‘The Front Runner’’ should get a big thumb’s up from President Trump.
The villain of the movie is not Gary Hart, presidential candidate and alleged adulterer, who humiliates his wife and throws his judgment open to question just when his campaign is taking off. It’s the press, which reveals his wrongdoing.
Rather than answer questions from the media about rumors of infidelity — and one specific allegation regarding a young woman named Donna Rice — Hart dropped his quest to become president back in May 1987. The film, based on a book by Matt Bai, a former Boston Globe reporter, and starring Hugh Jackman, presents the would-be president as a heroic, if flawed, figure who puts family and privacy ahead of ambition and stands up to bullying by the press.
Three decades later, Hart’s fall from grace has been cast as a turning point in journalism. Reporters looked the other way with JFK; with Hart, a reporter famously asked if he had ever committed adultery. The movie leaves us pondering the overall meaning of character and how much cheating on a spouse should count against it. It also shines an unflattering spotlight on the media frenzy over an unproved sex scandal.
If the press doesn’t look pretty, neither does Hart. In his own cerebral, self-righteous way, Hart is seen to be as much in love with himself as the current president. He leaves Rice to face the media circus on her own and lets his wife play the role of Hillary Clinton-like enabler.
Acting on a tip, reporters from the Miami Herald — including Tom Fiedler, now dean of BU’s College of Communication — staked out Hart’s Washington, D.C., townhouse and saw him meeting with Rice while his wife was out of town. Whether Rice stayed the night was never proved, since there was a back entrance the reporters weren’t watching. Hart and Rice never acknowledged any sexual relationship. Hart said then what happened in his private life was no one’s business, and sticks by that position today. In a recent CBS interview, Hart generously awards himself a more than passing grade on the so-called character test. “Character, which got to be the key word, is demonstrated over a lifetime,’’ said Hart. “And I’ll put my life up against anybody’s in terms of a sound character. That’s all I can say.’’
Hart also wants us to believe the media frenzy around his meet-up with Rice cost the country a great leader — himself as president. “We will get the kind of leaders we deserve’’ is the message Hart and the filmmakers want us to take from the story of Hart’s political demise. In other words, we would have been better off with an adulterous President Hart than with what we have today.
Presidential candidates like Bill Clinton and Trump survived allegations of adultery that occurred before they ran for president. However, there were no news reports of Clinton or Trump being with a woman other than their wife on the campaign trail. That may account for their ability to prevail with voters. Or it could just be that, unlike Hart, they fought back, leaving it to voters to apply their own character test.
Now that Trump’s in office, infidelity seems like a small piece of a much greater moral deficit revealed by his own tweets and actions, as well as by in-depth reporting by journalists. Yet rather than celebrate the role of the press in giving voters the full picture of a politician, “The Front Runner’’ reinforces Trump’s world view of the press as the enemy.
By that, Trump means the press is trained on his misconduct rather than on his self-proclaimed brilliance — a gripe Hart shares as well. But while the press hounded Hart off the stage, some 30 years later Trump thumbed his nose at it. And the rest is history.
Joan Vennochi can be reached at vennochi@globe.com.
