Former U.S. Senator and potential 2004 presidential candidate Gary Hart addressed an audience of approximately one hundred students last night in Columbia University's Earl Hall. The event was sponsored by the Office of the University Chaplain, the Student Governing Board of Earl Hall, the Columbia Political Union, and the Columbia College Democrats.
Hart's speech was one of a series of appearances on college campuses across the country in the last few months, all of which have constituted a new stage in the politician's career. Hart served as a U.S. senator from 1974 to 1986, and lost the Democratic presidential nomination to Walter Mondale in 1984. He attempted another run for nomination in the 1988 before becoming embroiled in a now-infamous scandal in which he was accused of an extramarital affair with the model Donna Rice.
Hart's self-described "exile" ended after Sept. 11, 2001, when a 1999 report written by Hart while serving on former President Bill Clinton's Commission on National Security was recognized as predicting with surprising accuracy the 9/11 attacks, leading some pundits to compare Hart to Paul Revere. Since then, Hart has embarked on an ambitious speaking tour and has suggested he may run a third time for the Democratic nomination for the 2004 presidential election.
In his Earl Hall speech, the majority of which was spent answering audience questions, Hart addressed a wide range of topics, from the war on terrorism to campaign finance reform. He elaborated on some of the issues he had raised in the 1999 report, as well as on the scholarly exploration of the classical political ideal of the republic which he addressed in his most recent book, Restoration of the Republic: The Jeffersonian Ideal in 21st-Century America, published in 2002 by Oxford University Press.
Hart said that while "many people consider the 21st century to simply be a linear extension of the twentieth century, I warn you on the contrary that we are inhabiting a revolutionary age." He likened the post-9/11 world to the years after the Cold War, arguing that just as the post-Cold War process of globalization signaled the transformation and erosion of the dominant political paradigm of the nation-state, the events of Sept. 11 have led to a transformation of warfare, one to which President George W. Bush's administration has not yet adjusted.
Hart spent much of his speech criticizing the war in Iraq, to which he has referred in his own recent writings as "a new, uncharted, and potentially dangerous course."
"I think that the number of students that turned out today to hear Senator Hart really tackle the issue seriously shows that there can be a very high level debate of about the war," said CPU General Manager Samir Arora, CC '03. "I think that the audience engaged at a very high level of discussion with the senator, and it was exciting to hear."
"It's a remarkable testament to Columbia students that this many braved the cold and the snow to come and hear a discussion of republican ideas that was held at this level," said Yoni Appelbaum, CC '03 and chair of the SGB.
Appelbaum, who is also a Spectator columnist, cited Hart's degree from Yale Divinity School, his experience as a political leader and his social activism as the reasons for SGB's decision to present him as the organization's spring speaker. "He is somebody who in and of himself incorporates the three major branches of Earl Hall," Appelbaum said.