"Obama is where I’d be if I had had $250 million.” Gary Hart compares '08 to '84 convention.

http://www.observer.com/2008/gary-hart-s-advice-hillary-clinton?page=0%2C1

{Edit to add the party needs Hart to speak about homeland security at the convention in his hometown of Denver this summer!}

:party: :toast: :party:

Before he declared for the presidency and while he was still in the Senate, Hart was followed by a PI after giving the Dem response to Reagan's weekly radio address.

That is what he got "caught" doing, the rest was cheap sensationalism, and not factually accurate either.

According to the Washington Post, it was a former Dem senator who paid the PI to follow him. To date that person has not been identified, if it was true.

He was the first victim of the right wing smear job.Funny Isn't It If Donna Rice had as affair with him that she has never publicly claimed that or tried to write a book.

You would think that she would know, right?

That's why I admire Obama so much.

He takes controversy head on. Doesn't have to be embarrassed about anything.

The fact remains that they changed the rules on Gary in '87-88.

The reality is that Hart never enjoyed the support of the party and was always broke.

Then when his grasp and ability to articulate policy, to defend core principles of the party, and refute the Reaganites using reason, was poised to win the day, he got slimed by gutter politics in the MSM.

At the time, the media intrusion into his personal life was unprecedented, and 64% of the American public according to Gallup thought it was unfair. That 64% included Richard Nixon who wrote to Hart to express his opinion. (Hart had served as the campaign manager for George McGovern's '72 campaign against Nixon.)

In retrospect it is easy to say what he could have done differently, but at the time the prevailing conventional wisdom was that the rival campaigns spreading the rumors about him would pay a price for what they did. Instead the MSM protected the campaign operatives, which included James Carville, who were spreading the rumors. The truth is that there were those in the party that preferred to have Bush, Sr. win that election than have Gary Hart in the White House. That story was never reported.

It is ugly, but it is the truth.

Hart has been a strong supporter of Obama. he wrote the forward for his book. He endorsed him early and blogged for him on HuffPo. Gary believes that Obama is much like he is. We can expect the Gary Hart will be involved in an Obama administration.

A little history refresher, for those who don't remember:

1988 presidential campaign and the Donna Rice affair
Hart declined to run for a third term in the Senate, leaving office in early 1987 with the intent of running for president again. In January 1987, he was the clear frontrunner for the Democratic nomination in the U.S. 1988 presidential election.<4> It seemed that only Democratic party efforts to recruit New York Governor Mario Cuomo could thwart his nomination. Hart had put in a strong showing in the 1984 presidential election, and had refined his campaign in the intervening years.

Hart officially declared his candidacy on April 13, 1987.<5> Rumors began circulating nearly immediately that Hart was having an extramarital affair. In an interview that appeared in the New York Times on May 3, 1987, Hart responded to the rumors by daring the press corps: "Follow me around. I don't care. I'm serious. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They'll be very bored."<6> The Miami Herald had been investigating Hart's rumored womanizing for weeks before the "dare" appeared in the New York Times. Two reporters from the Miami Herald had staked out his residence and observed an attractive young woman coming out of Hart's Washington, D.C., townhouse on the evening of May 2. The Herald published the story on Sunday, May 3, the same day Hart's dare appeared in print, and the scandal spread rapidly through the national media. Hart and his allies attacked the Herald for rushing the story into print, claiming that it had unfairly judged the situation without finding out the true facts. Hart claimed that the reporters had not watched both entrances to his home and could not have seen when the young woman entered and left the building. The Miami Herald reporter had flown to Washington, D.C. on the same flight as the woman, identified as Donna Rice. Hart was dogged with questions regarding his views on marital infidelity. In public, his wife, Lee, supported him, claiming the relationship with the young woman was innocent.<7> A poll of voters in New Hampshire for the New Hampshire Primary showed that Hart's support had dropped in half, from 32% to 17%, placing him suddenly ten points behind Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis.

On May 5, the Herald received a further tip that Hart had spent a night in Bimini on a yacht called the Monkey Business with a woman who was not his wife. The Herald obtained photographs of Hart aboard the Monkey Business with then-29-year-old model Donna Rice, sitting on Hart's lap. The photographs were subsequently published in the National Enquirer<8>. On May 8, 1987, a week after the Donna Rice story broke, Hart dropped out of the race. At a press conference, he lashed out at the media, saying "I said that I bend, but I don't break, and believe me, I'm not broken." A Gallup Poll found that nearly two-thirds (64%) of the U.S. respondents it surveyed thought the media treatment of Hart was "unfair." A little over half (53%) responded that marital infidelity had little to do with a president's ability to govern.

Not everyone was impressed with Hart's diatribe against the press. Television writer Paul Slansky noted that Hart had tried to deflect blame from himself for his downfall to the media, and that he offered no apology to betrayed supporters who now suddenly had to find other candidates to back. To many observers, the press conference was redolent of Richard Nixon's "Last Press Conference" of November 7, 1962, in which Nixon blamed the media for his loss in the 1962 California gubernatorial election. Hart, in fact, received a letter from Nixon himself commending him for "handling a very difficult situation uncommonly well" <9>.

In December 1987, Hart returned to the race, declaring "Let's let the people decide!" He competed in the New Hampshire primary and received 4,888 votes, approximately 4%. After the Super Tuesday contests on March 8, he withdrew from the campaign a second time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Hart#1988_presidential_campaign_and_the_Donna_Rice_affair

Get a life!


Right on about this, but the rest is MSM rehash.

The rest of the story about the this isn't on Wikipedia because a major MSM TV show canned a report about the infamous British woman who sold the stolen pics to the National Inquirer.

The video is still out there.

With the Internet, they can't smear a candidate the way they smeared Hart in '87 and '88.

You slut. I love you dude... but you lost cuz you fucked around.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Fitzgerald

The big scandal was the media double standard, and the constant repetition of the story after the vast majority of people said the media coverage of Hart was "unfair" according to Gallup.

If Hart had had more money, he could have broken through the "media" filtering and ran on substantive issues in '88.

Hart also lacked support within the party before the media obsession with his personal life.

So in essence, Hart = Dean with a mistress and no cash to combat it.

Dont get me wrong. I love me some Hart.

Because the Dean Scream to me is the media twisting nothing into something. Cheating... otoh... IS something. Unless youre Bill Clinton that is.

Hart was not happily married. If he hadn't been in the Senate, he may very well have gotten divorced. The problem was not the Gary was a "womanizer", but that they were two strong willed people who clashed frequently.

He and his wife separated twice.

During one of those separations, Hart apparently had a girlfriend and it was well known.

This was the small kernel of truth behind the story.

When the Donna Rice story broke, the Washington Post decided to pry into the other matter, and that is when Hart suspended his campaign:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE5DB1138F934A35755C0A961948260
(As the story from June 1987 makes clear, Hart had been followed after giving the Democratic Party's response to Reagan's weekly radio address in December 1987, before he meet Donna Rice and before he declared his candidacy for the presidency.

The problem is that Hart never liked to talk about his personal life. He never understood how it was relevant or necessary to discussing policy, which is what he thought government should be about.

The MSM aggregated two separate stories, i.e., Donna Rice, who was not much more than an acquaintance, with the other woman in D.C., into one false narrative, which some people here keep repeating.

Cheating is only relevant for Democrats.

Reagan was the first divorced man to become president. No one ever inquired as to why his first marriage failed. I'm sure he wasn't a saint.

Both Bushes had affairs.

The difference is that the MSM won't talk about it.

Hart's problem was like the "Dean Scream" because even after people knew about it and didn't care, it was all the MSM kept talking about, over and over. So the Hart-Rice thing was a way for the MSM to not cover important issues in the campaign, Bush, Sr's role in Iran-Contra, etc.

Even that didn't kill Hart. Hart was leading in national polls after reentering the campaign in December of 1987. People didn't care about Donna Rice. The little remembered fact is that Hart was leading in Iowa in early February of '87. Two weeks before Iowa a completely false story broke that Hart's campaign had been "secretly funded". It was totally false. Hart had never accepted money from a PAC and mortgaged his house in '84 to finance his campaign, but this last false story created enough doubt that he finished at the bottom in Iowa and New Hampshire and dropped out after Super Tuesday.

To get back to the point of his quote, if he could have gotten past the media filters that the MSM put on him he could have won. In short, he failed because he just couldn't get his message out over the MSM noise because he didn't have enough money. I can only imagine what Hart would have done with the ability to raise money on the Internet like Obama and Dean.

Donna Rice didn't happen until '87.

and his advice to hillary to be sincere in her efforts and not cute, to not let her delegates harm her any further.

As for the title of the OP, I could write that Obama is where I would be if I had $250 million - it's an easy thing to claim.

And Gary forgets his monkey business when public monkey business was political suicide.

By a significantly smaller margin than Mondale granted, but still would've lost. Hart would've been President as the "I told you so" candidate in '88 if the Donna rice thing hadn't been a factor.

At a minimum, Hart wouldn't have lost 49 states in the worst political defeat in presidential history, and may have enabled Dem's to retake the Senate at a minimum. That would have made it far more difficult for Reagan to accomplish things in his second term.

People forget that Reagan wasn't all that popular in '84 before the election. The '82 recession had been the worst recession since the Great Depression. (Cue Billy Joel singing "Allentown".) It was Mondale that creates the "Reagan was invincible" myth. Mondale was probably the worst possible candidate to run against Reagan. The results don't lie.

And the younger generation can see how impressive Gerry Ferraro is...

It's extremely difficult to beat a President who has approval ratings in the mid-high 50's during the year he is running for re-election. Incumbency is a huge advantage and if the country is going to get rid of its President, his approval ratings really have to be below 50%.

The key difference between Mondale and Hart is that if Reagan's mental health had been scrutinized more by the media, Hart might've been able to pull off a victory. Mondale probably still would've lost.

The exit polls in '84 all showed this clearly.

The Gingrich types were always attacking the Dem's for "Big Government" programs that didn't work, were wasteful, etc., while at the same time promoting government wasteful spending for defense spending.

Hart was always masterful on policy issues.

He could find a new approach to these things that people were comfortable with.

Mondale sealed his defeat after the first debate when he failed to follow up in any way after Reagan's stumbling performance in the first debate in Louisville where Reagan at times seemed fuzzy. Afterward, the MSM started asking if Reagan was too old. Reagan responded to that question in the following debate by making a joke about not taking advantage of Mondale's "youth and inexperience". Everyone laughed, including Mondale, and moved on to other topics.

I believe that if Mondale had pursued the matter further by recalling that Reagan's '80 team had stolen Carter's debate briefing book, a gift from George Will, and that Reagan was able to script answers to Carter's points in '80, and then pivoted and said, "What you saw in the last debate wasn't a President who is too old, but an actor who didn't have his script," Reagan would not have won the way he did.

Mondale choked.

I have always believed that the then youthful (then 47), mentally agile Hart, juxtaposed with the affable but mental midget that was Reagan would have been very striking indeed, and would have led to a different result.

Hart would've hammered the mental health issue harder but the media still would've covered it up.

I can see him getting ticked, and then making another gaffe.

It would have been good fun to watch.

I really like Gary Hart, and even looked at him in '04 and '08 as a possible candidate. He was correct on 9/11, and Homeland Security is all wrong, according to him. I'd trust him with my life.

And yes, he should be one of the keynote speakers here in Denver.

Is anyone interviewing Bill Bradley or Gerry Brown about this stuff?

Hart never won the nomination but he is a better interview than Mondale, Dukakis, Kerry, and McGovern who all did!

If you read the article, he liked Mondale personally. Their differences were about policy.

The current campaign, there have been few differences exposed between the candidates on policy and issues.

The rancor has been in how the Clinton campaign has conducted itself with the personal attacks, i.e., the sliming and pastorbating, etc.