All the Truth Is Out summary

Hart had gained considerable experience during an unsuccessful nomination bid in 1984, and his reformist policies left him well positioned as a front-runner for the Democratic presidential candidacy.

After the Democratic primary in 1987, Hart emerged as a clear front-runner, with double-digit leads in most polls over other Democratic hopefuls such as Rev. Jesse Jackson. In fact, his strongest challengers came from the new wave of young politicians, such as Joe Biden, who aimed to emulate Hart himself.   

Prior to the 1988 presidential election, journalists didn’t even consider delving into the personal and matrimonial lives of presidential candidates.

However, even in those times, a certain level of media inquiry into the lives of a prospective presidential candidate was expected. After all, they should be vetted and scrutinized for the public’s benefit.

One of the interesting aspects about Hart’s capitulation in 1988 wasn’t that journalists investigated his private life, but rather that, in the past, the private lives of politicians were seen as distinct from their viability as professionals.

In fact, prior to Hart’s downfall, journalists knew about a number of presidents’ and candidates’ extramarital affairs: Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, for example, were all adulterers – both before and during their presidencies.

The transformation from a kind of journalism which considered JFK’s tryst with Marilyn Monroe to be a non-story into the vulturous circus that it is today can be summed up with one word: Watergate.

After the Watergate scandal of the 1970s, there was suddenly no greater prize in political journalism than unearthing the lies of politicians.

The post-Cold War period saw not only great social and economic change, but also technological advances that ushered in a new era of news broadcasting. Specifically, the age of Electronic News Gathering (ENG) had a profound effect on how politics was reported.

Electronic news gathering was the transition from using film to modern videotape at the start of the 1980s. Its effects were profound, allowing news to be broadcast from anywhere as it happened by using satellite technology.

This shift in priorities for journalists brought in a new era of politics and political coverage that eventually spread across the globe.

Another renowned political journalist (who was granted the only in-depth character interview with Hart in 1987), wrote in the New York Times that Hart’s fall from grace had ushered in an era of confessional politics:

The media’s obsessive focus with scandal-finding and superficial, attention-grabbing factoids has meant that presidential candidates are now admired for attributes that have little to do with governance.

This becomes glaringly obvious when we compare Gary Hart’s political career with that of Bill Clinton, who, despite his many parallels to Gary Hart, emerged relatively unscathed from his indiscretions.

But what if a presidential candidate has a great policy approach that he or she wants to share with the public in detail?

Too bad! Today’s media has no interest in policy. Even if politicians wanted to detail their policy ideas, they’d have no one to talk to!