Republican Cory Gardner brought up former U.S. Sen. Gary Hart’s past when asked about Hart’s shock and ugh over The Denver Post’s endorsement of Gardner.
Former Colorado U.S. Sen. Gary Hart, a Democrat. (Special to the Post.)
Hart supports Democratic U.S. Sen. Mark Udall.
FOX: In your race in Colorado, the normally left-leaning Denver Post , and then Gary Hart and ripped into you, saying you are not a serious candidate. Would you like to respond to that?
GARDNER: Well, again, I think there was an article in Politico about Gary Hart ruining politics, and everybody knows his claim to fame. So, I`m not too worried about what Gary Hart thinks about, and he can take his monkey business other — other places.
Ouch. The Colorado senator was considered the frontrunner in the 1988 presidential race until the press reported of a suspected affair with a blonde named Donna Rice, and published a picture of her sitting in his lap on a yacht named Monkey Business. A recent story in The New York Times takes a fascinating look at .
Hart “was invariably described as a brilliant and serious man, perhaps the most visionary political mind of his generation, an old-school statesman of the kind Washington had lost its capacity to produce,” The Times wrote. “He warned of the rise of stateless terrorism and spoke of the need to convert the industrial economy into an information-and-technology-based one, at a time when few politicians in either party had given much thought to anything beyond communism and steel.”
When Udall was elected senator in 2008, it was Hart who convinced him that national security was an area to become focused on, especially considering Udall’s voracious appetite for history and his relationships with the military. critical of the government spying on its own citizens.
Hart has been in the news much of the last week after the letter he wrote to The Denver Post protesting the endorsement was reported by .
“I am dumbfounded and appalled by your endorsement,” Hart wrote in part. “For you to conclude that Mr. Gardner will be anything other than a consistent vote for a Tea Party dictated agenda on the major social and economic issues of the day is confounding.”
