Life—while sometimes fabulous and a lot of fun—offers few sights drearier than a journalist trying to think deeply about what we like to call our “craft.” That goes double when the deep thinking is pummeled and kneaded and stretched to book-length. A few years ago Matt Bai, a political reporter for the New York Times and Yahoo News, published a book called All the Truth Is Out, about the abortive presidential campaign of Gary Hart. In 1987 Hart was a senator from Colorado and the runaway favorite to become the Democratic party’s presidential candidate the following year. His campaign collapsed when reporters caught him in a dalliance with “a young woman not his wife,” as people had stopped saying even in 1988.
Hart’s demise as a candidate is an interesting story but Bai saw in it something more: a decisive moment in the evolution of American journalism and politics. When reporters stuck their big fat noses into Hart’s personal life, Bai wrote recently, “the worlds of politics and entertainment suddenly collided. From that time on, our candidates would be treated like celebrities, with every facet of their inner lives . . . considered within the bounds of reasonable scrutiny.” Bai’s book had its strengths and weaknesses: His account of the campaign was crisp and comprehensive, but it tripped into a bog of extensive meditations of the “whither America” variety and never really recovered.
Hart’s own story didn’t have a happy ending—he’s still ticking, rather bitterly, at 81, having spent 30 years trying to recapture the public’s attention with infrequent success. The story of Bai’s ponderous book does have a happy ending, however: It fell into the hands of Jason Reitman, director of such charming and charitable films as Juno, Tully, and one of the best movies ever made about Washington, D.C., Thank You for Smoking (drawn from the best book written about modern Washington, with the same title, by Christopher Buckley). Reitman’s lighter-than-air touch managed to buoy the heavier-than-lead text and the result is a movie opening around the country this week, The Front Runner. It will win over viewers interested in the workings of journalism—hello? anyone? anyone?—but also those with a curiosity about recent political history or a thing for Hugh Jackman, who plays Hart.
Co-written by Reitman and Bai, with help from a former-political-consultant-gone-Hollywood named Jay Carson, The Front Runner doesn’t take journalism or the Hart episode as seriously as Bai’s book does. Hart’s dalliance was discovered by a team of Miami Herald reporters who staked out his townhouse for two days in the spring of 1987, on the hunch he was holed up there with his girlfriend. The stakeout is the heart of the movie, and while it’s not played entirely for laughs, the reporters do at times bear an uncanny resemblance to the Three Stooges. Best of all, the sequence plays as a parody of the seminal Washington-crisis movie, All the President’s Men: The action, such as it is, takes place in the shadows of dimly lit Washington streets over a spooky musical theme and ominous percussion. The difference, of course, is that Watergate reporters thought they were uncovering crimes against the constitutional order; the Herald’s men were trying to catch an oversexed senator with his zipper down.
In a sense this satirical treatment underscores Bai’s grand thesis: that with Hart political journalists had taken a turn from covering “the issues” as a public service to servicing the public with prurient material, feeding an unhealthy appetite for the frivolous. “When your process treats politicians like entertainers, you will inevitably get entertainers as candidates,” Bai wrote in a recent column. “It’s a process that attracts emotive performers and repels nuanced thinkers, that rewards shamelessness and discourages candor. It’s a process that takes you exactly to where we are today.”
As Bai must know, complaints like this are as old as professional journalism itself, dating back to the unhappy day when the first journalist became self-regarding enough to call his rather shabby line of work a “craft.” They presuppose a Garden from which we have all been exiled—or rather, from which we have exiled ourselves. But it’s been a long, long time since “nuanced thinkers” and men of candor flocked to politics. The hacks of Warren Harding’s day complained that his movie-star pulchritude distracted voters from his lack of smarts or judgment. Forty years later, Norman Mailer wrote an arresting essay, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” about the trivializing effects of pop culture and superficial journalism on the presidential candidacy of John Kennedy. Perhaps it’s worth noting that both these presidents had zipper problems to rival Hart’s. So did Mailer, now that I think of it.
Liberal Democrats in particular have a need to see their political heroes as something more than politicians—they must be intellectuals in the bargain. This line of comically inflated reputations runs from Adlai Stevenson through Al Gore and Mario Cuomo up to Bill Bradley and Barack Obama. John Kennedy was so intellectually gifted he managed to win a Pulitzer Prize for a book he hired someone else to write. If a politician looks earnest enough, is seen with the right book on the campaign trail, and tosses off a quotation from Aeschylus or Reinhold Niebuhr (extra credit for his brother Richard), a certain element of the electorate, including many craftsmen in the press, will puddle up in admiration.
With his brow forever furrowed and the satchel of Tolstoy novels he carried on the campaign plane, Hart was squarely in the Stevenson-Kennedy tradition, which makes his removal from politics all the more painful for Democrats like Bai. “He was widely acknowledged to possess one of the great political minds of his time,” Bai writes in his book, which tells you all you need to know about the people who do the wide acknowledging in our country. Again, the movie is at once soberer, cannier, and funnier. In The Front Runner Hart is a geyser of platitudes. “The world changes when young people give a damn,” he tells a group of volunteers, who are polite enough not to point out that the world is going to change whether they give a damn or not. When staffers object to Hart’s choice of a remote mountainside as the location for a big campaign speech, he snaps: “If we want to reframe the debate, we can reframe the location.” Spoken more like a realtor than a visionary.
I’m sure The Front Runner will be the occasion for much Trump-bashing—what isn’t these days? Democrats will note the bitter irony that Hart’s career ended over a single instance of adultery while Trump’s has flourished against a well-established history of much worse. Trump Republicans, I suppose, will be reluctant to engage the point. But all sides will have to admit the Democrats won this one. As recently as 20 years ago, they insisted that the sex lives of politicians were irrelevant to politics. At last Republicans have come to agree. The Front Runner doesn’t resolve the issue and doesn’t try to, which makes it all the more welcome.
