Gary Hart

LAST OCTOBER 1, all the Democratic Presidential hopefuls were in Maine, begging for votes from party activists assembled that day to conduct a straw poll beauty pageant all the candidates except Sen. Gary W Hart (D-Colo) Hart was in New Hampshire with a busload of college-age volunteers. And while Walter F. Mondale. Sen John H Glenn (D-Ohio). Sen Alan M Cranston (D-Calif) and George S. McGovern hobnobbed with the Maine party establishment at a party sponsored cocktail party. Hart threw a party for his student workers at a Manchester ski lodge.

Mondale swept that straw poll and a few others, but today it is Hart who is in the limelight. Despite the best efforts of the Democratic National Committee, governors, senators, and Congressmen around the country. Hart is on the verge of pulling off one of the greatest political upsets in American history.

One cannot help but be excited by a man who challenged the seemingly unstoppable bureaucratic machine that was the Mondale candidacy and won. The party fashioned a delegate selection process that was supposed to snuff out underdogs like Hart. But the men in the back rooms made one mistake; the picked a man whom no one wanted, a man who called for a return normalcy when the American electorate had elected Ronald Reagan precisely to get away from that normalcy.

No we do not wholly swallow the "new ideas" message that Hart has promulgated. We do not find it significant that he is eight years younger than the hardly senile Mondale nor do we wish to participate in a generational political war with our parents and grandparents.

We support Hart for two separate though complementary reasons. His platform on a wide range of issues shows he is not content to take the facile route of traditional New Deal liberalism or to embrace the cynical neo-conservative backlash. Hart is, quite simply, too intelligent to embrace the well-meaning but unrealistic proposals of Mondale and McGovern. But, unlike Glenn, he does not believe that the Democrats should try to regain the White House by becoming milk toast Republicans. We also support Hart because he is now the only man who can send Reagan back to his ranch for good.

Many complain that Hart does not address issues. Yet, for a full year he talked issues, often to one or two people at a Manchester eatery or to gas station attendants, but rarely was he given air time.

Hart is clearly the strongest candidate on defense issues. He is largely non-interventionist, but his desire to avoid military involvement does not stem from McGovern-like isolationist sentiment ("America come home"). In the Senate, Hart has been on the front line of legislators fighting for the production of less expensive, less sophisticated out more mobile weaponry. While advocating a defense increase of about four percent--the same as Mondale--Hart has argued his case in terms of what the money is spent on. Hart led a 1983 filibuster against the MX missile, opposed the B1 bomber and the M-1 tank, fought for the SALT II treaty, and introduced legislation calling for a worldwide freeze on the manufacture of plutonium that could be used by terrorists to build nuclear weapons. Hart, in 1982, opposed the construction of two large aircraft carriers, arguing instead for more usable and less vulnerable smaller craft. In foreign policy, Hart opposed U.S. backing of Nicaraguan contras, called for the removal of U.S. marines from Lebanon before more than 250 were killed by a truck bomb. He has opposed the spread of technology that is suitable for weapons use, and has proposed negotiations on way to reduce the possibilities of an accidental nuclear war.

Hart also supports the freeze, but, unlike Mondale, he does not wallow in its symbolism, or pretend that a freeze can be easily negotiated. Despite increasingly hysterical charges by Mondale that Hart is the dupe of Reagan's legislative ploy to pass the MX missile proposal. Hart voted against the Reagan MX missile build-down program on October 31, 1983.

On domestic issues, Hart has remained steadfastly liberal while steering clear of special interest lobbying. Despite widespread criticism from labor. Hart refused to support protectionist measures, including tariffs and local content legislation. Mondale supports both.

Instead, Hart proposes using tax incentives to retrain workers and encourage industry to modernize. But unlike many, including Reagan, he does not want to abandon the traditional "smokestack" producers in the process. Hart is an early backer of Kennedy School lecturer Robert B. Reich's "industrial policy" to rejuvenate ailing industries using the government to negotiate compacts between management, labor, and the financial markets. Hart has also proposed a reform in entitlement programs to cut costs, and has advocated an active Federal Reserve Board to target interest rates to promote economic growth.

For all the policy talk, there is not that much that separates the only two real candidates. Unlike 1968 and 1972, no single issue holds sway, and ideology is now a word associated with the Republicans. Even Mondale, his candidacy disappearing like water through a sieve, would concede that he and Hart differ only superficially on the bread and butter issues.

The difference is more subtle and more important. Hart is the best man to defeat Reagan, because he is uncluttered with the remnants of the Democratic past. One must be wary of a candidate who ends his speeches with a climatic "I am ready to be President" or "Hubert Humphrey was like a father to me." Mondale consciously huddles in the shadow of Hamphrey and, while muttering the name "Jimmy Carter" only in muted tones, advocates a Carter platform that was soundly repudiated by the American electorate in 1980. We are cynical about Mondale's call for a "return" to an American before Reagan, because he does not convince us that what he offers is any more than a replay of the failed Carter Presidency.

Hart like John F. Kennedy '40, represents the diametric opposite of his Republican opponent. Kennedy triumphed over a craggy Richard M. Nixon, and Hart can triumph over a 73-year-old Reagan. Furthermore, Harts, distance from the party establishment--most of which fell into the Mondale trap--guarantees that he will not be doomed to follow the same worn political path. Mondale spent a lifetime carefully climbing up through the party, making the right friends, allying himself with the party establishment and reviving the old labor alliance. He is a player, not leader.

We do not embrace Hart as a new Kennedy. That would be native, and ultimately disappointing, for not even Kennedy lived up to his myth. We embrace Hart for his intelligence, his foresight, his proposals and for his refusal to fall in line with the party bureaucracy.