The Gentlemen From Virginia and Colorado

I feel bad for Gary Hart.

It's been 23 years since he told reporters that anyone who cared to tail him could, that "they'd be very bored," only to have a photo of him and Donna Rice splashed on the front pages of newspapers around the country, demolishing his presidential bid and sending Michael Dukakis into the lead for the Democratic nomination (and there's a historical "what if?" for you).

I feel bad for Hart not for his infidelity or scandal, or even for the fact that he was dumb enough to challenge the press when he knew he was doing wrong, but rather for the fact that he's gone on to better things. He's served on the bipartisan National Commission on Terrorism, which suggested a number of policy changes three years before September 11th, and he continues to advocate for more responsible energy usage and policies. He's stayed active enough in politics to have been discussed as a member of a theoretical John Kerry cabinet ("what if?" #2). And, of course, he wrote a biography of James Monroe.

I feel bad that despite the fact that he bounced back from a potentially career-killing moment, when I search for "James Monroe Gary Hart" on Google Images so that I can post a picture of the book for this blog, the page that comes up still results in no fewer than three pictures of Donna Rice (two of the famous photo of her on Hart's lap and a swimsuit shot).

It's probably worth thinking about Hart's role as a politician in writing his biography; unlike the four previous authors, his day job isn't historian. And while it's certainly easy enough to hear echoes of modern-day politics in the biographies of the Founding Fathers (the Argus being the Fox News of its day), it's Hart thinking as a politician who makes the first explicit connection I've seen to contemporary politics.

Like Frost's "The Road Not Taken," the Monroe Doctrine is an important piece of American Writing that's almost always misunderstood. You know how Frost ends his poem with "I took the road less traveled by / and that has made all the difference" (click the link if the last time you heard it was high school graduation)? Everyone loves that part! It's inspiring! "Go, young people, and follow your dreams!"

Very few people ever put the end of the second stanza on a t-shirt: "though as for that the passing there / had worn them really about the same," probably because the implication--neither road is really less traveled than the other, and they're pretty much the same road, just going in different directions--carpes a lot less diem.

Hart argues that American politics misreads the Monroe Doctrine like a sophomore waiting for the bell--we've remembered the memorable, exciting, back-the-fuck-off-Europe part, and skipped the middle stanzas. Hart points out that the Monroe Doctrine is reciprocal--not only does it state that Europe should stay out of the Western Hemisphere, it also states that America will stay out of Europe's affairs. It's not so much an assertion of power as it is a still-newborn country trying to keep its turf. Here's Hart: "Speaking today, Monroe might have reduced his foreign policy principles to a single premise: we will resist hegemony without seeking hegemony."

OK, not bad. We've been misreading it. Hart, however, starts calling out people. Here's the end of the book's penultimate chapter: "the saliency of the Monroe Doctrine in the twenty-first century is now being tested in a highly convoluted fashion. President George W. Bush's effort to expand the reach of the doctrine globally represents a radical departure from Monroe's original intent in two important ways: first, it extends U.S. hegemony from the Western Hemisphere to the entire globe; and, second, it shifts from U.S. rejection of European colonization in the Western Hemisphere to U.S. imposition of its values everywhere. Where Monroe sought to protect fledgling South American republics from European intrusion, Bush stands Monroe's doctrine on its head by extending a form of democratic imperialism into the far corners of the planet."

And here's the kicker:

"James Monroe would be the first to say that America as empire is no longer America as republic."

That's some gloves-off biographin' there. In a time when both parties seek to present themselves as the heirs of 1776, putting words in the mouth of a guy who's been dead since 1831 seems risky. But Hart, unlike the other biographers (so far), hasn't been afraid to point out how America as a political entity had shifted from the time of his subject to now. At this point, that is the road less traveled by.