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Revisiting the Gary Hart scandal on a trip from East to West.
March 10, 2025 By Jon Allsop
Democratic presidential hopeful Gary Hart fields a question during a news conference in Denver in 1987. (AP Photo/Ed Andrieski)

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Last week, I took some time off and did something I’ve always wanted to do: take Amtrak from coast to coast. In between long spells watching America unfold out the window—from the wooded banks of the Potomac to the snow-dusted, mountainous shores of the Great Salt Lake (seriously, you should do it; just don’t expect to get anywhere on time)—I read All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid, Matt Bai’s 2014 book about Gary Hart, the Democratic senator from Colorado who, in Bai’s telling, was all set to be elected president in 1988 only for allegations of an extramarital affair to derail his campaign. (My copy of the book bore the title The Front Runner and was adorned by a photo of Hugh Jackman, who played Hart in a 2018 movie of that name adapted from Bai’s work.) The scandal would live on in the public imagination through a photo of Hart with a woman on his lap near a yacht named Monkey Business, though Hart had already dropped out when the photo surfaced.

I hadn’t expected to write about Bai’s tome—it was one of those books that I’d always been meaning to read and had finally gotten around to; plus I’d be traveling through Colorado—but I found that its focus on the press (as suggested by its original title) resonated with me, and helped me to start seeing our present, confused media moment in a different light. Bai essentially argues that the legacy of Watergate—which served as a shot in the arm for adversarial political reporting focused in particular on leaders’ personal character, with every candidate for office coming to be seen as “a hypocrite waiting to be exposed”—combined with technological and other advancements to create a new kind of journalism, one that could arguably be seen as a break with past coziness between political reporters and their subjects but also reduced “complex careers to isolated transgressions” and, worse, turned politics into a form of trivial, celebrified entertainment. The scandal around Hart—whose Washington home was staked out by serious political reporters and whose family was bombarded by news cameras—served, in Bai’s telling, as the tipping point. In the process, policy substance—which, Bai suggests, Hart offered in spades—got lost, with politicians who once trusted reporters to sit with them for lengthy, detailed interviews retreating “behind iron walls of bland rhetoric, heavily guarded by cynical consultants” for fear of saying something that, fairly or not, would blow up into an incriminating sound bite. “Rarely is any candidate willing to risk sudden implosion by actually thinking through the complex issues out loud, as the most talented politicians of Hart’s day were accustomed to doing,” Bai writes. “It’s safer to tell yourself
that you really don’t need to cater to reporters anymore, because you can talk to your own email list directly instead.”

When the book appeared, critics challenged various parts of Bai’s thesis, arguing that Hart was not actually on track to win in 1988 when the scandal hit, that his was far from the first candidacy to become mired in personalized coverage (Tom Fiedler, a journalist who participated in the Hart stakeout, wrote that philandering helped thwart the presidential aspirations of Alexander Hamilton; in the immediate post-Watergate era, character was a defining feature of coverage of Jimmy Carter’s campaign, as I noted after Carter died recently), and that, post-Hart, the press chose not to emphasize allegations of infidelity against various other candidates. (Bob Dole!) No claim of a wholesale tipping point is ever totally clean. Still, Bai’s argument is nuanced and there is much to commend it; I found that its indictment of shallow, gamified campaign journalism still rings true. And its 2014 publication date—before the beginning of the Trump era, but only just—reads today as an interesting vantage point; Trump, who has since saturated any and all attempts at detached political and cultural analysis, is never mentioned, and yet the conditions for his rise are glaringly apparent. Bai writes of a candidate chosen for “stagecraft and stardom”; another whose “basic viability” was “almost entirely grounded in the culture of entertainment”; a third who represented “the logical end” of what Hart’s downfall presaged, and was “a wealthy businessman who outwardly looked the part of a president but who exuded a vast inner reservoir of nothingness.” He was referring, respectively, to Sarah Palin, Barack Obama, and Mitt Romney.

If Bai saw Romney as a logical endpoint, then in many ways, Trump has blitzed so far past the endpoint that it’s now a dot in the rearview mirror, perfecting the performance of politics as anti-intellectual entertainment and its fusion with the wider culture. In some ways, though, Trump—and the political era that he has birthed—can be seen as representing a break with, or even a repudiation of, the post-Hart state of affairs that Bai disdains: at minimum, he has bulldozed through the idea that character counts above all else; at most, he has successfully mobilized a political base against this idea. This is true, of course, in the realm of sexual conduct—Trump has been repeatedly accused of everything from infidelity to assault (which he has always denied). After Bai’s book came out, Fiedler suggested that sex has never been a “campaign killer”; rather, Hart had fallen foul to a “no hypocrisy” rule after suggesting that his private life was squeaky clean. But Trump, needless to say, has incinerated this supposed rule, too. And similar dynamics can be observed around others in his orbit. In his book, Bai mentions the post-Hart case of John Tower, whom George H.W. Bush picked for defense secretary after winning in 1988, only for the nomination to get bogged down in claims of drinking and womanizing. Recently, Tower’s name circulated in media coverage again due to the perceived similarities between his story and that of Pete Hegseth, the Fox host Trump picked for the Pentagon. Tower became the first ever cabinet pick of a new president to be rejected by the Senate. Hegseth, of course, was confirmed.

There are, of course, specific differences that complicate such comparisons: for starters, Democrats controlled the Senate when Tower was toppled (even if it was conservative activists who really stuck the knife in), and would surely have rejected Hegseth had they held the majority now; even in spite of this reality, Trump did not succeed in making Matt Gaetz attorney general due to the many, many concerns about his personal life. In his and many other cases, mainstream media coverage has continued to be organized around the notion of character. And Trump and his ilk didn’t invent the notion of brazening out such coverage, or attempting to. Bai notes the examples of Bill Clinton and of Mark Sanford, the governor of South Carolina who claimed in 2009 that he was taking off to hike the Appalachian Trail when he was actually visiting a lover in Argentina, and yet managed to see out his gubernatorial term and subsequently get elected to Congress. After dropping out of the 1988 race, Hart himself reentered, only to flounder in early primary states and drop out again. 

And yet this moment feels different in numerous ways that are not always connected to each other directly—and are still swimming into view amid the jumble of our present informational landscape—but do, I think, hint at an interesting reset in the relationship between the press and politicians. The extent to which politicians can now push through scandal coverage that at least might have ended their career in the nineties or two thousands increasingly feels like an existential challenge to the type of character-centric accountability reporting that Bai describes—and also feels wrapped up in a broader backlash against so-called “cancel culture,” one that is most palpable on the political right, but is not limited to it. More thoughtful critiques of the post-Watergate school of journalism are taking shape, too. And through it all, more and more politicians seem to be peeking out from behind the iron wall, if not on the press’s terms—a result, surely, of the modern survivability of scandal, but also, perhaps, of new electoral imperatives.

One interesting critique of post-Watergate journalistic norms was explored in a recent article, by Semafor’s Ben Smith, about a new book, titled Why Nothing Works, by the researcher Marc Dunkelman. The book isn’t primarily about the media; it argues, essentially, that progressives’ past desire to build infrastructure and more generally get things done has been subsumed by a “vetocracy” that gives blocking power to a wide range of actors. Dunkelman does argue, per Smith, that Watergate and the contemporaneous publication of The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s widely revered exposĂ© of the New York City bureaucrat and master builder Robert Moses, heralded an age in which journalists “weren’t inclined to accept government claims so uncritically, and for good reason,” but also slipped into (in Smith’s words) “a new sort of negative naivete: a reflexive skepticism of the use of power.”  

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In his article about Dunkelman, Smith raised the example of Andrew Cuomo, the Democratic former governor of New York who has “long expressed a theory of government that harkens back to the progressive era: that in an age of public distrust, the best way to restore faith is to build and fix big, literal, public works.” Last week, Cuomo jumped into the mayor’s race in New York City and made similar noises; asked in an interview with the sports-media personality Stephen A. Smith what he’d say to voters who wonder if he can be trusted, he said “if you want someone to play nice with the other politicians…I am not your guy,” but that he is their guy if you want “someone who can actually get something done.” Of course, as the subtext of this question indicated, Cuomo is also an example of the accountability dynamics I described above: he resigned as governor following a series of sexual-harassment allegations (which he has denied), and is now not only seeking a comeback as mayor, but looks like the front-runner for the post. (Already, per Semafor, he has won the support of at least one New York media mogul.) Writing in The Atlantic, David Graham described Cuomo’s comeback as consonant with a broader “selective amnesia about the recent past” that “is not exclusive to New York or to politics—it’s afflicting many areas of American culture.” 

As Graham notes, in between his gubernatorial downfall and mayoral announcement, Cuomo hosted his own podcast, on which he complained about cancel culture; that and his decision to grant his first campaign interview last week to Smith—himself increasingly a figure at the intersection of entertainment and politics, with some pundits calling for him to look at a presidential bid as a Democrat—once again make Bai look prescient, representing a technological upgrade on cutting out the traditional press and communicating via the email list. But Cuomo’s interview with Smith was, at least, long. And whatever the specifics of his comeback effort (wherever you see the proper balance between character-based journalism and reporting that facilitates getting things done, the things that Cuomo did as governor, not least allegedly covering up COVID deaths in nursing homes, demand media scrutiny), he isn’t alone among current politicians in showing more willingness to think out loud, at length.

Last week, Gavin Newsom—the serving Democratic governor of California and, perhaps, a Hart-like figure in a photogenic western-state hope with some character questions way—debuted a podcast of his own, with the imaginative title This Is Gavin Newsom. The first episode was hardly a lengthy, policy-driven interview with a seasoned independent reporter; Newsom’s guest was the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, and much of the time, Newsom seemed to be interviewing him, in a weirdly deferential way that felt deeply politically performative. And, sure enough, one sound bite from the sit-down blew up in the wider media: Newsom agreeing with Kirk that it’s unfair for trans athletes to compete in women’s sports. But the discussion, which went on for well over an hour, was at times substantive. And at one point, Newsom and Kirk had an interesting exchange about the importance of talking at length in today’s politics, with Kirk contending that Democrats are very bad at it (in part because doing so is “too masculine” a pursuit) and that “if you wanna earn the respect of forgotten America, you have to show them that you can intellectually joust with no script, no hard breaks, no producers in the ear, no teleprompters.” Some journalistic observers seemed to agree with the latter part of this equation, at least. Politico’s Christpoher Cadelago, who has long covered Newsom, observed that, in launching a podcast at all, he seems to be channeling a belief that “the old rules of politics just don’t apply anymore—that there’s no reason why you can’t be both politician and pundit rolled into one; that the more you talk, the more leeway you’ll get.”

At one point during the recording, Kirk brought up a past scandal of Newsom’s own, if only, ostensibly, to make light of it: his attendance, during the pandemic, of a lobbyist’s birthday dinner at a swanky restaurant, in apparent violation of his own health policies. “I should have been at Applebee’s,” Newsom joshed back, before quipping that Kirk “makes twenty-five times more money than I do.” But then he turned serious. “Dumbest bonehead move of my life,” Newsom said, of his attendance at the dinner. “Own it, move on, grow up.”


Other notable stories:

  • Over the weekend, agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate student at Columbia University who participated in pro-Palestinian protests on campus last year, “in support,” an official said, “of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism.” According to Khalil’s lawyer, the agents entered his university-owned apartment; said that they were revoking his student visa only to be informed that he has a green card, then said they’d be revoking that; and threatened to arrest his wife, who is eight months pregnant and a US citizen. The founder of a coalition of legal-service providers in New York told the AP that the arrest appears to be “a retaliatory action against someone who expressed an opinion the Trump administration didn’t like.”   
  • And Voice of America’s Liam Scott spoke with Gert Kuiper, who is still seeking justice for his brother Jan more than forty years after he was killed, alongside three other journalists from the Netherlands, while covering the civil war in El Salvador. A court in Virginia is currently deciding whether Kuiper can proceed with a civil suit against a former Salvadoran soldier now living in the US. Meanwhile, a criminal case is proceeding against the soldier and two former senior officials in El Salvador—the highest-profile such case since a court struck down an amnesty law in the country. 

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Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among other outlets. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.