"'I bear a very heavy burden of responsibility,' [Gary] Hart says, picking at a 'game plate' of elk, buffalo and quail at The Fort restaurant outside of Denver."

"If all that stuff had not happened and if I had been elected, there would have been no gulf war. H.W. wouldn’t have been president. W. wouldn’t have been president. Everything would have changed. I don’t say that to aggrandize myself. It’s just, history changed. And that has haunted me for thirty years. I had only one talent and it wasn’t traditional politics — I could see farther ahead than anybody."

Writes Maureen Dowd in "Trump and the Hart-less Presidency/After 30 years, Gary Hart still wonders what might have been."

I'm blogging this because I love the line "picking at a 'game plate' of elk, buffalo and quail." Somehow Hart and Dowd have found themselves at a table at this restaurant, and Hart orders the "game plate" of elk, buffalo and quail, presumably because that make him look like the guy he wants her to think he is, but then he only picks at it, because even after all these years and at his advanced age, he can't just be the person he really is.

And what a gasbag! "I could see farther ahead than anybody." You couldn't see far enough ahead to the part where the newsfolk you told to follow you around actually followed you around and discovered the tacky sex you were enjoying in contravention of your upstanding family-man image.

Here's the idiotic photograph that destroyed him:



And here's Hugh Jackman dressed up to play Gary Hart in a movie based on his ridiculous debacle:



The movie comes from the 2014 book "All the Truth Is Out" by Matt Bai, which I've read and blogged a couple times. Dowd tracks what Bai has written:

Before Hart, we had F.D.R., L.B.J. and J.F.K., who did not suffer politically for dalliances because the mostly male press corps had a bro-code and a blind eye. After Hart, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump got through frenzies about sexual transgressions by enduring the ridicule, enlisting their wives to defend them on TV, and attacking their accusers.

But the scratchy Hart wasn’t made that way. The adultery story enhanced the sense that he was an enigma, a story line that developed when the press learned that he had changed his name from Hartpence and fudged his age by a year....

Dowd questions Hart about whether he should have done something different. Should he have fought back, like Clinton and Trump?

In 1998, in the midst of the Clinton-Lewinsky uproar, Hart told me that he thought America might be getting more European about pols and sex, “growing up, finding out there is not a Santa Claus.” I am not sure that’s true. We have not reached any consensus on the issue, except that most strategists know better than to publicly trash the women at the center of such scandals....

But last year, in the midst of the #Metoo reckoning, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand criticized Al Franken after he was accused of groping and faux-groping for a joke picture, and told The Times that Bill Clinton should have resigned over the Lewinsky matter. The standards remain subjective, inconsistently applied and partisan....

Not sure... no consensus... subjective... Dowd is vague. And Hart must have been vague too, since there's no answer from him, other than the idea that "America might be getting more European," which seems laughably tone-deaf about how Americans feel and hopelessly far from understanding why people embrace Trump. Weren't Americans supposed to be prudes — so un-European?

Dowd began the column with an admission that she can't understand her own country:

As we fantasize about a parallel universe, where America is not a joke and our president cares about other human beings, the same questions keep swirling in our heads. What has happened to this country? Can he be stopped? When will it end? How the hell did we get here?

As we fantasize... We? "We" must mean We, the People of the more European part of America.

I find myself attracted to trifling stories this morning.

I got started with: "Cab company responsible for failed ride to airport, appeals court says."

Larry and Donna Peters... had sought damages of $5,225 for airline tickets, which had to be re-booked in a short time frame; $300 in ticket exchange fees; and $615 for hotel fees for the days they missed because of their late departure.

Small claims.  More smallness: "Hugh Jackman sliced the tip of his finger onstage during a preview of his Broadway show 'The River' Wednesday night":

A witness said the “Wolverine” star accidentally cut himself with a knife as he chopped a lemon around 30 minutes into the performance, and noticeably bled for an hour.

That caught my eye while I was reading the NY Post in an effort to learn exactly how the movie "The Social Network" hurt Mark Zuckerberg's feelings:

"They just kind of made up a bunch of stuff that I found really hurtful. They made up this whole plot line about how I somehow decided to create Facebook to attract girls."

And he'd never even heard of an appletini.

I also felt drawn into the details of this 1912 brothel menu. Interesting, what 50¢ bought back then and the language used to convey the differences between the various services.

I don't know. Maybe it's the after-effects of the election. Everything was so big the other day. It was a wave election. No! It was a tsunami!! (There are "About 15,700 results" for the Google news search "tsunami election.")

Oh, shut up, all you blowhard commentators and pollsters who didn't know what was going to happen before that gigantic thing happened. Your post-show is pointless. I watched none of that last night.

I taught my law school class — about Christmas decorations — had a glass of wine in a café with a friend, watched the most boring episode of "Survivor" ever with Meade, and went to sleep at 10. Had a dream about going to a bookstore and lugging along an entire bookcase full of one's own books, as if the owned books needed to socialize with the unbought books. Woke up at 5 and started reading the above-mentioned stories on my iPhone in bed. Got into a conversation about the election and its aftermath again. Meade said: "I'm ready to love Obama." But to explain that is to get past the topic of this post, the attraction of trifling things.