Looks like you’ll be able to add one more to the list of Democratic candidates seeking the nomination. I don’t have any inside information on this, but Gary Hart is certainly looking and sounding like he’s made up his mind and he’s throwing his hat in the ring.<\/p>\n
Winding up a two-day swing through Iowa yesterday, Hart was talking to activists about his ideas in a very candidate-like fashion.<\/p>\n
“I am not a politician. I am a public servant, and if I can do that at the national level, then so be it,” Hart said<\/a>. “I think there is a vacuum in the Democratic Party, and I think I have a different approach.”<\/p>\n He said he would announce his decision this week, but it sounds like, on a personal level, the decision has already been made.<\/p>\n I’m not quite sure how I feel about Hart’s candidacy. As far as negatives go, I don’t think the “Monkey Business” fiasco will doom his chances, but I believe he will be hampered by the perception that he is a candidate of the past. He did, after all, run for president twice in the ’80s. Occasionally, a candidate can run, fail, and still mount a credible race years later (see Nixon in ’68), but it’s usually four to eight years later, not 20.<\/p>\n To his benefit, Hart’s expertise is national security, particularly domestic defense, about which he has spoken and written prolifically. In fact, Hart, serving as a co-chair of the U.S. Commission on National Security\/21st Century, more or less predicted an attack on the U.S. like the one we suffered on 9\/11.<\/p>\n Hart’s national profile actually rose considerably after the terrorist attacks because of his knowledge of the issue. The public learned, for example, that the presidential commission Hart helped lead for a two-and-a-half years reported to the Bush administration that there was an urgent need to address domestic terrorist threats shortly after Bush’s inauguration.<\/p>\n As it turns out, the president announced in May 2001 that he was putting aside the commission’s recommendations<\/a> and asking Vice President Cheney to launch a new study of potential terrorist threats, which tragically barely got underway before Sept. 11, 2001.<\/p>\n Hart, therefore, can speak to one of the most serious issues of the day. I have a nagging feeling, though, that this is the right message but the wrong messenger.<\/p>\n If you’re really interested on the evolution of Hart’s interest in the campaign, The New Republic ran a terrific article about the process in December. It’s available here<\/a>, but I think you may have to be a subscriber to read it. Also, Richard Ben Cramer did a terrific job with his profile on Hart in his landmark book, “What It Takes<\/a>.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Looks like you’ll be able to add one more to the list of Democratic candidates seeking the nomination. I don’t have any inside information on this, but Gary Hart is certainly looking and sounding like he’s made up his mind and he’s throwing his hat in the ring. Winding up a two-day swing through Iowa […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}