Campaign Portrait,Gary Hart: Winning Hearts Through Minds

Though he nearly won the Democratic nomination in 1984, former Colorado Senator Gary Hart remains an enigma to many. This is the second in a series of profiles exploring the personalities and characters of the major 1988 contenders.

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 is ahead: ". . . and we'll be talking with Gary Hart about the presidential election of 1988." Hart groans, "Oh, no," and then smiles sheepishly, as if to say, What can one expect?

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 someone who knows Washington but is not a captive of it." Someone like Gary Hart? "Light bulb," Hart replies, a smile brightening his face as he strides into the artificial sunshine of the studio.

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. Lean and efficient, Hart is the Voyager of American politics -- carefully designed, technically innovative and built for a long haul.

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 oil and make cuts in military and agriculture programs. Although Hart had one of the most liberal voting records in the Senate, he has cast himself as a nonideological technocrat intent on steering the Democratic party away from traditional interest-group liberalism.