New Answers

TWO YEARS AGO, Jimmy Carter and the Democrats cringed as Ronald Reagan, smiling benignly into the living rooms of millions of Americans, asked. "Are you better off now than you were four years ago? Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores than it was four years ago? Is there more or less unemployment than there was four years ago?" Carter himself had used a similar tactic in the 1976 campaign, sympathizing with the American people over the "disgraceful" level of the Misery Index. Now, two years later, the economy is in even worse shape, and it is Reagan's turn to hear his opponents commiserate with the long-suffering public.

The string of candidates running against the dismal record of the incumbent Administration has led some to theorize that the Presidency and America's problems have in recent years become too complex for anyone to handle. Perhaps, but one contender for the throne, Sen. Gary Hart (D-Colo.), has a different answer. "While the world changes around us," he argues, "we remain mired in irrelevant debate about the wrong issues. Because we have not responded to change, we find ourselves faced with false choices inflation versus recession, government control versus the free market: even technological progress versus jobs."

All Democrats are talking New Ideas these days, but most are really peddling slightly modified wares with new labels. Hart, meanwhile, has specific solutions in mind--complex solutions, sometimes running to several pages and using many big words--but solutions nonetheless. One such proposal is the "military reform" movement. While other liberals vaguely criticize waste in defense spending. Hart and some fellow reformers have extensively studied the defense problem, and found the choice between military weakness and a crushing military budget to be illusory. Their solution is, in general, to avoid overly expensive technologically sophisticated weapons that don't work or that cost too much to buy in sufficient quantities, and instead to concentrate on small, reliable, and cheap weapons. Applying this principle, Hart recently proposed a defense budget that would save more than $100 billion in spending authority over the next five years by eliminating useless gadgets like the MX, the B-1B, the Bradley fighting vehicle, and AH-64 attack helicopter, and the F-18 fighter. Hart, incidentally, supports the nuclear weapons freeze.

In "An Economic Strategy for the '80s," Hart presents a comprehensive program for recovery and growth. This package includes support for education, investment incentives, progressive tax restructuring (he favors an expenditures tax), retraining of workers displaced out of "smokestack" industries, and, above all, technology.

OLD-LINE LIBERALS, suspicious of his deviation from orthodoxy, have lumped Hart together with other "high-tech" Democrats under cute labels like "neo-liberals." "Atari Democrats," and "technopols," and have suggested that Hart is "not a real liberal." This is inaccurate and unfair. Hart has continually emphasized his support for traditional liberal ideals. "The litmus test for a democratic society," he contends in his recent book, A New Democracy, "is equality--both equality of rights and equality of opportunity."

An eight-year Senate record bears out this philosophy. His rating from the American Civil Liberties Union is the highest in the Senate. His voting record on women's issues is impeccable, earning him a near-perfect rating from the National Women's Political Caucus. He is unswervingly pro-choice, pro-ERA, and has recently, with Sen. Edward M. Kennedy '54 (D-Mass.), been pushing a "pay equality" proposal to establish comparable pay for comparable work. He gets high ratings from consumer and conservation lobby groups. Hart's "party unity" rating in 1981 was one of the highest among Senate Democrats, and exceeded that of other President aspirants Sen. Allen Cranston (D-Calif.), Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio), Sen. Ernest F. Hollings (D-S.C.), and Sen. Dale Bumpers (D-Ark.). Indeed, Hart is the only one in this group who opposed both draft registration and the B-I bomber under the Carter Administration, and who voted consistently against the Reagan tax cuts and budget. (Bumpers, Glenn, and Hollings voted for the budget. Cranston and Glenn voted for the tax cut.)

But while aiming for liberal goals, Hart has insisted on thinking out the means himself. Traditional solutions, he argues, don't work because we aren't facing traditional problems. Hart's weakness among liberals has stemmed from a failure, until recently, to get this message across. He has been particularly hampered by the charge that his ideas are too complicated and too technical to use in a campaign, that he is "cerebral." Hart's reply: "Well, we've tried the other way."

Thottungal, a Crimson editor, is currently active in Hart's Harvard campaign.