"We haven't had a free election in this country for a long time."
---from "The Quotations of Chairman Joe"
In The Atlantic Magazine comes a report that the 1988 presidential candidacy of former Senator Gary Hart was sabotaged by Rescumlickan dirty trickster Lee Atwater.(1) Hart, for those of us old enough to remember, was an up and coming star turned political meteor by the machinations of the Rescumlickan slime machine.
Like so many of us, he had cut his teeth in the brief and tragic campaign of Senator Robert Kennedy in 1968, and, like Bill Clinton had worked for Senator George McGovern, managing his campaign for president in 1972. He went on to serve in congress, representing Colorado in the United States Senate. Hart, young, attractive, articulate and Kennedyesque, had achieved national stature, working hard to become a universally recognized authority on national security.
In 1984, Hart challenged the moribund Walter Mondale of Minnesota for the Democratic Presidential nomination in a campaign very reminiscent of Bernie Sanders challenge to the mossback Hillary Clinton in 2016. Like Clinton, Mondale was the choice of the party regulars, but unlike Clinton the party chose to field the former Vice President under the defeated Jimmy Carter against Ronald Reagan who had administered the beating just four years previously. At the Democratic convention, Hart supporters, reading the handwriting on the wall, put targets on their shoes. Sure enough, when the votes were counted Reagan carried 49 states, leaving the nation to ponder what might have been.
Certainly the Democrats would have had a more articulate and forceful champion. Gary Hart would never have stood dumbfounded in debate with the senile old actor as the spokesman of television's Death Valley Days charged falsely (it is always, it seems, falsely with these Rescumlickans) that the United States had unilaterally disarmed under Jimmy Carter. Hart would have rushed to the defense of our military and our nation, not to mention of our former president who had actually reversed the trend and increased military spending as a percentage of GDP, overturning a legacy of the nation's reactions to Viet Nam, Nixon and Watergate.
Imagine a polished, poised, articulate and confident Gary Hart on the podium facing the rambling and increasing incoherence of a man that all but drooled on stage. But it was not to be.
But Hart had established his Bona Fides and by 1988 was seen as the clear front runner for the Democratic nomination, a prospect that the Rescumlickan establishment found deeply unsettling. What to do? Sabotage his campaign.
From the bowels of the Young Rescumlickans came the likes of Lee Atwater and his disciple Karl Rove, young acolytes to the new religion and totally without ethical bearing. Practitioners of the politics of unlimited political expediency acting in the guise of Machiavellian 'realpolick', and confusing calling with mendacity while making an ethic of greed, they set about doing their worst.
Their worst, in this case, was a confession by Atwater of arranging the scene that put Gary Hart and Donna Rice together on a boat called Monkey Business.
It is difficult to imagine a reported affair between a politician and a young woman being taken so seriously, but this occurred well before the Republicans had coarsened the language and lowered the political bar of accepted behavior. In my youth, for instance, it was unthinkable that a man who had divorced his wife would even be considered for the presidency. Indeed, it kept the likes of Republican Governor Nelson Rockefeller out of the White House.
Normally, one's sex life would have not been reported but, since Watergate, young would-be Woodward's and Bernstein's roamed the land considering everything fair game.
Hart, it must be confessed, had a reputation for being a lady's man. But he challenged the press to follow him around--which is exactly what they did.
In a 'gotcha' moment, the press obtained a photo of the young Miss Rice sitting on the candidate's lap dockside next to the Monkey Business leading to a national scandal. Later reporters from the Miami Harold supposedly caught Miss Rice going into the Senator's Washington apartment and not exiting the building, apparently staying the night--all this while Hart's wife Lee was out of town.
It transpires that some political junkie named Broadhurst, who had tried unsuccessfully to ingratiate himself into Hart's inner campaign circles, needed money. He reportedly like to put on a show, freely spending and gambling. Atwater found his man. Arranging for Broadhurst to invite Hart on his boat and then tell the candidate that the boat was unavailable, transferring the party to a boat with a more salacious and headline-grabbing name Monkey Business--Broadhurst then arranged for young ladies to join the group.
Hart described the encounter saying that he was sitting on this piling dockside when all of a sudden Miss Rice jumped in his lap and her friend snapped a picture of the two. Later, Broadhurst arranged Rice's trip to Washington, tipping off the Herald. The press recorder her arriving through the front door, but did not know that there was a back door to the building and Hart, suspecting something amiss, sent her out the rear entry.
All of this Atwater confessed to his counterpart in Hart's 1988 campaign as he was dying of cancer some 30 years ago. He was making amends for the damage he had done.
And, indeed, the damage was considerable. Where would the nation be if there had been no Pappy Bush, no communications to the Iraqi government that it was a matter of no concern what Saddam would do with Kuwait--triggering the Gulf War. Without George Bush the Greater there would have been no Bill Clinton. There would have been no George Bush the Lesser.
This is but part of the legacy of the Rescumlickan campaign tactics. The country is numb and now paralyzed by them. From voter suppression, the return of Jim Crow, the falsifications and outright boldfaced lies, these are the symptoms of the cancer that is the modern conservative movement. Power by any means, power at all cost.
"An Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh"
Impeach and Imprison.
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(1). Fallows, James. "Was Gary Hart Set Up?" The Atlantic November 2018. Pages 26-29.
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