WASHINGTON -- Creation of the Department of Homeland Security is a vindication for former Sens. Gary Hart, Democrat of Colorado, and Warren Rudman, Republican of New Hampshire, who nine months before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks warned of the threat and called for just such a new federal agency.
Mr. Hart, while expressing some satisfaction that it has now been approved, says "a year and a half has been wasted" by President Bush's failure to act sooner on their recommendation and those of Democratic Sen. Joseph Lieberman and Republican Rep. William "Mac" Thornberry.
Mr. Hart and Mr. Rudman, as co-chairs of the U.S. Commission on National Security for the 21st Century created in the Clinton administration, met with Mr. Bush's homeland security adviser, Tom Ridge, after five months of trying, and urged him to advocate the new department.
They argued repeatedly during that time that Mr. Ridge did not have the necessary bureaucratic clout and was merely a referee among federal agencies ordered by Mr. Bush to cooperate with his new anti-terrorism program.
Mr. Hart says he would be willing to play a role in homeland security but Mr. Bush runs such "a partisan administration" that it's not possible. The president should use fellow Republican Rudman, Mr. Hart says, but isn't likely to because he supported the presidential candidacy of Sen. John McCain in the 2000 GOP primary.
Mr. Hart agrees that "it will take years" to get the new department up and running. Meanwhile, he says, squabbles in Congress are blocking vital assistance to local and state agencies that would be the first to respond to terrorism. Such aid is being urged by Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley, among others.
Local medical training, equipping the National Guard and plugging local and state entities into a federal watch list all demand immediate action that they're not getting, Mr. Hart says.
Amid all this, an ABC News television report just before the midterm elections that Mr. Hart may be considering another presidential bid has, he says, generated some grass-roots interest that has persuaded him to weigh the possibility.
In the next 60 to 90 days, he says, he will be making a series of speeches on homeland security, national defense and the state of the economy, all of which have engaged him since he bowed out of the 1988 race amid politically debilitating reports of sexual dalliances. He was quoted on election night as saying that issue was "ancient history" that would not deter him from running.
In fact, an embryonic campaign organization is being spawned by two former Rhodes scholars who met Mr. Hart at Oxford about three years ago when he was pursuing a doctoral degree there. It produced a book, Restoration of the Republic, calling for a return to Jeffersonian Republican principles of civic virtues.
Antwaun Smith, 27, now seeking a doctorate at Harvard, and Will Polkinghorn, 26, a medical student at Harvard, approached Mr. Hart late last winter with the idea of running again and have been spreading the notion since then. Former Hart campaign workers are responding positively.
The personal political trouble that brought Mr. Hart down in 1987, Mr. Smith says, "is ancient history in the post-Clinton era," a reference to former President Bill Clinton's political survival after similar allegations. "There are always people who can't get over it," he says, but Mr. Hart's ideas of what the country needs today "are so compelling to him that he's seriously considering running." Mr. Smith points out that Mr. Hart has been married to his wife, Lee, for 44 years.
With the 2004 Democratic nomination seemingly up for grabs, former Vice President Al Gore holding only a slim lead in preference polls among Democrats and other candidates grappling for a toehold, the notion no doubt is enticing to Mr. Hart. Another Hart candidacy would add substance as well as curiosity to the lackluster Democratic picture.
Jules Witcover writes from The Sun's Washington bureau. His column appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.