Free All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid by Matt Bai Page B

stunning, ten-point thrashing of Walter Mondale in New Hampshire, and the two men were seated next to each other during a televised debate at Atlanta’s Fox Theatre. A confident Hart was giving it to the former vice president pretty good, going on about the younger Americans who had entered the process in the previous decade, how weary they were of an aging Democratic establishment that cared only about keeping its interest groups happy, how badly they wanted new ideas. It was a theme that Hart had been sounding since 1973, when he wrote, in the closing pages of his memoir of the McGovern campaign, that “American liberalism was near bankruptcy.” Despite President Kennedy’s poetry, Hart had written then, the torch wasn’t passed from one generation to the next—it had to be seized.
    The fifty-six-year-old Mondale was no rookie, though, and he was ready with a canned one-liner that had been written for him by Bob Beckel, his sharp-tongued strategist (and later another cohost of
Crossfire
). The laconic former vice president had to wind up and start delivering the line several times, since he couldn’t get Hart to shut up already and let him do it the way he’d practiced. “When Ihear your new ideas,” Mondale finally said, in his flat Midwestern accent, “I’m reminded of that ad. ‘Where’s the beef?’ ”
    It’s probably hard for any American born after, say, 1980 to appreciate how devastating a line like that could be. This was before ubiquitous cable or DVRs or the phrase “audience fragmentation.” Most American families watched one of the same three networks at the same time every night, so no one watching the debate at home could have missed what was then the most talked about advertising campaign in the country—that Wendy’s ad where one old woman kept talking about how big the bun was on the typical fast-food burger, while her tiny, white-haired companion blurted out: “Where’s the beef?” Mondale’s laugh line instantly became one of the seminal moments in the history of American debates. It recast him, instantly, as somehow more current and less of a cardboard cutout. And, more important, it underscored how little Democrats really knew about this young interloper who was on the verge of upending their party.
    Hart’s 1984 campaign had been, from the start, something of an amateur enterprise; he had hovered around 3 percent in the polls for most of the campaign before New Hampshire. He hadn’t yet figured out a facile way of communicating his worldview in a few sentences, and even if he had, his campaign lacked the funding and sophistication needed to get it across. Mondale had seen Hart’s vulnerability and struck at it. The blow didn’t stop Hart from going on to win most of the remaining states, including California on the final day of voting before the convention. But Mondale’s one great debate moment did arrest his precipitous slide long enough to keep the party regulars—and most notably the newly created “superdelegates”—in line, and it was they who ultimately ensured his path to the nomination.
    There was never any question that Hart would run again, nor was there any question that he would be the presumed nominee, especially after his warnings about the party’s dying establishment proved well founded. The first thing he did, the day after Reagan thoroughly humiliated Mondale at the polls that November by taking every state but Mondale’s native Minnesota, was to call Bill Dixon, Wisconsin’s banking commissioner and his old friend from McGovern days, and ask him to come to Washington. The plan was for Dixon, a Wisconsin lawyer who had worked on several presidential campaigns and run the 1980 convention for Jimmy Carter, to run Hart’s Senate office until his second term expired at the end of 1986. Then Hart would retire from the Senate to focus his energy on running, and Dixon would be charged with doing what he was really there to do in the first place, which