Gary Hart asks big questions for Democrats

He speaks to college groups about “Darwinian determinism” and “Calvinistic predestinarianism.” He expounds on “Jefferson’s sense of duty and rationality.” He has mused about “selective delegation of sovereignty.” This is not standard fare for an American politician.

But then again, Gary W. Hart was never a standard politician. He ran for the White House twice, of course. The first time, in 1984, he nearly won the Democratic nomination on a platform of new ideas that party leaders said they reviled and then, when he was safely out of the way, quietly but briskly adopted. The second time, in 1988, he began as the front-runner, only to be toppled by a double scandal — one that may have scarred the press, which drove him out of the race in a testy inquisition in a New Hampshire inn, more than it scarred him.

But that was then. It was truly a different world, when communists were in power in Moscow, when the object of Iraq’s venom was Iran, when Kim Il Sung ruled North Korea and his son was regarded as something of a cipher, when Osama bin Laden was leading Islamic insurgents against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Today, there are signs of life in the old Gary Hart, who is now gray at more than the temples and, at 66, is an unlikely but unavoidable elder statesman. He’s not running for president — he gave the notion some thought, then abandoned it — and he’s not looking for redemption. He’s looking only for a role.

He may have found one. With nothing to sell but his ideas, he is finding more than a voice. He’s finding ears.

It was Hart, for example, who introduced the phrase “homeland security” into the popular lexicon. It was Hart who warned of America’s vulnerability to terror on a grand scale. It is Hart who is warning us still. His name may prompt snickers, but in his exile Gary Hart has written seven books, traveled all over the world, pondered the changing nature of war and conflict — and earned a Ph.D. from Oxford. In his new incarnation, Hart irritates, intimidates — and illuminates. He will not be ignored.

He is worried about the nation’s security; he thinks the Pentagon has failed to adjust swiftly enough to the new forms of warfare it must conduct; he believes the Democrats have resorted to what he called in a speech this winter a “nebulous centrism.” In a book review of Fareed Zakaria’s “The Future of Freedom,” Hart offers a succinct commentary on American political culture: “The republican ideal of the founders has simply given way to one vast, ungovernable, unbalanced and greedy ‘democracy’ — in effect, Alexander Hamilton’s worst nightmare,” he writes in the current issue of Washington Monthly.

The early Gary Hart had a touch of the idealist, a touch of the crusader — and a touch of the mischief-maker. In 1984, during his remarkable insurgency, he sensed Americans’ hunger for new ways, and he luxuriated in the tumult that he caused just by saying that the party elders were corrupt captives of special interests every bit as unimaginative as the ones who held the Republicans in their thrall. The mischievous chuckle is still there — he knows that much of American politics is not quite on the level — but he is dead serious. Few men who write Oxbridge doctoral theses that deal with the Roman Republic and Jefferson’s views of civic duty are trimmers.

“As an idealist who likes to try to challenge young people’s idealism, I began to think about the ideal of the Greek city state and the Roman Republic,” he said in a conversation. “I thought about republican values and found that they were very distinct and different from the rights era in which we all grew up.”

He thought about a presidential campaign, mostly because some young admirers pushed him in that direction. They envisioned Hart running as one part Adlai Stevenson, one part John F. Kennedy, one part Woodrow Wilson. It wouldn’t be a campaign so much as a seminar. He wouldn’t try to win as much as to persuade.

It had its lure. He knew he’d face the old questions, even if he would rather talk about the end of bipolarism in world affairs than whether he had an affair so many years ago in Bimini. But he has developed a grace about the past and whatever sins it holds. Lee Hart, his wife, encouraged him to run. They’ve been married for 44 years.

But Hart knows that a presidential campaign means pollsters and fund-raisers and other odious characters, plus a lot of smarmy inquiries into his personal life. He’s also read enough political philosophy to have encountered Karl Marx’s maxim that if history repeats itself, it’s first as tragedy, then as farce. Perhaps he concluded — it’s hard to avoid this conclusion — that a modern presidential campaign diminishes its principals rather than raises principles. Besides, his is one American life with an intriguing second act. Good thing, too, because somebody in the Democratic Party has to ask the big questions.


David Shribman is a columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.