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March 31, 2016
Former Sen. Gary Hart, right, announces his withdrawal from the presidential race in 1987. (Photo: AP)
If
you’re tired of hearing Donald Trump go on about his ratings and polls,
if you’re mystified by the Twitter War of the Candidates’ Wives, if you
can’t understand why Wolf Blitzer interviews a former contestant on “The Apprentice” as if she were a political authority, then I’ve got a video you really need to watch.
The video I’m showing you here,
courtesy of C-Span’s archive, is of a presidential candidate speaking
in 1987, at a moment of tectonic upheaval in our politics and media.
Chances are pretty good you’ve never seen it, or even heard about it,
and there’s a reason for that.
Before I tell the remarkable story of that eight-minute speech, though, let’s put it in the context of our moment.
Recently, a bunch of commentators — among them the president
of the United States — seem to have latched on to the idea that the
media is culpable in enabling Trump’s antic march to the Republican
nomination. In the New York Times, my former colleagues Nicholas Kristof and Jim Rutenberg have both written columns in the past week asking whether we, as an industry, need to be more accountable.
Regular readers of this column know that I wrote early and often on this theme, including a column last December about the destructive “symbiosis” between Trump and the media — a term very much in fashion now.
In fact, not long ago I wrote an entire book
on the collision of entertainment and political journalism, called “All
the Truth Is Out,” which seems to have accidentally anticipated the
Trump phenomenon. I borrowed from the brilliant work of the social
critic Neil Postman, whose 1985 book “Amusing Ourselves to Death” feels
more relevant today than it probably did then.
But
the guy who really predicted all of this was Gary Hart, the protagonist
of “All the Truth Is Out.” And man, did he try to sound the alarm.
At
this time in 1987, Hart was rather like the Hillary Clinton of his day,
only more talented and more visionary; he had been the presumed nominee
of the Democratic Party since narrowly losing in 1984, and the Gallup
Poll had him beating George H.W. Bush — then the sitting vice president —
by double digits. A man of staggering intellect, he was talking even
then about the rise of stateless terrorism and the arrival of a
high-tech economy.
But
his campaign unraveled in the space of five surreal days, during which
reporters from the Miami Herald hid outside Hart’s home in order to
catch him spending time with a younger woman. Hart found himself undone
by the first modern political sex scandal — the inevitable result of
myriad forces that were just then reshaping the media, from the echoes
of Watergate to the birth of the mobile satellite.
What happened next is interesting and almost entirely forgotten.
Driven
from the campaign trail in New Hampshire, Hart repaired to his cabin in
the Denver foothills, where he and his family were literally penned in
by a fleet of satellite trucks and news choppers. His aides wrote him
the kind of withdrawal statement we’ve come to expect from scandalized
politicians — contrite, gracious, bland.
Hart
couldn’t sleep after reading that speech. It made him want to vomit. He
called his close friend Warren Beatty (who would later make the film “Bulworth,” not incidentally) and talked through what he wished he could say instead.
Then,
the next morning, Hart drove the canyon road down to Denver, stepped
before the national media and calmly delivered one of the most stinging
and prescient indictments of an American institution you will ever see.
“In
public life, some things may be interesting, but that doesn’t
necessarily mean they’re important,” Hart said, decrying a process that
he said reduced reporters to hunters and candidates to the hunted.
“And
then after all that, ponderous pundits wonder in mock seriousness why
some of the best people in this country choose not to run for high
office,” Hart went on. “Now I want those talented people who supported
me to insist that this system be changed. Too much of it is just a
mockery. And if it continues to destroy people’s integrity and honor,
then that system will eventually destroy itself.
“Politics in this country, take it from me, is on the verge of becoming another form of athletic competition or sporting match.”
He
closed by paraphrasing his idol, Thomas Jefferson: “I tremble for my
country when I think we may in fact get the kind of leaders we deserve.”
Whenever
I talk about my book to audiences around the country, I close with
those lines. Invariably, I look up to find shocked and silent voters
nodding their heads, amazed at how eerily that captures our present
reality.
So
why haven’t you heard anything about this seminal speech? I’ll tell you
why. Because within 24 hours of its delivery, despite the polls showing
that the public mostly sided with Hart over the reporters, America’s
elite media, led by its columnists and editorial boards, rose up in
unison to mock and discredit it.
“Instead
of saying goodbye with a measure of dignity, respect and
introspection,” A.M. Rosenthal, the Times’ former editor, wrote on the
paper’s op-ed page, “Gary Hart told us he had decided that Gary Hart was
a wonderful man after all and that everybody was responsible for Gary
Hart’s political demise except Gary Hart.” (Watch Hart’s speech and decide for yourself if that was the point.)
Hart’s
monologue was instantly buried in an avalanche of defensiveness and
moral posturing. “It wasn’t just that I was blaming the media,” Hart
recalled when we talked this week. “It was that I was a bad guy, and it
was good riddance to a bad politician.”
For
29 years after that moment, until I directed him to it this week, even
Hart hadn’t watched that video clip. Nor did he bother to continue
pressing his case, despite a stream of offers to give speeches or appear
on talk shows.
“I
was not put on earth to pick a fight with the media and carry it out,”
he told me. “I couldn’t repeat the theme of that talk without the
headline inevitably saying, ‘Hart attacks the press,’ and I just didn’t
want to do that for the rest of my life.
“There was no capacity for thoughtful reflection,” Hart said. “It was all me versus them.”
By
the time I got into the business of political journalism in the late
1990s, 24-hour cable news — mindless, sensational, personality-obsessed —
was driving the conversation. Then came the Internet, with its frenzied
competition for clicks. By 2007, Politico (which does some excellent
work, to be fair) was calling itself the ESPN of news, which is pretty
much exactly what Hart had prophesied.
And so we systematically created a process perfectly suited to a manipulative, reality-TV performer like Trump (or Sarah Palin before him) — and just as hostile to a guy like John Kasich,
who talks about governing as complicated work. We spend half of any
given debate talking about poll numbers and strategies, mean tweets and
sordid allegations, because the game of politics is so much more
alluring than the practice of statecraft.
I
asked Hart if, on a week like this one, when battery charges against
Trump’s campaign manager were vying for airtime against his war with Ted
Cruz over their spouses, he felt vindicated at last.
“No,”
he said quickly. “No. No.” After all, he explained, no one (other than
me) ever saw the need to revisit what he said all those years ago.
I
raise the Hart video this week because if you read this latest flood of
self-criticism, some of it from commentators who have worked in our
business for decades, you might come away thinking that something
transformative has just taken us by surprise. You might get the
impression that a tsunami of triviality has suddenly overwhelmed our
media, and we barely had time to suck in air and duck our heads.
But
don’t let anyone tell you that this is all just about Trump’s suckering
us, or about some convergence of recent trends we couldn’t have
foreseen. It is, in fact, a generational reckoning — the failure of
executives and anchors and reporters-turned-cable-personalities, many of
them in our most serious news outlets, who for decades refused to
confront the creeping realities of their industry, as surely as a
generation of political leaders refused to confront the realities of
fiscal and global instability.
Leslie Moonves, the chairman of CBS, did a pretty nice job of encapsulating that failure when he talked about Trump’s campaign this way last month: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”
We
can say, as Moonves surely would, that we were just responding to
market forces beyond our control. We can say that voters, and not us,
get to decide what matters and what doesn’t. We can point out that we’ve
gone to great lengths to expose the depth of Trump’s ignorance and
inconsistency.
What we can’t say is that we weren’t told it would happen.
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