Matt Bai

He was a very brilliant candidate.

a politician of his day who was very forward-looking.

A lot of his insight and agenda would become part of Bill Clinton and the New Democrats' agenda very soon afterward.

His departure from American politics was not just, I would argue, a sort of changer of the paradigms of what we consider private and personal space, but it had a ripple effect on everything that came later that, you know, certainly makes it fair to wonder where the country would be had it not happened.

The rules didn't change because Hart was, as you know, a different kind of politician or because he changed the rules.

The rules changed because they were changing.

And Gary Hart just kind of walked into it.

There was a lot happening in that moment.

You were right at the birth of satellite technology and 24-hour, what would become the 24-hour news cycles.

So suddenly it was possible to go live from anywhere, which had a real impact on what was considered news and what wasn't, what would keep people in their seats.

You also had this new generation of journalists who were just then coming onto the campaign buses and planes

who had been sort of inspired into the business by the example of Woodward and Bernstein 10 to 15 years earlier, who aspired to be Watergate-style journalists.

And that meant not just taking people down in a shallow way, not just looking for scandal, but really protecting the American voter from failures and lapses in character, which was something I think they thought the American media of the previous generation had failed to do.

Defiantly.

Defiantly.

He felt it was no one's business.

You know, he refused to answer questions about it.

He tried to move on.

Hart would tell you that he got out of the race not because he was no longer a tenable candidate, but because it was impossible to speak to voters.

It had become such a... Politics had never seen...