Hart-felt message: Next president needs a world vision

M.E. Sprengelmeyer, Rocky Mountain News

Published October 24, 2007 at midnight

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DES MOINES, Iowa - Twenty years since his last run for president, former U.S. Sen. Gary Hart returned to the home of the first- in-the-nation Iowa caucuses Tuesday night to tell a crowd they should demand "visionary" foreign policy leadership from this year's crop of White House contenders.

Hart, 70, sported more gray hair than he did in his Democratic campaigns of 1984 and 1988. But his message was as adamant as ever to the Center for U.S. Global Engagement and the U.S. Center for Citizen Diplomacy.

Hart ignored the stairs and literally hopped to the stage inside Des Moines' Temple for Performing Arts, telling the crowd that the world is undergoing so many revolutions - with globalization, with technology and otherwise - that the country needs candidates who take international diplomacy seriously.

The new millennium is "not simply a continuation of the 20th century," Hart said. "We are living in a revolutionary world."

His message, echoed by former Senate colleague Nancy Kassebaum Baker, a Republican, is that the next president needs to look far beyond military challenges and military means of solving problems, and focus on diplomatic tools to restore the country's battered image in the world.

"You don't ask generals to solve political problems," Hart said. "That's where we get in trouble."

Hart struck a familiar profile for Iowans who remember his insurgent run against then-vice president Walter Mondale in the race for the 1984 Democratic nomination, and then his ill-fated 1988 campaign, which was derailed by questions of marital infidelity.

On Tuesday night, when he was thanking the president of the organization that invited him, Hart drew a big laugh joking: "Mr. President, what a nice title . . ."

Since 1988, Hart has become a prolific author, military and foreign policy adviser to fellow Democrats, and member of commissions like the one that predicted a devastating terrorist attack months before Sept. 11, 2001.

In an interview Tuesday, Hart complained that he does not see presidential candidates concentrating on foreign policy challenges nearly enough.

He and Kassebaum Baker said the next president needs to show the kind of leadership that former presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower showed in the middle of the last century, when they helped foster the role of the United Nations and other international institutions.

"The United States after World War II understood that it had to play a leading role in the world and helped forumlate some of the international institutions which we collectively . . . have used to govern the world and prevent a World War III," Hart said.

"My view is that . . . we need another round of that visionary internationalism in the 21st century."

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