Needs to Persuade Electorate He Was Victim of Unfairness : Attack on Media Seen as Hart’s Best Issue

Although Gary Hart has vowed that his resurrected presidential campaign will be about new ideas, most political experts believe the former Colorado senator is really running on one of the oldest ideas of all: resentment against the press.

To win supporters, political professionals say, the former Democratic front-runner must persuade people that his personal conduct does not bear on his public character and, further, that he was a victim of unfair press coverage seven months ago when reports about extramarital relationships led him to withdraw from the race.

“The press is the best issue he has going for him,” said William Schneider, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a political consultant to the Los Angeles Times. “It is much better than enlightened engagement or military reform,” two of the “new ideas” on which Hart said his campaign is based.

Personal Queries Avoided

And, so far, it appears to be working. After an initial spate of questions in the first hours after Hart reopened his campaign Tuesday, reporters have avoided the personal questions. And Hart and his wife, Lee, have for the most part avoided taking questions of any kind.

The subject came up once when a student in New Hampshire asked Hart about his personal life, and again when another student in Sioux Falls, S.D., got up to say he thought it was terrible how the media had treated Hart.

When a reporter asked Lee Hart if she was surprised that the personal questions were not coming up, she answered: “The people of this country aren’t interested in the personal questions. It’s the people in your profession.”

‘Political Sideshow’

Yet Hart is enjoying enormous publicity. And some of it so far has seemed quite fawning. After following Hart to schools, where students are too young to vote but respond enthusiastically to the appearance of a celebrity, the New York Times reported Friday:

“The Washington experts may be dismissing Gary Hart’s ‘citizens’ campaign’ as a strange political sideshow. But, out in America, many people appear to like the no-frills, no-apologies effort, and that is making some of the other Democrats very nervous.”

Implicit Challenge

The challenge implicit in Hart’s campaign is not restricted to the press.

“He’s going after the whole institutional framework of modern presidential campaigning,” including the pollsters, fund-raisers and political consultants, said Frank Greer, a prominent Democratic consultant. “Of course, that is a necessity because he has no staff and no money to hire any. So he decided to make a virtue out of the necessity, and I think that has populist appeal.”

Running against the press is a familiar tactic for controversial politicians. It was an important theme in the presidential campaigns of George C. Wallace and a strain in the campaigns and presidency of Richard M. Nixon. More recently, it has been a favorite theme of embattled Arizona Gov. Evan Mecham.

The irony in Hart’s case, however, is that to run a campaign as he intends without much money or organization, he must rely almost entirely on attracting free press coverage.

‘Wants It Both Ways’

“He wants to have it both ways,” said Howard Simons, director of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard. “To run against the press you have to use the press.”

For the most part, despite enjoying enormous coverage, Hart has managed to avoid answering questions. He has not held any press conferences and departs without taking questions at his campaign stops.

After a reporter from the Los Angeles Times, sitting across the aisle from Hart on a plane, tried to strike up conversation by asking, “How’s it going?” Hart campaign worker Sue Casey came up and said: “Thank you for asking just one question.”

The Harts then closed their eyes and pretended to be asleep.

Hart has laced his speeches and appearances with jabs at the press, as he did in his appearance Tuesday night on ABC’s “Nightline”:

“No one owns the nomination and no one owns the right to run for President--including, if I may say so, the political press of this country,” Hart said.

‘A Wave of Sentiment’

“He is riding a wave of sentiment in this country that the press has gone too far,” said Carter Askew, a political consultant who has worked with many of the nation’s leading Democrats. Public opinion polls suggest that Americans are troubled by the media’s recent disclosures about plagiarism by former Democratic candidate Joseph R. Biden Jr., marijuana smoking by former Supreme Court nominee Douglas H. Ginsburg and the premarital conception of Republican candidate Pat Robertson’s first child.

“But, if the press backs off, they will be confirming that yes, this was unfair--and Gary Hart was the victim,” Askew said.

Some papers do appear cautious at least in their public pronouncements about how they will deal with Hart’s new candidacy.

The Miami Herald, whose report that Hart had spent a weekend with a Miami actress and model led to Hart’s withdrawal last May, issued a terse statement:

“We reported the story last May. We will report the story now. That is our role and our only role. We have no further comment.”

Post Withheld a Story

The Washington Post also has kept its head down. Only hours before Hart dropped out, the Post informed him that it was preparing a story about another extramarital liaison involving Hart and a Washington woman. The paper chose not to run the story after Hart withdrew because, it said, he was no longer a candidate.

On Wednesday, after Hart’s resurrection, the Post ran five paragraphs briefly outlining what information it had, a decision made, according to the Post staff, after lengthy discussions. The Post has refused to comment further.

(That story took an additional twist Friday, when the estranged wife of a former Democratic senator, saying she was addressing widespread rumors that she was the woman that the Post referred to but did not name, denied that she had ever had a romantic relationship with Hart. The woman, Terry Tydings, who is involved in divorce proceedings with former Sen. Joseph D. Tydings (D-Md.), made the statement in an interview with a Washington TV station.)

Koppel Criticized

Some journalists have criticized “Nightline” host Ted Koppel for not pressing when Hart declared personal matters off limits. Koppel devoted his Tuesday program to an interview with the candidate.

Dennis A. Britton, deputy managing editor of The Times, said his paper would follow and report “very vigorously” any tips it had about Hart’s personal conduct that the paper thought would raise questions about Hart’s character.

Yet, how to report about Hart’s novel candidacy is a delicate issue, and this week it took up nearly a third of a three-hour Times political staff meeting. After hearing a list of possible stories about Hart that the staff was considering, Times consultant Schneider said, “You’re running his campaign for him.”

And at least some journalists feel the press should not cover Hart the same way it did seven months ago.

Chicago Editor’s View

“The legitimacy of Hart’s personal life as an issue has passed, I think,” argued Chicago Tribune Editor Jim Squires. “The second time the man bites a dog, it isn’t as big a story.”

If Squires had a tip that Hart was commiting adultery, “I would probably follow up on the tip just to see if it were true, but what I would do with it if I got it is another question.”

But part of Squires’ reasoning is that he thinks Hart’s candidacy is something of a sideshow. “If Gary Hart won two or three primaries and looked like he might have enough delegates to threaten for the nomination, that might refocus attention on the Rice incident.”

“The voters versus the reporters--who should make the choice?” That theme is already coming out “loud and clear,” said Stephen Hess, Brookings Institution press scholar. “He (Hart) reads the polls and sees what a marvelous whipping boy the press can be. And he does it because it has strategic value to him.”

‘Posture of Outsider’

Some consultants feel that running a campaign against the press and the rest of the political Establishment appeals to Hart emotionally.

“He is most comfortable in the posture of the outsider, Gary Hart versus the world,” said consultant Askew. “Now he is free of all the trappings.”

Several political experts see parallels between Hart’s tactics and Nixon’s. Refusing to answer reporters’ questions on the campaign trail is a technique Nixon used with great effectiveness in 1968, Hess said.

And his more overt attacks on the press while President also proved effective for a while, some journalists said. “When Spiro Agnew attacked the press, the press reacted badly and ran for cover,” said Simons, the Nieman Foundation director, who is a former managing editor of the Washington Post.

‘A Ready Audience’

“Every President at times has attacked the press and found a ready audience out there for it,” Simons said.

Press attacks were more central in the campaigns of George Wallace in 1968 and 1972. “Wallace would get up in front of the crowd and point to the out-of-state reporters,” recalled Roy Reed, a former New York Times political reporter and now professor of journalism at the University of Arkansas. “ ‘There’s the New York Times,’ he’d say, ‘There’s Newsweek.’ He would get the crowd on his side. It was very effective.”

Los Angeles Times Washington Bureau Chief Jack Nelson recalled a day when one of Wallace’s bodyguards even warned him that the candidate planned to come down hard on Nelson in his speech that night. And then the governor asked that the bodyguard watch out for Nelson’s welfare, just in case the crowd got nasty.

This year in particular, “I think Hart is tapping into a well that has some water in it,” said Bob Beckel, who ran Walter F. Mondale’s campaign for President in 1984. “The problem with this whole thing is we are treading here on political territory where we have never been before. We ought to be very careful about drawing any conclusions.”

A Limited Constituency

Yet others believe that running a campaign against the press can attract only a limited, if passionate, constituency. “He becomes the candidate people talk about rather than vote for,” said Hess. “He can get plenty of press and even a respectable poll rating. But George Wallace was irrelevant. He couldn’t win, only be a spoiler. Hart is a man who says he wants to be taken seriously.”

“It’s as if Frank Sinatra or Warren Beatty were running for President,” said political scientist Ben J. Wattenberg of the American Enterprise Institute. “He has celebrity status. It’ll be good for press coverage for a month.”

Schneider argued that, although he considers Hart unelectable, he could succeed in the primaries by running against the press and avoiding the question of character. Although people consider character important in general elections, they do not consider it so clearly in primaries.

‘A Laughing Stock’

New Republic Editor Michael Kinsley does not believe the Hart strategy will work. “No one is going to fall for it,” Kinsley said. “He is going nowhere. He is going to be a laughing stock.”

When Hart dropped out, “there wasn’t a voice missing,” Kinsley added. “There was just one less candidate. There hasn’t been this huge teeming in the land, ‘Where is Gary Hart? Oh, how we miss him!’ ”

Others said the reason is simpler than that. Gary Hart cannot win by running against the press and political Establishment because that campaign is predicated on Hart’s basic failure to understand what has happened to him.

“He doesn’t understand that the press didn’t run him out,” said consultant Askew. “What ran him out was his own actions, his own recklessness.”

Staff writer Robert Gillette contributed to this story.