136or142
Adam T
Junior Chimp
Posts: 7,434
|
 |
« on: April 24, 2016, 05:26:16 PM » |
|
|
« edited: April 24, 2016, 05:27:52 PM by Adam T »
|
Gary Hart was far from a lightweight. He was a leading thinker on nuclear issues and foreign policy in general, and he was one of the early Democrats fighting against old-line liberalism that ultimately led to Bill Clinton (though Gary Hart positioned himself more as a 'technocrat' or, in the parlance of the day 'an Atari Democrat' than as the 'centrist' that Bill Clinton more or less ran on and governed as.)
Gary Hart is also rightly credited for helping George McGovern win the Democratic nomination in 1972 and Hart's own insurgent campaign against Walter Mondale is at least as relatively successful as Bernie Sanders' insurgent campaign this time around will be as while Sanders was pretty much the only alternative to Hillary Rodham Clinton, Gary Hart had to overcome a number of other top contenders challenging Mondale for the Democratic nomination including John Glenn.
I'm also not sure that the 'where's the beef' advertisement ended Gary Hart's candidacy as has been stated above, as much as his lack of organization in the later primary states and his inability to raise enough funding to compete with Mondale did.
Gary Hart would have lost to Ronald Reagan because of the things written above, but also because Hart was and is simply a very strange person, but the view at the time that I agree with is that he likely would have ended up getting 43-45% of the vote, as opposed to the 41% that Mondale received.
|
