GARY HART

Watching and waiting to see if someone takes on President Obama in the primaries makes for impatience. One taps one's fingers and speculates and daydreams, itching to get out there and help make history happen. What follows is one take on what could be, though the odds on it are difficult to compute.

A superb source of info on political trends is the Huffington Post. One of its regular bloggers is Gary Hart, onetime United States senator and presidential candidate. Hart, like most of the other Huffington bloggers, is temperately but substantively critical of the Obama administration and its defeatist mindset and weak will.

As Hart has always been very much a political striver, I have to wonder if the ongoing search for a liberal opponent to the prez has reached his door? As recently as the early 2000s he was looking into the possibility of another presidential run. The longer nobody else tries for it, the more inclined he may be to begin taking such a task seriously despite all that weighs into the scale against it.

If you watch Hart on YouTube from last year and the immediately previous years, you will find that he is very articulate and clear-headed, though not a compelling personality. He still looks good for an oldtimer: thick dark gray hair, firm features, a strong and slender body that is unbent and without stiffness. There even remains something boyish in his demeanor.

He has baggage, of course. His presidential quest of '88, when he was the frontrunner for the Dem nomination following a strong showing four years earlier, was done to death by the news media. Replacing without advance notice their policy of respecting the privacy of candidates' private lives, reporters exposed his tendency to affairs with women. After JFK and Bill Clinton, and after the passage of decades, that tendency, which one hopes is in the past, might no longer count for much in a campaign. It helps that he is still with the wife, Lee, who put up with his shenanigans.

Well, why Gary Hart, of all people? Few are as qualified for the presidency. As a young lawyer he was prominent in the effort to make the Democratic party more democratic and deliver it from control by the old party bosses after the '68 election. In '72 he was George McGovern's campaign manager, and a keen one. He then served two terms in the Senate from Colorado, 1975-87, where he was a doer and was seen as a comer. Seeking the presidency, he was an "Atari Democrat" or "neoliberal", emphasizing the economic advantages of emerging technologies and running on non-ideological "new ideas". He was a centrist in a time when the center was still midway across the ideological spectrum rather than far into the right outfield; in today's terms he is a liberal.

Crucially, Hart has long been a thoroughgoing and much-respected authority on national security and defense issues, advocating a lighter and smarter military and getting listened to. Administrations have repeatedly drawn on his expertise. Five days before 9/11, he publicly warned that terrorists could and would strike and that thousands of lives would be lost; he and a few others had urgently advocated the creation of a department of homeland security while our leaders were dozing.

Were Hart to have a go at it, his age would be a factor. He will turn 76 within a month after the '12 election. Considering that he seems in excellent shape, my guess is that he could finesse that. He might want to (1) immediately pick a consistently progressive young runningmate who would be ready to step in at once if need be; (2) pledge that he would not run for re-election and might resign at some propitious time after setting things in motion; and (3) state that upon taking office he would give his cabinet an undated letter of resignation which it could activate if it felt that he was not totally up to the day-to-day requirements of the position. Together with such measures, his brainpower and energy level might suffice to see him through.

Would Hart be the ideal Obama challenger? One can dream of an inspired leader, which he presumably would not be. But he could probably do ably what a challenger should do: communicate his reasoning to the American people in vigorous language with candor and a command of hard fact; carry the fight to the Republicans, hitting hard rhetorically, as he does in his blog; and invoke moral authority on social questions and on the kind of society we want to be.

If he ran, he should firmly refuse to be put on the defensive by anyone, whether reporters or politicians, and should stay on message with detailed critiques and specific proposals, doing a significant part of his campaigning online so as to conserve his native vitality.

Walter Mondale once famously asked Gary Hart during a debate, "Where's the beef?" Today the beef is with whoever goes after the Obama administration. If Hart wants to assume that role, he can probably do so, at least if no one else of standing applies for the job first.

It's pretty iffy, yes; but it's worth mulling over.