the walking embodiment of internationalism, ready to restore an honorable and respected place for America in the world. And they are right.” The torch had been passed, and presumably Obama would now enact the Hart vision, sadly dormant in the wasted years since his embarrassment. Six years later, America was less respected everywhere in the world than when Obama took office, Democrats running for office were fleeing their leader, the threat from the Middle East was greater than ever, and all the gains made by the surge in the war in Iraq had been carelessly thrown away.

Is it fair to assume that the aborted Hart presidency would have become a similar train wreck? No, but it may be possible to look at traits the two men have in common, and draw some hints from those. “Hart’s Senate record is not marked by a great deal of success,” Elizabeth Drew wrote in her 1984 volume. “His lack of achievement .  .  . stems in part from his by now much discussed disinclination to work in concert with colleagues to form coalitions. Hart has often seemed more interested in making a point.” Obama too showed no interest whatever in bargaining, and, like Hart, was better with words than with deeds. Like Hart, Obama scored poorly in “knows how to work and play well with others,” and seemed to have only one technique for governing: He would give a big speech that created a groundswell for what he was selling, and Congress would fix the details. When the groundswell didn’t occur, as in health care reform, he relied on his overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress, along with a great many arms and rules twisted and broken, to ram the bill through. When this created the inevitable backlash and loss of the House, he turned to executive orders, which created still more opposition, and sulked. When he lost the Senate along with the House, he dug in still further, projecting the sense that it was beneath him to bargain, and that there were no ideas coming from others that were worth his attention and time. Would Hart, whose contempt for rivals was legend, have proceeded differently? 

Another trait the two have in common is that they tend to lie. Hart, of course, lied about things that he thought should be private (but which had a huge effect on the fortunes of others), while Obama lies about things that affect the public (“if you like your plan, you can keep your plan”) or that involve life and death issues for the people involved (the attack in Benghazi was caused by a video). In these cases, it’s hard to tell if Obama is lying on purpose, or if he is just misinformed, or talking about things that he thinks ought to happen, or making assessments and/or predictions (about ISIS being “junior varsity”) that sadly just turn out not to be true. Whatever the reasons, these things pile up, and by 2014, after the catastrophic rollout of Obamacare and the chaos in the Middle East from his cut-and-run policy, the greatest orator of his generation found himself in a world where no one believed a word that he said. Obama would say, of course, that he meant well, as Hart would say he lied about things that were nobody else’s business; but in that case the proper response is to simply say “none of your business,” and not to embark on a series of whoppers that embarrass your backers and friends. 

Trait number three is an indifference to others, particularly those in their service or employ. Remnick cites a friend of Hart who went on the air to defend him at the height of the furor and later found out he was used: “So I went on television and got hung out to dry saying that I had known Gary Hart for seventeen years and I believed him. Now I think he did lie. I was very angry. What really made me angry was that he could let all those people pin their hopes on him and then not have the personal discipline to make his candidacy viable.” Obama showed a similar lack of concern for the many members of Congress whom he forced into unplanned and unwanted early retirement as the price of pushing his very unpopular health care proposal through Congress. A party leader is supposed to care about those in his party, but Obama thought their careers a small price to pay for his legacy—which so far remains deeply unpopular and has caused staggering losses for his fellow Democrats in not one but two midterms, and which may yet be undone in the courts.

Trait number four, which relates to the others, is that nothing is ever their fault. Hart is on record several times tracing his fall to the machinations of various sinister forces, from the armed forces to the energy companies, to people who still were anti-McGovern (Hart had managed his 1972 campaign), to people in the campaigns of his rival Democrats, angry and jealous because he was just so darned much smarter than they. To Obama, bad things always seem to spring up for no reason related to him: The Tea Party movement that revived the Republicans’ fortunes had nothing to do with the debt, the deficit, or the way he twisted the rules to push his health care proposals through Congress; the sudden appearance of ISIS had nothing to do with his Syria blunders, compounded by his careless decision to pull all of our troops from Iraq. But messiahs don’t make mistakes, nor are they obliged to think about others, nor are they bound by the rules (such as those about lying) that serve to constrain lesser men.

Trait number five is the fact that for all of their vaunted intelligence, both frequently appeared not all that bright. In accounts of the time, Hart was perhaps the only person in the political world who failed to realize that posing in Bimini with a blonde in his lap was not the best move for a possible president; just as Obama was the only person in his administration who thought leaving Iraq when he did would not be catastrophic or that passing a huge bill with a consensus against it could be seen as a really smart move. The trouble they both had in dealing with common sense matters suggests their brilliance was not much more than a glib line of patter, a knack for addressing the world in the ways that elites found familiar, encased in a package of Style-page glamour, as fit the demands of the day. As Elizabeth Drew had seen in the moment, “Hart may have drawn young voters less by the summoning up of the social activists than by his cool, modern, hip demeanor, his non-old hat political style, and the fact that he was not Mondale.” In short, it all came down to glitz.

Glitz is the downfall of some on the left who assess their worth, and that of others, by the measure of two different things: how much they appear to be saintly and wise in the way of the politically correct creed of the moment, and how cool they appear to be. Scratching one of these itches will take you far with some liberals (“Madly for Adlai”), but scratch both and you have the crowds and the frenzies that made the spring of 1984 and the entirety of 2008 so enthralling: the belief that the savior is here, and looks like a Ralph Lauren model, the man you wished you could be.  

The problem is that the type turns out to not wear well in politics, whether in the six-year deflation of Barack Obama, or the six-day implosion of Hart. The next time another such messiah-cum-brain-cum-Condé Nast darling knocks on the door of the Democrats (and there will be a next time), they should, for the sake of themselves and the country, nod at him sweetly and show him the door.

Noemie Emery is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and a columnist for the Washington Examiner.