Master of Strategy Runs Afoul of Another Dimension

Gary Hart is like the drugstore cowboy working his favorite pinball machine. He stands by himself, cool as a cucumber, lighting up the board and making all the bells ring. The game doesn’t end till he runs out of quarters--or the “tilt” sign flashes.

Last week the Colorado loner was back at the arcade. A trusted aide had dropped another coin into the machine: It was “probable,” he said, that Hart would soon be back in the presidential action.

Within hours the story had hit the wires, bounced to the network news shows and to every paper in the country. Last seen, it was ricocheting and careening through the weekend talk shows.

Hart, meanwhile, had become a political missing-in-action. After denying the comeback story through another aide, he escaped the press through the green meadows of Ireland.

Brief as it was, the Hart murmur of August, 1987, displayed the man’s peculiar grip on the country’s political attention. Here he is, weeks after the Donna Rice scandal, still able to claim massive news attention and first place among Democrats in a Gallup poll.

I offer an eerie explanation for all this. Gary Hart may have been a bust as a presidential candidate, but he had a genius for strategy. He designed a candidacy so precisely tuned to the country’s wavelength that it outlived his own campaign.

Hart is a master at what political insiders call positioning. The trick is to find the most powerful issue driving the voter in any particular election year, then identify yourself with it.

In 1972 Hart managed the presidential campaign of a South Dakota senator with a liberal voting record and a voice like Liberace’s. It outflanked the party Establishment, beating Edmund Muskie, Scoop Jackson and Hubert Humphrey. The key was positioning. My one unique position, George McGovern said, is to be to the left of all of them.

Two years later Hart ran for the Senate in Colorado. With a young population moving into the state, the candidate found just the right issue: generation. It’s our turn now, his slogan shouted. “They had theirs.”

In 1984, in his first shot at the White House, Hart positioned himself as the outdoorsy alternative to Walter Mondale & Co. His was the candidacy of fresh, new ideas vs. the brain-dead party regulars. The strategy caught everyone off guard, particularly the Minnesotan. It was so deftly conceived that it came within a few Georgia primary votes of toppling Mondale and giving Hart the momentum to win nomination. Only when the momentum slowed did the spotlight shift from Hart’s seductive political profile to the man himself.

It is at this critical point that Hart’s masterful strategy came undone. What began as particular questions about his past--the disputed birth date, the controversy over his name change, etc.--shifted to broader questions of character and identity. Mondale asked, “Where’s the beef?” The country’s query was more personal: “Where’s Gary Hart?”

The irony is that even today Hart remains a formidable strategist. Better than anyone else, he knows the congested circuitry of the Democratic Party. He saw early that, to win the Democratic nomination next time, a candidacy must be positioned on the left, but mainly in a historical sense--opposition to Vietnam, aggressive support for civil rights. As far as the future is concerned, people are distrustful of leftish ideology. He needed to position himself as a tough, smart technocrat, hip to the country’s high-tech world but with a John Denver-ish bond with the Rockies: someone with a history on the left who recognizes the need for strength--in short, an American Gorbachev.

This profile still seems right on the mark. That explains why, months after he was forced to leave the race, the effect of Hart’s campaign lingers on. The Democrats have yet to recognize another candidate so custom-made to its turbulent coalition.

This is hardly to suggest that Hart was the perfect candidate. I remember sitting at breakfast with him in early 1983. There were only the two of us, and the topic was the coming presidential race. After listening to the senator earnestly discuss one of his new ideas, I suggested that recent history points to the irrelevance of such specific nostrums. First Jimmy Carter, then Ronald Reagan won because they managed to connect personally with the electorate. They talked the way the average guy was talking about the government and the country.

Hart seemed distressed at my interruption. He believed then, as now, that what really matters is the candidate’s political profile and where he positions himself on the key issues.

That was the fatal flaw in Hart’s master plan. When it comes to picking a President, Americans want to study not only the candidate’s profile but also the character who’s projecting it.