A Heart of Darkness

The presidential preference poll at this year's Massachusetts Democratic Convention did not start until the afternoon of Saturday, April 9, but the six campaigns set up shop in Springfield the night before to start wooing the delegates. Five candidates devoted their evenings to wining and dining for support; the more elaborate were Reubin Askew's Florida barbecue, California Sen. Alan Cranston's open-bar bash, and Ohio Sen. John Glenn's late-night Buckeye Blast. The sixth presidential aspirant, Sen. Gary Hart of Colorado, conducted an Issues Workshop. In a cramped, stuffy room of the Stonehaven Inn, Hart and two MIT professors discussed President Reagan's recent arms control proposals for about two hours. In a question and answer period, one woman asked the candidate to "tell us about yourself, tell us why we as delegates should vote for you." The senator replied in a tone equivalent to the solemnity of the seminar, "Let's not stray from the topic. Believe it or not, this is not a Hart for President event I don't want to detract from the speakers."

With half a dozen politicians jockeying for the position of Democratic contender to the throne, each man has to distinguish himself, to keep from blurring with the blather of the bunch. It is no secret that Gary Hart wants to stake out the territory of "thinking man's liberal," the one who carefully examines issues and courageously gives detailed answers, who is not afraid to reject the slogans of the past to create the solutions for the future. He is the only one who at this early stage has published a book, and A New Democracy A Democratic, Vision for the 1980's and Beyond racks of this pseudo intellectual tack.

The blurb on the back cover calls him a "pragmatic idealist, a man firmly committed to America's traditional values but impatient with yesterday's politics." It notes that he attended Yale Divinity school and graduated from Yale Law School, ignoring his B.A from Bethany College. In the acknowledgements, Hart cites several prominent academicians, including former Yale President Dr. Kingman Brewster, former Carter inflation fighter Alfred J. Kahn. MIT's Robert Solow, and Kennedy School hotshots Robert Reich and Daniel Yergin Throughout the text, the senator shows a wide ranging familiarity with Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, citing among others Winston Churchill, Leo Iolstoy, Jose Ortegay Gasset, Theodore Roszak, H.G. Wells and Cicero.

But despite these academic trappings, the book fails miserably in its pretension to be a serious look at the issues. The prose, while often straight forward, becomes intolerable as Hart's conscientious stabs at eloquence fall flat--painfully highlighted by his incessant quoting of John F. Kennedy '40, whom he is clearly flying to emulate. Typical of his rhetoric are such hollow lines is. We have the experience, the means and the power to make the right choice. We cannot escape the consequences of making the wrong one," Or. "The steps outlined in this section are designed to help us bestow that sense of purpose and national will" Or. "A nation whose children go to bed at night with nuclear nightmares is not a secure nation." "Without this purpose, we will fail. With this purpose, a generation can fashion its place in history. In such purpose, there is hope."

And such grandiose phraseology serves only to patch together a disorganized hodgepodge of mostly superficial ideas. The book is divided into two sections, Part I. "The Path to Prosperity," outlines Hart's proposals for the economy. Part II, "National Security Today and Tomorrow," details his views on energy and weaponry. Much of what he argues in both sections comes off as a complicated acknowledgement that he has no new solutions. When discussing the current problems with monetary policy, he essentially says that the Federal Reserve should get back on target. On trade policy, he states that he is against protectionism, but that when other countries engage in unfair trading practices, the United States should strictly enforce the rules in place under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade which allows for retaliation. Identifying the shortsightedness of our democratically elected government, he proposing a "Council of Emerging Issues," which would somehow be better at noticing long term trends than current public and private agencies, and would somehow make congressmen with two-year terms more likely to vote for long term projects. On preventing a nuclear holocaust. Hart merely proposes more negotiations with the Soviets on destabilizing weapons, and with Third World nations to stem the flow of the dangerous technology.

Of the specific proposals Hart forwards some trigger the suspicion that he is proposing them simply he cause they are new, not because of any profound understanding or support for them. His prosecutions on Tax-Based Income Policies (TIP) to control inflation and consumption taxes--rather than income taxes to reform the tax code, are both brief. Neither sections acknowledges the administrative barriers which would seriously erode such programs' implementation not do they address the political problems which have led many politicians and economists to write both proposals off.

This is not to say that Gary Hart does not have some solid, serious ideas buried in his grab-bag of slogans. His tacit acknowledgement that competition in the most effective way to direct resources generous interesting proposals aimed not to subsets the month but to patch up its failures. His blueprint for "Revolving Industrial Vitality" makes a lot of sense--to compile better information for investors, and to alter financial regulations to free up investment finds for businesses, especially small ones, would do much to encourage increased production. His plans for workers, providing elaborate government training and matching programs, giving employees a say in the workplace, encouraging labor-management partnerships suffer than confrontations--are changes that inevitably must take place if the United States is to adjust to its current industrial structure. Hart's general that the federal government should acknowledge that any policy it sets has an effect on the market, and that it should consequently plan out in a coordinated manner what its priorities are, is a persuasive one.

But while tilting at the bold new questions of the eighties and beyond. Hart leaves the old queries to faster. His economic program levels micro solutions helping individual workers and individual flame--an what are essentially macro problems. Freeing up investment funds and giving workers more skills can only work so far. Without an underlying boost in aggregate demand, few companies will care to invest those funds, and without an overall increase in job openings, the most intricate job training will not place the unemployed.

Even more disturbing is Hart's rather cold, calculating approach to the issues. A New Democracy focuses only on how to increase production, how to increase employment, how to trim back the military and make it more efficient. It is a new technocracy: it has no soul While bolstering the overall state of the economy would President Hart care if resources were fluting to the South and the West, while the industrial Northeast and Northwest were left to rot? When increasing general training, would this chief executive competition for minorities, who continue to get stuck with more unemployment and lower wages than the vest of the population? When fostering labor-management cooperation, would he take special action in those region of the country where no union to speak of exists? Hart skillfully glides through 117 pages on the economy without addressing these tired old questions.

He pulls a similar stunt in his section on "National Security Today and Tomorrow," where he goes into great detail on weaponry and training in the control of proposing curriculum reform at West Point. But he never answers what such reform is for, aside from bet- ter fighting "the Soviets." It remains unclear whether, with the Coloradan in the Oval Office, the United States would continue to fight Communism in the outreaches of El Salvador and Nicaragua. We may, upon prodding, answer these questions too, but it is disturbing to imagine a president who, when considering domestic and foreign problems, reacts immediately for more jobs and better weaponry, without pausing to answer for whom and for what.

Few people will actually read A New Democracy, many will consequently fall into its trap and consider the author an intellect and a scholar. But the "thinking man" he aims to attract will try to slog through it, and, upon doing so, will think twice about accepting Gary Hart