All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid (36 page)

Of course, it wasn’t as if the Republicans desperate to unseat Obama had found some serious thinker on their side to run against him. Leading up to the 2012 election, most of the Washington Republicans I talked to, who were trying to hold off a wave of Palin-inspired, Tea Party extremism that threatened to overrun the party, thought their strongest candidate was someone like Indiana’s popular governor, Mitch Daniels. A free-market-loving conservative who had served as budget director in the Bush administration, Daniels was a plainspoken intellectual who argued passionately for a generational shift in the country’s thinking about policy. Specifically, he wanted to reform entitlement programs and the tax code for a new century, and he called for a more tolerant and inclusive Republican Party—even when speaking to its more conservative factions. He was, arguably, the most impressive politician in Republican politics, and one of the very few who had the potential to unite besieged moderates and enraged conservatives.

But Daniels had other issues to consider in the age of tabloid politics. The saga of his marriage was the kind of thing you might read in a
Modern Love
column; his wife had left him at one point for a doctor and moved away, only to return to Daniels and their four daughters years later. By all accounts, they had rebuilt a solid family life, and for anyone who spent much time reflecting on the complexities of the human heart, there was actually something inspiring about it all. But Daniels’s wife was said to dread the inevitable forensic study of her personal journey that would accompany a presidential campaign, and Daniels finally said, with characteristic bluntness and evident sadness, that his family had effectively vetoed the idea of his running.

No amount of lobbying from Washington could change his mind, and Daniels ultimately settled for the presidency of Purdue. Like a lot of other thoughtful men with imperfect pasts who had considered the presidency in the years since Hart’s downfall, Daniels had
probably concluded that the process would reduce the totality of his career and personal life to a single embarrassing episode that he and his family would be forced to relive, over and over again, even if he won. Even if he were willing to endure that for the chance of making history, his wife and daughters apparently were not.

Instead, after flirting with a succession of less than serious alternatives, Republican primary voters finally accepted the reality that their leadership had managed to swallow some months earlier—that their party’s candidate would be Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor. It would have been hard to make up a candidate who better typified what presidential politics—and, really, national politics as a whole—had now become than Romney, a wealthy businessman who outwardly looked the part of a president but who exuded a vast inner reservoir of nothingness. Too dull and earnest to be in any way vulnerable on the character issue, far too cautious to offer any ideas that might be objectionable to any of his own constituencies (or, really, anything that could fairly be called an idea at all), Romney was more a figurehead than an actual candidate—an actor hired to deliver someone else’s message, like the guy in the airline video who tells you to watch your flight attendant so you know how to float on your seat cushion.

Romney offered fewer lengthy interviews in his campaign than any candidate in memory, and even fewer genuine insights into his political worldview. Like most national journalists who wrote about the contest, and probably even some who rode his bus and followed his campaign closely, I never got within twenty feet of the man. Reporters and columnists, who were by now used to the character routine, happily expounded on some embarrassing facts about Romney and what they might tell us about his true nature: he had once driven with a sick dog strapped in a cage on the top of his car, and he had apparently acted the bully during an ugly episode in high school. But in the end, probably no revelation about Romney doomed his candidacy as much as the total absence of revelation that characterized it. His website was full of platitudes and vague positions, but when it came to any sense of the underlying convictions that would define his presidency, he was simply the least known and
least knowable nominee in modern history—the logical end, perhaps, to what Hart’s downfall and the ensuing era of destructive coverage had wrought.

The famous Dubliner, which bills itself as “America’s premier Irish pub,” opened on Capitol Hill in 1974, the same year that Gary Hart drove his two-door family Oldsmobile clear across the country and took his seat in the Senate just a few blocks away. On a balmy September night almost four decades later, Hart and I sat at a back table in the Dubliner, talking over what had happened in the intervening years.

Hart had just come from the airport and looked dapper in a suit and tie. He was in town for a meeting of a task force on strategy he was chairing for Kerry, who had recently been named Obama’s secretary of state, and in the morning he would meet privately with Kerry to discuss the chaos in Syria, among other issues. This was one of two such panels over which Hart, at seventy-seven, now quietly and ably presided, the other being an advisory board on national security for the new defense secretary, Chuck Hagel. He had accepted that such a role was as close to elder statesmanship as he was going to get in this, the final act of his public career, and it was not without usefulness or intellectual challenge.

I reminded Hart of what he had said back in 1987, during the cathartic rant that formally ended his campaign and infuriated his critics in the press—that a system bent on destroying people’s integrity would ultimately destroy itself, that politics would become just another sport staged for our entertainment. I wondered if he thought his prediction had come to pass.

Hart shrugged sadly. Whatever other emotions he may have felt when he looked back over the years, he had long since given up on the prospect of vindication. When he thought back on it now, he said, the two words that became most prevalent in the political media after 1987 were “scrutiny” and “scandal.” Scrutiny, he said, became an excuse for going through your telephone logs from a hotel you’d stayed in, or checking which movies you’d rented, back
in the days when people did such things. And scandal as a concept became omnipresent and overused—a deplorable word.

“A scandal, to me, is a child living in poverty,” Hart said quietly. “An elderly person without medicine. Unemployed workers. Those are scandals.” This was the kind of rhetoric one sometimes heard from syrupy politicians these days, but there was no performance in the way Hart said it. “People’s sex lives or their personal lives are scandals only in the sense of tabloid journalism, but not in the sense of ethics,” he said. “They’re not bribery. They’re not some under-the-table exchange of money, buying votes. Those, I suppose, would be real political scandals. At least that’s what they were called throughout most of American history.”

I asked Hart if he had been right to suggest, back in 1987, that if we continued in the direction we were going, we would end up with the leaders we deserved. He paused for a long moment.

“I’ll let the record speak for itself,” he said finally. “The Congress and the Senate today is not the one I joined in 1975.” He tossed out the names of some of his colleagues back then: Mansfield, Muskie, Mathias, Jackson, Javits, Case. “I just don’t think the caliber and quality of members of Congress, generally, is what it was in those days.”

We talked about the issues that Hart thought would—or at least should—be central in the 2016 campaign: groping the way toward a new fiscal policy, redefining America’s role as a global power, setting a course toward energy independence. These were, of course, the same issues that Hart had evangelized and thought deeply about back in the 1980s and had been talking about ever since, and yet little about them had fundamentally changed or been settled. One of the core problems, as Hart saw it, is that even the best and boldest political leaders no longer believe they can make complex ideas understood through a media obsessed with personalities and scandals. And if you couldn’t utilize the machinery of persuasion, then it was hard to do anything but talk to the people who already agreed with you.

“The genius of democracy, in my mind, is the ability of an individual to sense the temper and the mood of an electorate and to
respond to it and to help shape it,” Hart told me. “And once that’s gone, once a leader loses confidence in his ability to shape and mold, in a positive sense, public opinion and attitudes, there is no leadership.”

Occasionally during this conversation, the last in a series of formal and informal interviews over several years, Hart stole a quick glance toward the bar. Hart’s son, John, had chosen the Dubliner for us to meet because in a few minutes a handful of Hart alumni would be meeting at the pub for a reunion of sorts, over several rounds of Hart’s favorite whiskey, Jameson.

This was the kind of thing Hart relished. His impact as a politician may have been lost through the years, but as a spotter of talent and an inspiration to the brightest minds of the boomer vanguard, probably no public figure alive could claim to rival Hart’s legacy. It was almost certainly Hart’s most lasting achievement, and the one in which he took the most pride—the list of young, idealistic Democrats he had mentored during those heady years as a national figure who had gone on to distinguished careers not only in politics, but as purveyors of social change.

Martin O’Malley, who as a law student had driven Hart through the South and Plains on that last, funereal stretch as a candidate in 1988 (and who would soon slip into the Dubliner, virtually unnoticed, after debating Texas governor Rick Perry on
Crossfire
in a studio down the block), was now Maryland’s governor. Billy Shore, one of the more universally admired men in Washington, had founded and grown Share Our Strength, the nation’s premier anti-hunger organization and a model for social entrepreneurship. John Emerson, in addition to serving in the Clinton White House, had become a venture capitalist and major Democratic fundraiser, and as Hart and I sat at the Dubliner, he was assuming his new post as ambassador to Germany. Jeanne Shaheen, who as a grassroots organizer had helped orchestrate Hart’s stunning victory in New Hampshire in 1984, was now that state’s senior senator and former governor. Doug Wilson, who had been Hart’s principal foreign policy aide, had just left his second senior stint at the Defense Department, this time as assistant secretary for public affairs.

Another Hart aide from back in the day, Alan Khazei, cofounded City Year, which became the inspiration for Clinton’s AmeriCorps program. The late Eli Segal, who had run Hart’s fundraising operation in 1987, had been the first CEO of AmeriCorps’ parent program, the Corporation for National and Community Service. Sue Casey, the trusted advisor who spirited Donna Rice out of Washington, later served on the Denver City Council and ran for mayor. Kevin Sweeney, Hart’s press secretary in 1987, became a leading consultant in the field of corporate responsibility. Kathy Bushkin Calvin, who was Hart’s press secretary in 1984, now served as president of the United Nations Foundation. And on went the list, which Hart could proudly recite.

Not all of these Hart alums kept in touch with the boss (although a substantial number still called and emailed regularly). Not all had managed to get beyond the resentment they felt at his having acted recklessly and squandered their faith, just as he had never fully gotten beyond his own feelings of intense regret. But to an astonishing degree, most of these former aides, who were now nearing their own retirements, still thought of themselves principally as “Hart people” and would describe themselves that way for the rest of their lives.

One question remained unanswered as we sat at the Dubliner, a piece of unfinished business that lingered in the space between us, as it had now through years of uncomfortably personal conversations about the events of 1987. Hart had pointed out to me many times that his was the only political sex scandal in which “both parties”—that was how he referred to himself and Donna Rice—had denied, then and ever after, the existence of “a relationship.” But he did not define what he meant by that, nor did he ever come close to confiding in me about what had actually gone on in that townhouse, and whether Rice had, in fact, spent the night or left through the back door as they both maintained. He did not, in other words, volunteer any more intimate details of the episode than he had for the previous decades, and I stopped short of asking for them.

Even so, I was aware that a reader might have curiosity about
this part of the story. Often during this time, when I would tell a friend or a fellow writer about my project on Hart, he or she would immediately grin and ask some variation on what seemed to be the obvious question: “So did he finally come clean? Are you going to get the
real
story?” Even for those who were involved in the events that led to Hart’s banishment, the absence of an abject confession—Hart’s refusal to “tell his story” in the redemptive way of modern culture—remained a source of frustration.

When I had lunch with Tom Fiedler in 2013, I asked him what he would say to Hart, after all the intervening years, if he had a chance to talk with him now. I expected him to say something about wanting Hart to know he had only been doing his job, or that he bore no ill will. But instead, Fiedler told me: “What I wish I could say to him, and what I wish I could trust if he answered, is what is it he feels we didn’t get right, and what did we get right? I suppose I always would want just the truth. And if we didn’t get the truth or a close approximation of it, what did we get wrong?”

My own interest in the details had less to do with anything lurid than with the historical implications of what Hart did or didn’t do. What if Hart hadn’t actually spent the night entwined with Rice? What if, as some of his closest aides still privately believed, he had fooled around with her a few times but hadn’t actually consummated the affair? (If Bill Clinton taught us anything, it was that politicians, like the rest of America, tend to define sex with various degrees of technicality.) If that were the case, then the course of our political history would have been forever changed because of a widely held assumption that wasn’t even true. It would mean that the rules of political coverage had been overturned not because Hart had carried on some wild affair, but because he was too damn stubborn to set the record straight.