This commentary is written by Kevin Ellis, a communications consultant based in Montpelier. He is a member of the board of the Vermont Journalism Trust, the parent organization of VTDigger.
In 1987, a Colorado senator named Gary Hart was the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Hart was smart, well-informed and attracted national attention by resisting predictable liberalism in favor of a more pragmatic approach. He proposed reforming the Pentagon to be more efficient and understood that a new generation of voters wanted more than what the Reagan years provided.
Hart was a new breed of Democrat, different from the old bulls from Southern states who mixed racism with populism. The Senate and the country were changing and Hart reflected that change.
But when news broke that Hart had a relationship with a woman named Donna Rice (not his wife), a media frenzy ensued. The Republicans were “shocked!” Democrats were angry at Hart for being reckless. And the public ate it up, watching a real-life scandal in real time on three TV networks.
At a tension-filled press conference in Littleton, New Hampshire, a Washington Post reporter asked Hart if he had always been faithful to his wife. We journalists were now really shocked because that question had rarely, if ever, been asked of a politician.
It was a moment when the tectonic plates of politics and culture shifted. The system would never be the same. Hart knew that, but he was trapped by the TV cameras and the reporters. He had to give an answer, but was so shocked by the question all he could say was: “I do not have to answer that question.’’
The following day, the campaign was over, sunk by incessant media attention and dropping poll numbers.
Thirty-five years later, the Republican Party is led by a man who paid a stripper hush money to keep their affair secret while his wife was pregnant. He was also caught on tape bragging that he could grab women by their crotch and get away with it because of his celebrity.
The party’s newest nominee for the U.S. Senate paid for an abortion for a woman (not his wife) and urged her to abort a second pregnancy. He also threatened to kill his wife by putting a gun to her head while abandoning his three “illegitimate” children.
The first man, Donald Trump, became president in 2016. The second, Herschel Walker, is within a breath of winning a U.S. Senate seat in Georgia.
Gary Hart’s relationship with Donna Rice became one of the more famous stories of my generation. Today, the far more concerning stories of Trump and Walker have become old news. We no longer seem to care. We have lived through Bill Clinton’s Oval Office affair with a White House intern (1997), House Speaker Dennis Hastert sexually abusing students as a wrestling coach (2015) and Congressman Anthony Weiner sexting pictures of himself to young women (2011).
The list of scandals is long and Trump, Herschel Walker and the Republicans are betting that the change in social mores over the last 35 years will save Walker’s candidacy and give them control of the U.S. Senate. Even evangelical Christians are rallying to his defense. Walker himself denies that he paid for the abortion or that he urged anyone to have one. He first said it is all lies. Then he said he has been “forgiven.’’
Regardless of these excuses, Walker is adamantly “pro-life’’ and supports a national ban on abortion without regard to health and safety of the mother. It is worth pointing out that paying for his former girlfriend’s abortion is a federal crime and a crime in Georgia, which bans abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. As a citizen, Walker would go to prison. As a candidate for the U.S. Senate, he could win.
Trump and Walker have learned a lot from those who came before them. Clinton survived his sex scandal and even prospered as president. Trump and Walker only seem to grow in strength. Walker is basically tied with his opponent, despite inane comments about climate change and his lame defense of his personal life.
Why is Walker still politically alive while Gary Hart sank like a stone? What happened in the last 35 years? Why are Trump and Walker held to different standards than Gary Hart?
It’s because we got used to it.
A prince in England married a commoner, cheated on her and divorced her before she was killed in a car crash. He is now King of England.
The Kardashians get married, divorced and remarried — all on TV and all delivered to us via the internet up to the minute.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich divorced his wife when she had cancer in favor of his assistant.
Beneath the weight of so many scandals, it seems the public no longer cares.
Just a few months after leaving the presidential race, Gary Hart reentered it. A young reporter at the time, I was assigned to cover Hart’s campaign. It was a sad affair, with the candidate traveling alone, his schedule managed by his daughter. The Democratic Party had abandoned him.
He was depressed and angry about what American politics had just become. He had so much to give and the media/political industrial complex took it away. It wasn’t fair. Politics rarely is.
We would sit on the plane and in hotel lobbies talking politics, the Kennedy assassination and the future of the country. One day he turned to me and New York Times reporter Maureen Dowd and said: “If you two, with all your readers, told the truth about what happened and why I am the best candidate, the system could change.’’
He was right. But we were all trapped in a growing media culture that was becoming toxic and tribal, where reporters didn’t much care about the humanity of the people they covered and supporters not caring about the behavior of their candidate. They just wanted to get their tax cut. They just wanted to win.
I should have written a deeper, more complex story about how the political culture was changing and Hart got trapped in a new world none of us really understood. Instead, I wrote a basic story about Hart traveling around the country tilting at windmills.
And here we are today. How is it possible that evangelical Christians continue to support Herschel Walker?
“I don’t care if Herschel Walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles. I want control of the Senate,” former NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch said on her radio program.
And there we are.