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Gary Hart’s ’88 run for the Presidency ended in disaster

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11 Jan 2022
5 min read
Question: once the front-runner for the democratic nomination for president, this colorado politician showed a little too much love...

The American public froths at a salacious story – especially when politics are involved.

Setting a tone for the impending public/media appetite for the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinski tale, the decade previous spun its own yarn of political and personal entanglement.

Gary Hart (D) served Colorado as a U.S. Senator from 1975-1987, having crafted quite the C.V.  en route to Congress.  After earning dual degrees from Yale University (including, perhaps ironically, a Bachelor’s Degree in Divinity to go with a law degree), Hart worked for the U.S. Department of Justice before becoming a special assistant to the solicitor of the United States Dept. of the Interior.  In the early ‘70’s, before his own election, Hart was the national campaign director for George McGovern’s presidential run of 1972.

Come the mid-80’s, Hart sought further office, and became a Democratic candidate for the presidency.  Though the nomination ultimately went to Vice President Walter Mondale, Hart made some national noise by earning the second-most delegates (1,200 votes), a clip of just over 30%, while Mondale earned nearly 57%.  In addition, Hart won an impressive 26 primaries, a number which usurped Mondale’s count by four states.

After Mondale was clobbered by winner Ronald Reagan in the President’s re-election to a second term, the Democrats sought a rally in ‘88 and upstart Hart was the clear front-runner.

Until he wasn’t.

With extramarital rumors long surrounding his campaign, a May of ’88 investigative piece by the Miami Herald linked the Senator to model and actress Donna Rice, with a reporter observing the pair leaving Hart’s Washington, D.C. townhouse together.

His run at the White House was over, though not before Hart attempted to hang around the race for a short time amid the newspaper controversy, and then, after dropping out, re-entering the race later in the year before realizing his chances were dim.  Ultimately, the nomination when to Michael Dukakis, Governor of Massachusetts, who would go on to lose in the general election to George H.W. Bush.

Hart would soon go back to practicing law, before later returning to the political realm. In 2009, was named by President Obama as Vice Chair of Homeland Security Advisory Council.  Come 2014, Obama named Hart as his U.S. Special Envoy for Northern Ireland, a post Hart would hold from 2014-17.

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