To the Editor:

I am . . . grateful to COMMENTARY and to Gregory A. Fossedal for taking note of my book, The Outside Story [Books in Review, June]. Could I expand on my analysis of one of the 1984 campaign’s most important events—the fall of Gary Hart?

“Brookhiser,” Mr. Fossedal notes, “attempts an explanation, but it does not amount to much. He cites Hart’s blunders—especially over the matter of his own name and age. But this is not persuasive.” Indeed not. That’s why I asked whether Hart’s booboos were “the deciding factor, the slip of the lip that sank the new generation of leadership? Yes, proximately; which is to say, no, not at all. If a politician’s defeat depends on such a minor factor, then he was as good as beaten long before. No kingdom is lost for the want of a single nail. Hart had correctly picked out Mondale’s weakness—special interests. But they were also a strength.”

How is that? “From time to time throughout the campaign, Mondale’s rivals would depict” the endorsement of him by special-interest groups (such as NOW, the NEA, and the AFL-CIO) “as venal transactions. . . . They got it backward. Mondale was able to go to these groups, . . . because he had been with them all along, fighting their fights. . . . Liberalism had endorsed the efforts of Mondale’s groups, and they endorsed liberalism in the person of Mondale.”

The story of Gary Hart’s weakness was thus in fact the story of Walter Mondale’s strength, at least among regular Democratic voters. Unfortunately for them, their taste for Mondale’s brand of old politics is shared by fewer and fewer Americans. This will continue to be a problem for Gary Hart, and for the Democratic party, in 1988, and beyond.

I look forward to meeting Mr. Fossedal on the campaign trail as we try to figure it out.

Richard Brookhiser
New York City

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Gregory A. Fossedal writes:

As my review noted, Richard Brookhiser discussed several possible explanations for Gary Hart’s rise and fall, not just Hart’s occasional gaffes. The problem is that none of them was particularly convincing or well documented, including the paragraphs above.

If Mondale’s linkage to special interests was the key variable, why did Hart in particular benefit from it? Why did he exploit it to near-victory—Mondale, according to some reports, had actually written a withdrawal speech after the Maine caucuses—and then, suddenly, collapse? I read Mr. Brookhiser’s book with the keen anticipation of learning what changed in Hart’s speeches, commercials, and other communications with the electorate—the “outside story”—that caused his decline. Richard Brookhiser disappointed me on that particular score; even William F. Buckley’s praise for this book, like mine, is qualified by an observation that it contains little fresh reporting.

But it’s always tricky criticizing a book for what it doesn’t do. What Mr. Brookhiser does, as my review said, is to recapitulate the 1984 campaign with wit and style. I probably won’t see Mr. Brookhiser on the 1988 trail, as I’m much too lazy to cover a campaign; but I hope he’ll write a book on the ’88 race, in which case I’ll feel well-informed without having to eat all that rubber chicken.

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