Hart and Danger

Gary Hart of Colorado, once considered by one and all to be the “front-runner” for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988, always was a strange politician.

He was--and surely the use of the past tense is inescapable--the antithesis of a normal politician. Normal politicians ask the voters to trust them--if not for the warmth of their hearts and the sincerity of their smiles, at least for the integrity of their persons. Hart acted as if indifferent to trust.

Twice, in 1984 and in 1987, he rose toward the presidency in a vacuum, pulled to the top by the lack, in the earlier campaign, of a credible alternative to Walter F. Mondale, and, in the later, by the absence of substantial and well-known opponents. Both times he indeed drew backers who spoke for him with passion, but they usually spent no little time assuring their potential converts that there really was a man with a soul behind those cold blue eyes.

As the search for his identity intensified in 1987, going by the political shorthand of the “character question,” Hart stubbornly and self-destructively resisted playing the game. An excellent example of why he was considered “remote” and “aloof” was presented by E. J. Dionne Jr. in the New York Times magazine last Sunday, by coincidence the day the Miami Herald sprang the trap door of the political gallows that Hart had constructed for himself. Dionne perceptively offered him the opportunity to talk about aspects of the views of Plato and Dostoevsky, two thinkers who Hart had said influenced him, but Hart, always intellectual and often called intelligent, firmly turned the questions away.

Hart said it was all innocent, his consorting with a younger woman, but if innocent, not normal for an ordinary man truly wanting to preserve his troubled marriage, and most certainly not normal for a candidate for President for whom the old “character” issue was rapidly crystallizing into the issue of “womanizing.”

Hart, one of his campaign aides told Dionne, liked “to court danger.” In 1987 he courted danger, and in the end embraced it.