Connie Schultz is a nationally syndicated columnist and the author of “. . . and His Lovely Wife.”
By Gary Hart
Blue Rider.
215 pp. $25.95
In his new book, “The Republic of Conscience,” former U.S. senator and presidential candidate Gary Hart says he can “personally testify that American politics have taken a distinctly downward turn in the space of one mature lifetime.” His lifetime, he means, and his small book captures this shift.
Hart is right to echo the public’s growing despair over what is happening to electoral politics, from the undermining influence of unlimited donor dollars to the decline of social justice. “When our economy is not growing,” he writes, “those least able to look after themselves are the first thrown overboard under the banner of slogans such as ‘A thousand points of light’ or ‘We must balance our budget’ or ‘We can’t afford handouts’ or ‘We must eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse.’ Never mind that these are all rhetorical devices to facilitate an escape from harsh reality with our conscience intact.”
Hart is right, too, to bemoan how “partisan and ideological media” have fed a growing tendency for Americans to question whether we are a “society with social obligations.” He is correct to lament the current state of what often passes as political journalism, but he loses his voice of authority by failing to note how his own past experience with the press has colored his perceptions. Indeed, his conflicted relationship with the media fuels some of his biggest missteps. He offers out-of-context quotes from journalists he does not name, and he cherry-picks his political history to depict himself as the smartest, and most ignored, public figure in American politics today.
This is a shame, because Hart has a lot of good ideas. He is right to examine the many ways money has corroded politics, including the heinous tendency of former members of Congress and their staffers to become lobbyists. He is eloquent, if too brief, in advocating for the one in five children — the 46.5 million Americans — who live in poverty. There was a time, he reminds us, when there was dignity in helping “humble men appearing at our back door toward the end of the Great Depression politely asking for a bite of food.”
Now, however, the partisan “media chatterers” chip away at these once-treasured national values. “Could we do without the social safety net,” he writes, “without Social Security and Medicare, without farm subsidies, without unemployment compensation, without school lunch programs, without housing assistance? Of course we could. But we would not be a civilized society and we would not be an American nation any of us would be proud of.”
At its best, Hart’s book is a warning flare to draw our attention to our many departures from the Founding Fathers’ intentions. He is especially fond of Thomas Jefferson, whom many now see through a darker lens after recent revelations about his mistreatment of his slaves. I point this out not to sully Jefferson’s legacy but to remind us — and Hart — that even our greatest leaders are often deeply flawed.
Which brings me to this: Hart writes that, after Watergate, “journalistic rewards were offered for disclosure, by any means devised, of the private lives of presidents and political figures, with varying degrees of accuracy and verifiability. The duty of selecting leaders shifted from the people to the press. It is one thing for the people to know the emperor has no clothes. It is another for the media to peek in the windows of his private home to prove it.”
The next sentence should have read something like this: “In the interest of full disclosure, I speak from personal experience.” And following that should have been at least a mention of how media coverage of his relationship with a woman not his wife derailed his presidential bid in 1988. If you want to position yourself as a prophet to save us from ourselves, it’s important to acknowledge your own missteps on this road to wisdom.
In the interest of full disclosure, I note the following: My husband, Sherrod Brown, is a member of the U.S. Senate, which Hart disparages as devoid of serious debate and full of people who no longer read any history. I am also a journalist — that is, a member of a profession he loathes. I am also a woman, and Hart seems to think my gender has little or nothing to offer a country in dire need of big personalities. Bemoaning the “shrinking” stature of everyone from political leaders to television anchors, he writes, “Where have you gone Walter Conkrite, or Lee Iacocca, or Gary Cooper, or Walter Lippmann?” If visibility is what he’s going for here, how about CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour, or Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, or three-time Oscar winner Meryl Streep, or New York Times columnists Gail Collins and Maureen Dowd? To name a few of so many.
Hart regularly repeats himself — no one who reads this book will forget that he co-chaired the U.S. Commission on National Security for the Twenty-First Century — and relies on generalizations that sometimes can’t pass the straight-face test. For example, he writes, “We are as far from uniting around a national renewal of principles as we have ever been.” What a jarring claim, particularly during this renewed period of debate in our country over the Confederate flag and the legacy of our Civil War, the most divisive period in our country.
As has been true throughout his career, Hart is most eloquent when discussing foreign policy. He makes a strong case for how war has changed while the United States has not kept pace. Armed conflict with the Islamic State, he warns, “will not yield itself to quick and final results” but rather will take “two or three” decades.
Warfare is “retreating to the barbaric age of the assassins in the eleventh century,” he writes, and one of the most effective ways to counter this is to rely less on what he calls “high technologies” and return to the use of agents to keep America safe. “Human intelligence . . . elicited by one agent from another by means of wine, women, song, and money still holds the greatest promise of catastrophe avoidance. It is cheap; it requires spectacular skill — and luck — and it is dangerous. But it might avoid future 9/11s and it might have avoided the first one.”
Despite Hart’s emphatic dismay with the media, he does occasionally quote journalists — though not by name and not in context — when he thinks it bolsters his views. A particularly egregious example is when Hart offers an excerpt from what he calls a “recent article in the New York Times on the triumph of the adolescent culture.” After lamenting the absence of real men such as Cronkite and Iacocca, he misrepresents the Times article as echoing his longing, when in fact critic A.O. Scott’s essay is a much more nuanced look at how television’s traditional patriarchy, with its attendant misogyny, is on its way out. And how this is a good thing.
Hart, however, quotes these fragments from the article: “It seems that, in doing away with patriarchal authority, we have also, perhaps unwittingly, killed off all the grown-ups. . . . nobody knows how to be a grown-up anymore. Adulthood . . . has become conceptually untenable.”
This is not just a disingenuous truncating of quotes on Hart’s part; it distorts the intentions of Scott’s long, thoughtful reflection sparked by the conclusion of male-centric series such as “Mad Men,” “The Sopranos” and “Breaking Bad.” “The supremacy of men can no longer be taken as a reflection of natural order or settled custom,” Scott wrote. “This slow unwinding has been the work of generations. For the most part, it has been understood — rightly in my view, and this is not really an argument I want to have right now — as a narrative of progress. A society that was exclusive and repressive is now freer and more open. But there may be other less unequivocally happy consequences.”
Presented in context, this is a different message, and an inconvenient one for Hart, who insists the high road is his alone to claim.
