The Hart of the Matter

...The candidate has also said his late parents wanted to shorten the family name from Hartpence to Hart...

...As already noted, this involves individuals and emotions, which simply don't seem to interest Hart...

...Gary's just a little more quiet, a little more reserved, a little harder to figure out at first...

...Moreover, many of the notions expressed will be familiar to readers of Hart' s twin bibles, Megatrends and (shades of Jimmy Carter) War and Peace...

...More recently, he has said that he was merely returning to the original form, that an Ohio genealogist told him Hartpence was adopted by an ancestor fearing anti-German sentiment...

...and his service on the crack team of young lawyers advising Interior Secretary Stewart Udall...

...his years as a young parent and graduate student at Yale...

...the autumn he bounced back from previously losing to a write-in candidate and won election on the Radical (theologically conservative) ticket as student body president at Bethany Nazarene...

...Those were ideas that we had solicited and sought from other people, and I believe in each case we tried to credit those people with those ideas...

...Almost everything he has said on the issues subsequently paraphrases the points made in its 180 pages...

...He bristled, mumbled, came up with conflicting explanations, and finally shrugged...

...So Gary and Lee asked a judge to make the change for all four when Gary switched from Yale's Divinity School to its Law School—after taking part in the 1960 Kennedy campaign and deciding he preferred public service to academia...

...He has seldom aroused majorities behind his ideas...

...I asked each group the ultimate question: What is Gary Hart really like...

...C. zip codes) did not mind having people think she was older than her husband...

...If the sac pilots looked in and saw that the people inside were wearing uniforms, he said, he would order the airliner shot down...

...In a dusty hall in downtown Manchester the morning after his New Hampshire victory, however, Hart volunteered a plausible defense of his "new ideas" theme...

...He passed that hurdle by changing strategy...

...To which reporters mentally respond, Gimme a break...

...It sometimes seemed that his "new generation" appeal for unspecified "new ideas" wassimplyamore sophisticated version of the slogan that carried him into the Senate in 1974: "They had their turn...

...Indeed, The New Democracy answers all the basic questions Hart could anticipate...

...The New Democracy is dull, probably because it focuses on forces and concepts, not people...

...One of the areas where Vice President Mondale and I have disagreed most sharply is on the question of trade policy, particularly as that issue is embodied in the domestic content proposal...

...The Industrial Training Account is part of that...

...The third test, not yet fully resolved, has been his handling of the mutations in name and age...

...One can point out, for instance, that his proposed Industrial Training Account is part of a larger plan for government intervention in collective bargaining that would encourage wage restraints by workers and new tax incentives for employers, rather than the other way around...

...What Franklin Roosevelt did, and I think essentially what President Kennedy did, was to open up the political process for creative people all across this country...

...Asked about all this now, he says he wanted to be ready to fight, if needed, in the Persian Gulf...

...The group that knew him before 1967 attest to his success under varying circumstances: These include a summer working at the headquarters of the Church of the Nazarene in Kansas City...

...No wonder the campaign press corps describes the Presidential hopeful like this: Gary Hart's the trendiest choice, a Cabbage Patch Doll grabbed willy-nilly from the counter in a stampede of novelty-seeking consumers who saw him advertised on TV .They aren't even sure what their new toy will do, or what he's made of...

...Frequently he gets so intense, so drawn into what he sees as the beauty of his theories, that he forgets what is going on...

...Hart was flexible on the Senate floor as well in 1980...

...And certainly Hart's record indicates that he is no less willing than any of his colleagues to bend occasionally...

...Nor did he object to the additional $10,000 the unions spent telling their Colorado members about him...

...for the purposes of relocation, retraining, continuing skills, and so on...

...I always saw him as a person of ideals who wanted to make a significant contribution that was not run-of-the-mill...

...Or one can wryly note that another of the "new ideas" he mentioned that morning in New Hampshire was "to return to the energy policies of the 1970s...

...is the idea of an Industrial Training Account—a separate account for every worker in this society contributed to by the worker and the worker's employer...

...I can give specific ideas as long as you want to stay here...

...They appear in the Quill paperback he published last spring, The New Democracy, available to anyone for $4.95...

...But I do know this...

...In answering that question, one has to start by considering the reason politicians usually take such steps to begin with: political expediency...

...For a long time, I carried in my head the tentative hypothesis that Hart was just another fib-peddling age-baiter, reversing for the 1980s the anti-youth appeals I had no less strongly objected to when they were directed at young anti-Vietnam activists like himself two decades ago...

...It is consistently that of a strong-defense, bigger-pie liberal—and is one reason why he and Mondale have had to turn to arcane arguments over obscure votes in a desperate effort to differentiate themselves...

...They saw him don cowboy boots, let his hair grow and join the antiwar generation...

...Before last April, whenever he mentioned Bethany Naz-arene College of Oklahoma, he left out the "Nazarene...

...Having watched him off and on for more than a year, my sense is that people, including himself, are not nearly as important to Hart as ideas—preferably ideas that are interlocking parts of some grand teleological scheme...

...Hart's attempts to obtain a political appointment as a Navy commander before the balloting were foiled...

...In the Senate itself Hart has been a reticent loner as well...

...Such reactions, though, only prove that Hart has presented ideas specific enough to be debatable...

...And that book I wrote, The New Democracy, that was not just Gary Hart's ideas...

...Long ago he described his rocky relationship with Lee—which was patched up just before each Senate race and again in 1983 when he began running for President—as a "reform marriage...

...And they were too rushed to do more than glance at the name and birthday on the little fake certificate the maker attached in a calculated attempt to humanize him...

...Andrew Mollison is the chief political writer for the Cox Newspapers...

...The other group has known Hart since he went to Colorado in 1967...

...But how would Hart, as Chief Executive, handle a situation he hasn't thought through for his book...

...The domestic content proposal—above all its importance to the American auto workers, and it is important to American auto workers—is bad industrial policy, is bad economic policy and is bad trade policy...

...Fighting for survival in a conservative state, he lowered his AFL-CIO vote rating from 89 to 47 per cent, and raised his Chamber of Commerce rating from 9 to 39 per cent...

...In recent weeks I have talked with over three dozen of Hart's acquaintances...

...He would rather be sitting at his terminal creating a baroque 76-step procedure to substitute for the four-step program that less imaginative operators have bought off the shelf...

...One 1980 ploy worked out differently than intended...

...But what the theme of new ideas and new leadership is about isn't just the ideas I've come up with...

...If they [Gary and Lee] both walked into the room and you didn't know either one, you'd go out impressed with Lee," said Don Whitsett, who actually spans the two sets of friends...

...With questions recurring, it would have been to the candidate's advantage to end the controversy by dis-armingly stating that as a very young man, for reasons that in retrospect seem foolish, he hyped his resume...

...They were President Carter's pollster Patrick Caddell, and media specialist Robert Squier, whose first national assignment came from Hubert Humphrey's 1968 campaign manager, Walter Mondale...

...In general, the older friends describe Hart as a religiously and culturally conservative young man: pensive, intense, deeply honest, highly intellectual, drily humorous, ambitious and shy...

...Initially, he blamed the blooper on his Senate staff, which he did not acquire until January 1975...

...He tells us today, for example, that he is against "special interests and Washington insiders...

...Speculation continues to run rife over why, in 1966, Hart began to use 1937 as his birth date and thus stretched out his 29th year to twice its normal length...

...Hart bit...

...What will happen when the world untidily squirts out from the boundaries of his mental map...

...Now it's our turn...

...And that is supplemented by a range of proposals to modernize our industrial base and make it competitive and efficient— to make our auto and steel and machine tool plants the most modern and effective in the world by the end of the 1980s, and to direct private investment toward the effort...

...One of them that I've been stressing...

...The first test came when he failed, to his utter consternation, to win the Wisconsin straw vote last year...

...Or when Congress, as it is wont to do, offers the intellectual perfectionist 60 per cent of what he desires...

...Nevertheless, to look upon Hart's lapses concerning his biographical details as by-products of the standard American political hypocrisy is, I think, to miss the point...

...Standing near the Coloradan on the campaign trail, as the wind whistles through his hair and he mechanically chops away in recently acquired Kennedyesque gestures, is like listening to the philosophy professor he once wanted to be rather than to a politician seeking votes...

...After two years away from his family as field marshal of McGovern's army of volunteers, he assembled a personal machine in Colorado and returned in triumph to Washington as a U.S...

...So far in the present campaign, we have had three revealing responses by Hart to the unexpected...

...When you hug a Cabbage Patch Doll, no matter what its head is stuffed with, it will never really love you back...

...And those are the kinds of issues that this debate, this contest, will be about...

...Although the Colorado Senator has since gone on to become a serious contender for the Democratic Presidential nomination, among the politically literate the image it suggests and the questions it raises persist...

...At the time he told friends, who kidded him mercilessly, that the new name was simply shorter, easier to spell and pronounce...

...In case you' re wondering, no off-the-wall welfare plans of the kind that tripped up George McGovern in 1972 are likely to emerge from his ex-campaign manager's lips in this Presidential election year...

...his stint as an attorney in the moribund Internal Security Division of the Justice Department...

...I heard that wisecrack one midnight at a reporters' watering hole in Bedford, New Hampshire...

...The newer friends in Washington demur only on religion and culture...

...if the passengers were in civilian clothes, he would let them go on...

...The incident showed how, on at least some occasions, Hart can be distracted from reality by the attractiveness of a puzzle...

...Of course, several months remain before the Democratic convention and my impression could turn out to be wrong...

...Senator...

...One flaw in his book, in fact, is that it makes inadequate allowances for the passions, agony, history, and quirks that motivate people...

...Then he said his mother (who was still alive in his hometown of Ottawa, Kansas, when he lowered his age for the first time in a law directory listing him as an Interior Department attorney in Washington, D. C.) did not want people to think she was too old...

...The small liberal arts school's public information director notes only that following his "private counseling" (Nazarene for showdown) with the Senator, the school's full name was restored to the campaign biographical sketch...

...That requires us to believe his wife Lee (a comely college sweetheart who this year posed in designer suits and ballgowns as the prototypical candidate's wife for a snob magazine mailed to up-scaleD...

...He fired some people, reassigned others, cut back toalean-er operation, and borrowed money in order to survive until his January infusion of Federal matching funds...

...Instead, a month after he won re-election, the 44-year-old Senator settled for a reserve commission as a lieutenant junior grade in the Navy's Judge Advocate Generals Corps...

...From people who live inside the Beltway that rings the nation's capital Hart scooped up another $25,000 in contributions that year, while hiring two Washington insiders as close advisers...

...I suspect he really has forgotten why he changed his name and age, because he doesn't care...

...My own impression of Gary Hart is that he is very much the young man on the make, preoccupied with what's going on inside his head and unable to see the people and the world outside...

...Hart has had trouble on the name of his alma mater, too...

...But what kind of man, you may ask, wouldn't remember the reasons for changing his own name and age...

...Still, his Senate record in nonelection years indicates he would try...

...A more recent test came in the Atlanta debate, where moderator John Chancellor asked the candidates a loaded hypothetical question about what they would do if a Czechoslovak airliner full of passengers was flying toward Strategic Air Command bases and ignoring warnings of interceptor aircraft to turn back...

...He is the computer nerd whose mother has to nag him to join the family at dinner...

...Hart currently says he is a "nominal Presbyterian...

...My very strong belief is that it would erect the kind of trade barriers that would cost us enormous numbers of jobs, and represent for the first time in 200 years real economic surrender in this country...

...Later, he served lO unpaid days in the Mediterranean and was promoted to full lieutenant...

...Hart did not take this course...

...He may be more into the future than into the now...

...He refused a request for a meeting from workers in his own Colorado Senate offices, who were told he was too shy...

...One can object to Hart's schemes...

...He posed in tanks and used ads quoting kind words from Barry Goldwater...

...Then I read Hart's book, and I realized it was a bum rap to charge that he has neglected to tell us exactly what his "new ideas" are...

...Yet when his 1980 reelection bid was in trouble he accepted more than $250,000 in pac money, including $148,000 from labor PACs...