We Don't Gotta Have Hart

RICHARD NIXON returned from political oblivion in 1968 largely on the strength of a slogan. After losing the presidency to John Kennedy in 1960 and the governorship of California two years later, Nixon was written off even by himself. "You won't have Richard Nixon to kick around anymore," he told reporters the morning after his California loss. Yet in 1968 Nixon bounced all the way back after an image makeover by Madison Avenue hucksters. The still strident Nixon successfully was presented to the voters as "The New Dick."

That probably wouldn't be the best slogan for Gary Hart, who also is attempting a return from the electoral netherworld. While Nixon resurrected himself by assiduously courting fellow Republicans and trying to make amends for past behavior, the "New Gary" is an entirely unrepentant fellow who didn't tell even his best friends that he was going to re-enter the fray. Hart seems determined to become the Sidney Biddle Barrows of presidential politics, unremorsefully parlaying shameful private conduct into public acclaim.

What's sad is that Hart is a bright guy who could make worthy contributions to American political life. And it will be fun watching Hart play insurgent, so long as he doesn't bring any mortal embarassment to his party. If he comes through on his pledge to run a no-frills campaign and succeeds in shaking up what is now a stultifying and uninspiring nominating process, more power to him. And to everyone.

Unfortunately, Hart shouldn't--and hopefully will not--be president of the United States. The character defects that he displayed in the Donna Rice incident and those that emerged in its aftermath rule out Hart's ever sitting in the Oval Office. He still thinks the press alone is to blame for his problems, that his travails reflect not at all on himself. He's displayed no sign of a new understanding of himself or of his time that make him worthy of redemption. Let him write on policy-issues to his heart's content. Just don't let him do so with the presidential pen.

GAIL SHEEHY caught a lot of flak, much of it deserved, for a long profile of Hart she wrote this summer in Vanity Fair. Sheehy went on and on with cheap pop psychological insights into Hart's upbringing while trying to answer the question "Why would Gary Hart want to sleep with a woman like Donna Rice?" She cited his stern mother and their even sterner Church as the source of his incessant womanizing.

But as Mickey Kaus ungracefully pointed out in The New Republic (and I ungracefully repeat here), it's not so surprising that a man might want to fool around with an attractive woman like Ms. Rice. You don't have to have grown up in a repressive environment to want to do that. What is repulsive about Hart is that as a presidential front-runner he was hanging around with a crowd no decent man should be part of, crazy mother or no.

What was valuable in Sheehy's piece, and got overlooked in criticisms of her second-rate psychoanalysis, was her reporting on how Hart and Rice met in the slimy underworld of South Florida. Their paths crossed on a party boat frequented by drug dealers and other high rollers. (Rice, in fact, lived for two years with one of the biggest drug dealers in South Florida, a man now in jail on a long sentence.)

Hart's problems run far deeper than a simple desire to let loose of the bonds of mother and childhood. Anyone who has seen the infamous National Enquirer photos of Rice sitting on Hart's lap and a clearly blasted Hart playing the congas in a nightclub cannot have come away thinking they were looking at a happy or stable man.

BUT NOW he's back. Some have suggested that Hart must have a Messiah complex and that's why he's re-entered the race. True enough, Hart said that the main reason he's going again unto the breach is that he has "a sense of new direction and a set of new ideas that our country needs that no one else represents." No one else, he said, has filled the gaping hole in the political landscape left by his absence.

Hart's megalomonia probably is slightly less divine, though. He's too existential to think he--or anyone else--is a messiah. Instead, he seems to fancy himself some latter-day "Great Legislator." Many philosophers--all of whom Hart has read--spend a great deal of time waxing eloquent about the need of a people for such a visionary and just man to set down laws for them and to lead them to the promised land of social harmony and peace. Hart clearly thinks himself a neo-liberal, technocratic Moses.

Indeed, Hart said Tuesday that if he could choose his epitaph, it would be, "He educated his people." He wasn't talking about the need to spend more money on the public school system. He was referring to how "the President himself must become the nation's first teacher to help our people understand some very tough problems and how together we can solve them." Such are noble sentiments, no doubt. Before Gary Hart can teach us anything, though, he needs to learn a few lessons himself.