Word: hartness
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Lost in thought, he fiddles with his fingers, rubbing his left hand with his right as though it were a kind of talisman. It is a nervous habit, something he does before nearly every public appearance. At 7:15 a.m., Gary Hart, his black cowboy boots burnished, his blue pinstripe suit neatly pressed, stands in the corner of the windowless waiting room at ABC before going on Good Morning America. He is there to promote The Strategies of Zeus, his recently published spy novel about arms talks in Geneva. Watching the monitor, he hears the announcer telling viewers what...
...Hart winces at being depicted as a political animal; his manner can suggest that he would be more at home reading (or writing) a book. Yet as he leans against the doorway waiting to go on the air, the 1988 race is clearly on his mind. "What voters are tired of," he says earnestly, "is the ideological President." Presidents, he declares, should not be afraid of creative ideas, of searching for fresh approaches. "It's a state of mind. Kennedy had it. Roosevelt had it." Hart's Mount Rushmore face becomes very serious. "Voters," he says, "want competence. They want...
Gary Warren Hart, 50, the shy, jug-eared boy from Ottawa, Kansas, who graduated from Bethany Nazarene College in central Oklahoma and then from Yale's Divinity and Law Schools, the volunteer for both John and Robert Kennedy who engineered George McGovern's capture of the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination, portrayed himself in 1984 as the man who would move his party and the country into a new age. It almost worked. Now the self- described antipolitician is in the unaccustomed position of being the front runner for the Democratic nomination, and, for the moment, he is biding his time...
Ever since Walter Mondale deflated his 1984 campaign with a single question -- "Where's the beef?" -- Hart has been constructing an impressive fortress of ideas. He has delivered a series of scholarly speeches on foreign affairs and industrial policy. He opposes restrictions on trade like tariffs and quotas and advocates a restructuring of Third World debt. In a speech last month, Hart proposed an overhaul of the U.S. education system featuring stricter accountability for teachers and offering educational retraining for adults. To help finance this multibillion-dollar proposal, he would impose a $10-per-bbl. fee on imported...
...curious way, Hart the man seems hidden behind the edifice of his ideas. He sometimes appears to wield his detailed understanding of issues as a kind of personal shield. He admits that Mondale's question probed deeper than policy particulars. "Fritz touched a nerve when he sort of questioned who I was," says Hart from behind the desk of his rather spartan Denver law office. "What he was really saying was, 'Is this guy well-grounded enough to govern this country?' " Hart can answer the question that stymies many other candidates: Why are you running for President? But he still...