The Hart Rule
Anything any politician did with a woman other than his wife prior to May 5 1987 ought to be allowed to go unrevealed.
The Hart here is Gary, former Democratic senator from Colorado, whose denial on May 5th 1987 that he had ever spent “an evening, a night” with a woman other than Mrs. Hart was contradicted by enough evidence to force him to abandon his campaign for his party’s 1988 presidential nomination. (Reporters had staked out his Washington town house the previous weekend, spotting the departure of a Ms. Donna Earle Rice who, it turned out, also had accompanied Mr. Hart on a cruise to the Bahamas aboard the good ship Monkey Business - and there were pictures of the fun couple to prove it.)
All this was fresh in the memory of a Virginia Republican, John Buckley, who propounded the Hart Rule three years later when Democratic senator Charles S. Robb was fending off allegations that he had had an affair with a former representative of the state in the Miss US Pagent. (Mr. Robb admitted only to indiscreet “socializing.”) Mr. Buckley’s point was that “Intense scrutiny of candidates’ lives is an unpleasant fact of life in politics today . . . After Gary Hart’s exposure. politicians were on notice that their behavior had to change” (Roanoke Times & World, April 28th 1991, in Anne H. Soukhanov, Word Watch 1995).
Discussion of The Hart Rule
Post your comment here
