I called my old friend Gary Hart the other morning. It was Friday and he was at his law office in Denver, hard at work on a speech to the Foreign Affairs Council in Philadelphia later this week, and also on his major confrontation with Ted Koppel on a special edition of “Nightline” Tuesday night, when he will have to make a major statement about whether or not he would get back into the presidential race.
“Never mind that stuff. Save it for the gossip columns,” I told him. “What I need from you now is help for my winter book numbers this week. I know that you don’t gamble, but now that you’re out, I figured you’d be the one person who could tell me who’s going to get the nomination.”
He laughed sardonically. “You know I can’t be quoting numbers for gamblers on anything as serious as the presidential campaign.” He paused. “Are you going to quote me?”
“Of course not,” I said. “You know me, Gary. We’ve been in this business together for 15 years. Why would I want to quote you? I just needed a little help in readjusting my odds. ... I can’t make any sense of it.”
GH: I can’t either. I think everybody’s kind of 12-1. . . . It’s so wide open and it’s unprecedented in so many ways. There’s no front-runner.
HST: Why did Nunn drop out? I thought he had a lock on the South.
GH: Well, I don’t know. ... He couldn’t sell it to the big boys on the (Democratic) National Committee, and also he knew he couldn’t get the nomination. It’s still a left-centered nomination process. He knows that. And the big boys in Washington couldn’t guarantee him a clean sweep on Super Tuesday, which he had to have.
HST: Who, then?
GH: What will happen is, between Iowa and New Hampshire the race will narrow from six or seven to two or three. Not including Jesse. You’ve got to treat Jesse separately. Two or three white guys. They’ll go to the South and one of them will dominate down there and go forward and win the nomination. The only way it will be a brokered convention is if they—the two or three—just keep swapping states around.
HST: Ye gods, it didn’t occur to me that we would at this point be looking at—if you had to make book—a Republican in the White House.
GH: But part of the problem is our party doesn’t have any policies.
It doesn’t have any direction. People know that. They’d rather go with a Republican they know than a Democrat, a devil that they don’t know.
HST: I look at a guy like Paul Simon. He appeals to me in an odd way. . . .
GH: Paul isn’t a hound for publicity. He’s a great guy. His campaign platform is, “I care about people, and I’m the next Harry Truman.” That’s it. You know the problem is these guys will not take the trouble to go out and find a foreign policy or a military policy or an economic policy. It’s hard work. And it took me 10 years to do it. . . . They’re all backing away from the serious problems. They’ve got to do the hard work. It bores people and it’s dull, but the only reason I was able to emerge as a serious national candidate was because people thought I was a serious man. There was an impression created that I had done the work necessary to know where the country ought to go. And you can’t stand up and say that. You can’t say, “Vote for me because I’ve done the work.” You’ve got to demonstrate it. You’ve got to get articles out, you’ve got to make speeches.
HST: Can any of them win?
GH: Yeah, they could, but not the way they’re doing it now. Several of my supporters went to work for this one and that one. They kept asking me what they should do. I said they should take the summer off, not go to New Hampshire, not go to Iowa. Get together with the smartest people, not the Washington or New York crowd, but really thoughtful people. Come up with six blockbuster speeches and hit the country right between the eyes in September or October. That person would jump up in the polls. None of them has done it.
HST: What kind of time frame do you see on it?
GH: Now there’s another window. The last window was the summer. Now all the reporters are going to start odds-making in September. And nothing will change. Now Dukakis looks good, Gephardt’s looking better, Biden not. All that’s horse manure. I think these guys all have a chance in the next 60 to 90 days to redefine themselves in bigger terms. . . . It’s not that they’re bad guys. They’re not bad guys. They’re good guys. It’s simply a question of scope and dimension and size. It’s not good or bad, it’s just size. That’s what’s missing is size. It’s not left or right or any of that ideological crap. . . . The field is still wide open. There may be more entries. Any handicapping right now is going to be folly.
HST: You’ve still got some control. Even in your hideous shame, there are people who wouldn’t vote for you before because you didn’t wear the right kind of tie who have said, well, yeah, now they’d vote for you. I think there’s a huge kind of backlash vote out there. GH: Oh, I do too.
HST: What do we call it, Gary? What kind of vote is it? The adulterer’s vote? The sex fiend’s vote?
GH: The victim’s vote. The first time in my life, Hunter, that black people come up to me on the street and want to shake hands with me. It’s amazing. It’s a sense of us and them.
HST: We really can’t afford to lose this one, Gary. Four more years of these vengeful half-bright rich boys in the White House will drive a whole generation out of politics. It’s time to win, Gary. It’s necessary to maintain the bloodlines.
GH: You’re right. But there just aren’t any more heroes on white horses around, Hunter.
HST: The hell with white horses. They can ride mules or Harley-Davidsons for all I care. We’re talking about winning. And save that talk about no more heroes until we have more time, like 16 straight hours on my porch with a case of beer. Let’s not forget, sport, that a few months ago you were a hero. You were the closest thing we’ve had to a president-in-waiting that anybody in this generation will ever see.
GH: OK, Hunter, OK—I’ll get there to Woody Creek in a few weeks, and we’ll talk about it then. I could use some time on your porch.
I hung up with a twinge of sadness. Gary is still the brightest and shrewdest of all the presidential candidates, and he will make a run at it. I like Gary and wish him well, but the gambler in me puts him at about 44-1. We are, after all, professionals.
September 7, 1987