Running on new

...Congress is obliged to show a small morsel of courage here, and prohibit the pre-vote projection...

...In the 1950s and 1960s, liberals had decided that, in order to achieve their goals, they needed large government agencies and an extensive regulatory apparatus...

...In his standard campaign speech, Hart calls for " a compassionate government without . . . outmoded policies of big spending...

...The difficulty of separating liberal goals from liberal methods is best seen in one of the issues that Hart doesn't talk about: poverty...

...John Lindsay was a leader in the Hart framework, but Dick Daley would not have been...

...Hart is probably correct in maintaining that the continual preoccupation with the first question has caused us to ignore the second one...

...6 April 1984:201...

...The closest Hart comes in this direction are his proposals to secure full employment...

...None of which is to suggest that Gary Hart is a closet Reaganite...

...Hart's effort to formulate a third position on the military budget, then, yields equivocal results...

...New ideas are, by definition, untried...

...KEITH C. BURRIS (Keith C. Burris teaches political science at Washington and Jefferson College in Pennsylvania...

...Political conflict, he seems to be saying, is largely illusory...

...But they don't seem to have noticed a second and equally important lesson of the last few years: that Reagan's new ideas -- particularly supply-side economics -- were a disaster in practice...

...In revising the liberal vision, Hart started by trying to draw a distinction between the values or principles of liberalism, and its methods or policy instruments...

...Though some journalists and political scientists dream of resurrection, I think they are sentimental and mistaken...

...we needed "both to rebuild the old and build the new...

...My real point is to call into question the extent to which one really can make a clean, neat separation between liberal goals and liberal methods...

...Granted that some political conflicts are unproductive, and granted that the focus on some issues (like the size of the defense budget) causes other issues to be ignored (such as proper defense strategy), nevertheless the conflicts between fundamental philosophies and values are, ultimately, unavoidable...

...But I do know he is not currently running on ideas...

...Military promotion policies favored bureaucrats over military strategists...

...But as one moves beyond the area of regulation, Hart's call for new methods to achieve old values begins to look a lot more like a conjurer's trick: a feat of image manipulation that might work for one election but leaves the real policy problems unsolved...

...The smoke-filled room of a Mayor Daley is gone forever...

...yet the idea has never been given a fair trial...

...Now he characterized the debate about "whether to revive traditional industries or to encourage new industries' ,(-- a debate which he had helped to initiate -as outmoded...

...Even here, however, the emphasis is on I1~ problems of the established working- and middle-classes,;In education, for example, he offers detailed proposals for improving the quality of technical and scientific learning, but offers only rhetorical support for improvements in more basic skills...

...In short, the r way in which the military went about defining and iltll~lementing its mission needed to be reformed...

...For the Democratic party's established liberal leadership -- McGovern, Ted Kennedy, and Hubert Humphrey -Nixon's victory was a great disappointment, but not a reason to reassess their entire political ideology...

...In economic policy, he reached out to such innovative thinkers as Robert Reich long before they had been recognized by other Democratic leaders...

...For Gary Hart, and the whole new generation of Democratic politicians who first ran for public office in the mid-1970s-, the message sent by the 1972 election was stronger and clearer...

...That alone is their primary interest: being Number One...

...Health care and nutrition are dismissed in one sentence: they must be ensured for every American child (adults are presumably not covered), but there's no indication about how this is to be accomplished...

...For the more one scrutinizes Hart's military reform proposals, the less clear it becomes how much he has really accomplished...

...At no point in his many policy statements on military reform does Hart ever raise the subject of the appropriate uses and limits of military force...

...For when it comes to results -- the actual policies offered - . the "newness" and the vision are much less apparent, if they exist at all...

...Of course, one should also note in passing that the reaction against regulation is far less of a new idea or a generational phenomenon than the "neoliberals" would have us believe...

...As Hart pursues some of his new ideas, they often encounter the same problems and political obstacles that have bedeviled more traditional approaches...

...And since, as relative newcomersto politics, they weren't on record as having created, supported, or voted for the programs of the old liberalism, they possessed a freedom denied to McGovem and Kennedy: to reshape their images, rhetoric, and political philosophies in a way more in tune with these "new realities...

...And for purposes of figuring out what kind of a president Hart might be --- which is, after all, the bottom line - - that larger philosphy is a good deal more revealing than a narrow debate about who said what first...

...Why, even the National Review had conceded that Hart "has been doing some of the best thinking around on military aspects of national survival...

...In the military reform debate, Hart sought out the unconventional views of James Boyd...

...Democratic primaries RUNNING ON NEW ISREDEFINING PROBLEMS ENOUGH...

...rtlerican military planning was too often based on a strategic pieiure taken from the 1940s...

...The values -- equality of fights and equality of opportunity -- must be kept, but the methods should be rethought...

...New ideas are needed, not just to provide liberals with a new stock of weapons for the old shouting matches, but as a way of fundamentally reshaping the entire public dialogue...

...Which, stated as a general proposition, is hardly very persuasive...

...We need a process, initiated by the president, to create long-term agreements by management, labor, financial markets, and government designed to help our major industries be, come more competitive...

...It is an approach he'consciously triesto apply to almost every issue: the economy, energy, the environment...

...the notion that special steps must be taken to ensure that the fruits of growth redound to the benefit of all Americans seems never to have occurred to him...

...The Democratic choice is between two kinds of selling of the presidency: old-fashioned retail huckstering h la Humphrey...

...As this narrative also suggests, there is a faddish, elq~i~ mental quality to much of Hart's thinking that may be r appropriate for a gadfly senator, but is ill-suited to the respon, sibilities of a president...

...Is Hart's search for third positions the solution, then, to the current liberal predicament...

...In this respect, he has clearly proven to be a valuable member of both the Senate and the Democratic party...

...Not surprisingly, if Hart concedes that much to the conservative side, he can make only marginal cuts in the huge Reagan defense budget...

...But Hart, like many of the neoliberals, is desperately short of historical vision...

...Watching Hollings withdraw the other day, I had a sense of an unprogrammed and honorable man...

...A leader is one who searches out new ideas, who is the first on the block to call for some new initiative...

...As he once told a reporter, "I'm interested in major overhauls of government, not so much in taking a screwdriver to the engine...

...Technological advances notwithstanding, it became increasingly doubtful that high technology by itself could ever employ more than a small fraction of America's non-agricultural work force...

...The American people wouldn't buy it anymore...

...T HE ARGUMENT, I predict, will degenerate very quickly...

...The net effect of watching Hart label a whole series of traditional debates as "false choices" is to raise some serious questions about his own political vision...

...Turning from general rhetoric to specific programs, it becomes obvious why Hart faces this problem...

...And even these cuts come about almost by accident: it just so happens that the smaller but more numerous naval vessels that Hart wants are cheaper than the larger ones desired by President Reagan...

...he is running on the symbolism of ideas...

...For a political press that has often been criticized for ignoring issues, that would be a praiseworthy attempt -- but it approaches the subject in the wrong way...

...But then if it doesn't fall on fertile ground, he'll wonder how come you can't convince people to go along...

...Not necessarily a bad idea -- but this is precisely what the Chrysler bail-out was, and he had opposed it...

...But to the conservatives, he could truthfully say that he wasn't soft on' defense -- indeed, that in r areas of the budget, he would ask for more money than President Reagan would...

...They will not stop commentating...

...John Kennedy (in 1960) was the first to sense and exploit it...

...There is nothing inherently wrong with elites...

...Their reporters, playing the cole of kingmakers, mostly pursue sarcasm and success...

...But he commits precisely the same error if he asserts, as he seems to, that by concentrating on the second question he can make the f'n-st disappear...

...Political parties are dead...

...Liberals noted approvingly that Hart was opposed to some of the largest and most expensive new weapons proposals...

...We have gone from the passions and the interests to the media and the lobbyists...

...But there is something wrong with unaccountable ones...

...Beyond specific policy proposals, there is, I think, a larger conception of government and politics that informs and explains Hart;s rhetoric and his behavior as a public official...

...Perhaps the Democrats will one day elect him floor leader...

...6 April 1984:199 T HE COALS-METHODS distinction is not Hart's only vehicle for modernizing the liberal vision...

...Number One in ratings...

...And if there's a way to deliver services to a large, dependent population without creating a bureaucracy, well, that hasn't been discovered yet, either...

...Our naval procurement policies emphasized large aircraft carders, whereas what we really needed were smaller but more numerous vessels...

...The networks will not stop selling time to candidates (except third and fourth party ones...

...Truth is left to Bill Moyers, who is occasionally banished to P.B.S...

...Common sense - - as well as history -- tells us that one cannot eliminate poverty without spending money...

...The subjects of welfare, day care, food stamps, legal services, and substandard housing are never mentioned in his book...

...As he puts it in his book, "Too many of our leaders try to force today's problems into the framework of yesterday's world...

...The new one is unquestionably the press -- with broadcast media dominating...

...Hart, in short, is an intellectual visionary hiding inside a pragmatic, often cautious politician...

...The chapter on military reform in his book, for example, includes a call for " obvious and indisputalSle American naval superiority" as a way of limiting "Soviet military and diplomatic options in dealing with third-world nations...

...But then the late returns came in, and Hart had some second thoughts on the issue...

...Economists have been arguing for years that the best way to control pollution, for example, is through the use of effluent fees (sometimes called pollution taxes...

...Aside from ideals and ideas -- genuine, personal, old, or new -- the real test of a presidential candidate may be wit, which McGovern and Hollings in this campaign seemed to have, and which all the interesting losers of the last thirty years (Goldwater, McCarthy, Stevenson) seemed to possess...

...Number One network...

...He'll have thought out an idea, he'll know an idea, he'll present the idea," Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming has said him...

...The evolution of Hart's views on economic policy are a particularly good illustration of this...

...But after considerable study, Hart felt that a more important issue was being ignored: namely, that the military was spending the money it did have for all the wrong things...

...Perhaps his message of sacrifice will get a better hearing there now, or in the next session...

...Hollings said he will stay in the Senate which is where independent and competent men of his stature should be, and where not enough are...

...Much of our public debate is based on false choices, which ensure wrong answers...

...We just think there are better methods of achieving them...

...A second major theme that undergirds his policies is the attempt to reformulate basic political controversies -- a search for what he calls "third positions...

...He consistently voted against all of the Reagan budget cuts and has introduced legislation to restore many of them...

...The future of our country is unquestionably in intelligence, communications, software, an information society," he told a reporter in 198 I. Meanwhile, he had opposed the Chrysler bail-out, and had criticized both Democrats and Republicans for "debating whether to bail out C h r y s l e r . . . when in effect we ought to be acknowledging this tremendous grassroots, bottom-up surge of new technology and high technology industries...

...And how would he go about rebuilding the old...

...On the other hand, there is no evidence, in either his writings or his career, that Hart thinks or engages much in legislative strategizing or careful coalition building...

...Our conventional forces were designed to fight a war of attrition --- a reasonable strategy against Germany and Japan, but entirely inappropriate against the Soviets and Chinese...

...Even if the final results sometimes aren't new, the style and the vision are...

...It will end with an article in which some enterprising reporter will list all two hundred-odd proposals that Gary Hart has made over the last four years, and then -- based on God-knows what criteria -- put check marks next to the ones that constitute authentic "new ideas...

...We are not opposed to the goals of the New Deal, Dewey and Eisenhower and Nixon (in 1960) all insisted...

...Though Hart likes to associate himself with John F. KenCommonweal: 198 /,,,~ i nedy and the events and spirit of the 1960s, the formative experience in his evolution as a public official is not the New Frontier but the landslide defeat of George McGovem, in 1972...

...To Hart, leadership is almost entirely limited to intellectual and policy concerns...

...And mass marketing h la Kennedy...

...but equivocal or not, the "third position" has become a Hart trademark...

...Indeed, a strong case could be made that Hart overuses the approach...

...It results only because established political leadership phrases the policy choices in the wrong way...

...Too often he seems to seize on some proposal simply because it's new...

...Guns versus butter, freedom versus equality, size of government versus extent of services -- these issues haven't divided democratic societies for the last one hundred years solely because politicians are too dumb to see the debate in other terms...

...I doubt I agree with more than 50 percent of what McGovern says, or more than 30 percent of wha~ Hollings advocated...

...The issues persist because the conflicts are real, and no amount of recasting or "third positioning" will ever eliminate them...

...M Y OWN FAVORITE Democrats this year were McGovern and Hollings...

...One of the first major politicians to call for extensive deregulation, after all, was that nasty old-line liberal Ted Kennedy...

...I N SPEAKING of Hart's persistent attempts to formulate a third position, we touch upon yet another important characteristic of his thinking: his constant, unremitting, almost obsessive search for the new...

...Senate, his stock speech was entitled "The End of the New Deal...

...The military reform issue is perhaps the best example of Hart's attempts to articulate a third position...

...and the history of policy innovation in this country contains a long list of new ideas which promised to solve a problem but actually made it worse...

...Their second interest -- a distant second -- is in the candidate who "emerges" as Number One...

...The thrust of his economic proposals is to restore economic growth and make the United States more competitive internationally...

...The Number One news organization...

...Hart does talk a lot about new ideas, but he also speaks of "moving forward," "leadership," and "a vision of the future...

...As corporations the networks pursue money and power as voraciously as other cong~trterates and monopolies do...

...Many Democrats were very impressed by the massive victory of Ronald Reagan, 1980's candidate of new ideas, and so drew the conclusion that a similar renewal movement was needed within their own party...

...Nixon was the first (in 1968) to clearly enunciate post-party politics as an appendage to advertising...

...Which brings us back to the media...

...The old liberalism was dead...

...the poor are almost invisible in it...

...Well, sort of...

...I'd settle for old tried and true "ideas...

...An irish friend of mine, on first heating of Hart's call for new ideas, commented, "How typically American...

...Rather like old Sam Ervin, Hollings seemed to have character, and though much dedication to what he regards as the good work of politics, some kind of reserve -- an inner life as well...

...But this is only one side of Hart's political temperament...

...Today, Hart says, "we must figure out new methods and new ways of achieving those objectives with a reduction in programs, less bureaucracy, and fewer regulations...

...Commonweal: 200 Hart's penchant for the new also permeates his conception of leadership...

...Maybe there are, but Ike and Nixon never produced them -- and neither, I think, will Gary Hart...

...Hart, whatever the merits of his platform, has understood the new gameand the new elite, and played them as Carter and Reagan did...

...But, like Goldwater, one senses that both are real persons -- of flesh and blood, conviction, prejudice, pride, and even (imagine...

...Moreover, workers in traditional industries weren't particularly pleased to hear that they were washed up...

...And there is, indeed, something distinctively American about a campaign whose principal boast is that its proposals are new -- and seems to relegate to secondary status the question of whether they' re any good or not...

...This suggests ~fliat a genuinely new idea deserves much closer and more c r i f i ~ scrutiny than an incremental change in an old one...

...I personally prefer the current two Democratic frontrunners to President Reagan because as governors either would, i believe, do less harm...

...So he begins to compromise and soften them a little, and pretty soon he winds up with a set of proposals -- his energy program is a good example --that aren't all that different from what every other Democrat is proposing...

...such lessons are lost on him...

...This general approach seems to make the most sense when applied to the field Of economic regulation...

...Hart and the neoliberals aren't the first to try: this distinction was the very cornerstone of moderate Republicanism during the f'n'st two decades after World War Ii...

...Beyond this, we cannot and should not expect restraint upon the political power of the press...

...I do not know an easy way out...

...It is in this sense, principally, that he truly is a candidate of new ideas...

...This decision might have been defensible in the context of the 1950s, but it no longer suits the economic realities...

...Hart thus tried to recast the entire liberal-conservative debate on the military by formulating a third position that seemed to ~l~fY easy categorization...

...It's the person, he said in one interview, "out front, taking the lead, framing the issues...

...In democracy, an elite is inevitable...

...As for his recent book, A New Democracy (William Morrow, $12.95,180 pp...

...He thinks great thoughts but does not do great deeds...

...In the late 1970s, Hart, like many other Democrats, began to feel that a new approach was needed to deal with America's persistently high levels of inflation and unemployment...

...When he first came to the Senate in 1975, he says, the debate over the military budget had ground down into a stalemate between two polar positions: conservatives said spend more, liberals said spend less...

...What is at stake is not freedom of expression or investigation, but full reign of greed as against the modest amount of power still retained in this country by ordinary citizens...

...On this vital issue, his stance sounds perilously close to Ronald Reagan's...

...American political tradition never -- from James Madison to Teddy Roosevelt -- expected the powerful to restrain themselves...

...As a nation, we were never much on political parties...

...In too many policy arenas, he has argued, liberals and conservatives begin by asking the wrong questions, and then engage in a furious squabble over largely irrelevant answers...

...To put the matter in another way, there are (at least) two separate questions that can be raised about the U.S...

...political experience...

...Yet, one imagines Hart or Mondale on the morning after an electoral defeat waking to ask, "Where's the rest of me...

...After talking to John Naisbitt, among others, Hart latched onto high technology as the s01ution to an information society, and America's economy would /" S" ~t have to adjust accordingly...

...But if he has any real ideas about how to do this, he hasn't made them public...

...Where other candidates operate within an existing framework and cautiously probe the boundaries of established policy, Hart has always made a conscious effort to seek out new alternatives and new perspectives...

...If the conser -~ vatives are now saying nice things about him, it is largely because he has conceded every one of their premises...

...Certainly declarations of the outcome of elections before they are fact, i.e...

...He has absorbed the perspectives and criticisms of such thinkers as Reich and Lester Thurow, but he is unwilling to embrace the kinds of comprehensive solutions that these men call for...

...A good case can be made that liberals in the 1950s and '60s were insufficiently aware of the complex problems posed by large regulatory agencies, and perhaps too quick to reject market mechanisms as a way of allocating goods or imposing costs...

...In Hart's case, the about-face was particularly abrupt...

...But we ought to be able to demand less verbal and analytic nonsense and more respect for voters, if not for "truth...

...Number One" ---- that ought to be the key buzzword for the reigning sportscasters in the news booths...

...held, is absolutely without justification and an assault upon the franchise...

...They set the agenda, pinpoint crises, determine the standards for deciding which candidates and what issues may be dubbed "real...

...The sole exception in his speech is a plan to weatherize low-income houses...

...defense budget: how much we should spend and what we should spend it on...

...As early as 1973, in his memoirs of the McGovern campaign, Hart was already proclaiming that "American liberalism was near bankruptcy...

...This means a new elite must filter out candidates and issues...

...only later does he begin to sort out its real merits and deficiencies...

...As a result, by the time he wrote his book in 1983, Hart was taking a very different line...

...WILLIAM G. MAYER (William G. Mayer is a graduate student in government at Harvard, concentrating on contemporary liberal thought, and a flee-lance writer on politics...

...In 1974, when he fast ran for the U.S...