DENVER—Former Sen. Gary Hart said Friday the country may be on the verge of a new political era after decades dominated by the influence of Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan.
“I think the real question is, is the age of Reagan ending, as I think it may well be? And what is to take over after that?” he said.
Hart, a Colorado Democrat, ran for his party’s presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988 and has endorsed Sen. Barack Obama this year. But the longtime policy scholar said the most interesting aspect of the 2008 race will be the Republican Party.
He said he watched as Republicans evolved in the late 1970s from a party focused on balanced budgets and leery of foreign engagements to one with a neo-conservative foreign policy, Christian right values and a Libertarian tax stance.
“If the American people in ’08 and beyond … begin to turn their back on that party as it is composed, the question then becomes, what is the future of the Republican Party?” he said.
Hart said Republican front-runner John McCain—for whom Hart was a groomsman when McCain married his current wife—represents a return to more traditional Republican Party.
“This is not an endorsement he needs,” Hart told about 150 journalists and lawmakers at a Colorado Press Association convention. “But John McCain is a conservative. Don’t quote me or it will kill him.”
Hart called claims that McCain is liberal “astounding.”
Hart characterized Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s supporters as looking to the past and Obama’s supporters as looking to the future, but he conceded that was a “gross over-generalization.”
Democrats who remember the 1990s fondly are rallying to Clinton, he said. “But you have other people who see this revolutionary age going like this to the future, and they are gravitating towards Barack Obama.”
Hart said Obama’s campaign will help remove race as a factor in American politics, even if he’s not elected.
“That is pretty profound,” he said.
Hart also called a Clinton “red phone” ad running in Texas “total nonsense.”
The ad shows children sleeping while a narrator says a phone is ring in the White House and something has happened in the world.
“Your vote will decide who answers that call,” the voice says. “Whether it’s someone who already knows the world’s leaders, knows the military—someone tested and ready to lead in a dangerous world.”
The add mirrors an attack levied by Walter Mondale on Hart in their 1984 race for the Democratic nomination.
