Oh! somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright; The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light; And somewhere men are laughing and somewhere children shout, But there is no joy in Mudville—mighty Casey has struck out.
—Ernest Lawrence Thayer, “Casey at the Bat”
The evil demon, sex-crazed, twisted cowboy preacher is gone now . . . Gary Hart is back in Colorado, and his high-powered 1988 presidential campaign is a smoking ruin, a disaster worse than anything that ever happened in Mudville.
Casey had a bad night. He struck out. He was humiliated. The fans spit on him and even the batboy kicked him in the shins when he came back to the dugout.
So what? The poem was first printed in the Examiner on June 3, 1888, but there was no mention of what happened when Casey went to bat the next day and cracked a bases-loaded triple down the right field line. They say he lived happily ever after, and the women followed him everywhere.
That is the difference between baseball and big-time politics. Even the wretched Casey knew he would get another chance. . . . Many more, in fact; and his shame would not follow him long. He hit 55 homers that year and led the Negro League in triples.
But when Gary Hart struck out last week, he knew he was doomed forever. He will not come to bat again in our lifetime. There is no second chance on the biggest and fastest and meanest of all the campaign trails.
One half-legal screwball can put you down in the ditch with the skulls and burnt bones of other monstrous failures like George Romney, Herbert Hoover and the fiendish Wilbur Mills.
That is a very ugly league. Adolf Hitler is there, along with Grigori Rasputin, Adm. Tojo and Idi Amin. . . . And now Gary Hart is there, for reasons that are too strange to explain.
Some people called it a sex scandal, and others called it true craziness. The most intelligent Democratic presidential campaign since John F. Kennedy’s in 1960 went down in a ball of huge fire like the Hindenburg. . . . And the heaviest winter book favorite since Richard Nixon in 72 was suddenly trapped in a web of foul rumors and stomped to death like a roach.
It happened with a terrible quickness, like a big ship hitting an iceberg and sinking so fast that even the lifeboats went down with it. . . . Most of the crew drowned, along with the captain and many, many passengers. When the sun set over Denver last night, the once-elegant Hart headquarters at 16th and Pine was a lonely abandoned hulk, and there was no joy at all in the national gambling community.
There is not a lot of action in Vegas on presidential futures, but there are clusters of smart boys here and there who take it very seriously. Most of the early betting is on long shots and odd possibilities, but the numbers are high and potential payoffs on odds like 50-1 or even 77-1 on geeks like Lyndon LaRouche and Pierre DuPont tend to keep people interested. . . .
Or whipped like egg-sucking dogs with no warning or reason at all— which is what happened last week to folks who bet heavily on Gary Hart. He was the early-line favorite at 8-1 when he suddenly exploded like the Challenger and disappeared.
The gambling people were left in utter disarray. Hart had been running so far in front of the rest of the Democrats that his demise left the ’88 race for the White House in a hellbroth of fear and confusion.
Before Hart got croaked, the Wall Street Journal was calling the Democratic race “a rerun of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” . . . Gary was running about 55 points ahead of everybody except Jesse Jackson, who was in the process of doing business.
Jackson and Hart formed a loose sort of alliance during the ’84 campaign, and this time they were ready to formalize it. Three days before the bomb hit Gary, Jesse and Hart Campaign Manager Bill Dixon had met privately in Santa Fe and agreed to share research, staff talent and maybe even the 15 percent chunk of delegates that Dixon figured Jesse would have locked up by the time of the convention next summer.
That deal is a bad joke now, and the new numbers show Jackson up from 15 percent to 20 percent. “Jesse could win nine states on Super Tuesday.” Dixon figures. “Gary was his only real competition in the South.”
Only a madman would make numbers on the Democratic race right now. The whole game has changed, and the first caucus in Iowa is still 10 months away.
That is a long time in politics, but the Democratic numbers are not likely to change much between now and Christmas. The Seven Dwarfs were mainly running for vice president, anyway, and now they will probably split the vote seven ways.
Gephardt will probably win Iowa—if only because he has spent 75 weekends there, pressing flesh—and Dukakis is a heavy favorite in New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Maine. . . . But after that, things get hazy. Biden will take a hometown victory in Delaware and Babbitt is a sure thing in Arizona and maybe three other Western states.
Probably nobody will win more than one primary by the time “Super Tuesday” rolls around in the second week of March. . . . That is 11 Southern states, including big ones like Texas, Florida and Georgia.
Gary Hart would have been a prohibitive favorite on Super Tuesday, on the strength of early wins in Iowa and New Hampshire—but times have changed, and right now the best bet to sweep the whole South on Super Tuesday in Sen. Sam Nunn, a Georgia boy who will have a lot of TV exposure by then, from his perch on the Iran/contra hearings.
But the South will not be enough, and nobody will go to Atlanta with a lock on the nomination; 1988 might be the first deadlocked and brokered political convention in America since Ike ambushed Taft in ’52.
With Hart and Ted Kennedy out, the only other big hitter around is New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, who might be a genius wild card. Cuomo could lay low for at least the next six months, then jump in late and win New York, New Jersey and California all at once, then stampede the convention.
That is about the only hope the Democrats have right now of beating the crooked wimp, George Bush—who until last week appeared to have no hope at all.
May 11, 1987