There is what you remember, then there are the facts, and the facts are stubborn things. When Hart declared in again in New Hampshire in December 1987, he went back to the lead in the national polls. The "secretly funded" rumor along with his actual funding problems ultimately sank that campaign. He had no money to get his message out over the MSM noise. The MSM created the "scandals", and then reported on what they had created.
Hart had already been followed in Dec. 1986, BEFORE he announced in 1987 after giving the party response to President Reagan's weekly radio address:
Mr. Sweeney said he was told that the detective's report traced Mr. Hart's movements from about noon Dec. 20 (1986) when Mr. Hart, a former Senator from Colorado, was seen driving to radio station WTOP in suburban Virginia, where he presented the Democratic radio response to President Reagan's weekly radio address. Mr. Hart was followed back to the District of Columbia and was seen later in the afternoon entering a bookstore.
That evening Mr. Hart was followed from his Capitol Hill town house to downtown Washington.
http://www.nytimes.com/1987/06/07/us/hart-s-link-to-2d -...
Gary Hart has denied challenging the media to try to catch him doing anything, and that full story has never really been told:
http://www.bing.com/videos/watch/video/gary-hart-on-sca ...
Donna Rice is the former girlfriend of Hart supporter Don Henley. The two had not met before she was brought by a friend to meet Hart on the dock. When he learned she was a friend of Henley's she was invited onboard. The trip was scheduled for a campaign strategy planning and speech writing.
The Miami Herald's Tom Fiedler admitted to reading this quote on the plane on the way to D.C., after the Herald had been pursuing this story for weeks, and only after two other Knight-Ridder where already in the street spying on Hart. More likely, with the way the New York Times is distributed, he read this quote after arriving in D.C. For the Herald to write that they had followed Hart around, which they didn't, in response to his "challenge" was another Herald cheap shot, since it was demonstrably false. The Miami Herald did not follow Gary Hart anywhere. They hid in his bushes and were peeking in his windows.
Donna Rice Hughes, who now devotes herself to combating children accessing pornography on the internet, has always been a class act. She never made any money from the "scandal", which was laughable in light of those which have followed. Both she and Senator Hart have always denied that their relationship had been sexual. (The recent Rupert Murdoch phone hacking scandal may also shed some light on how Fiedler's anonymous caller knew so much information about her plane reservations.)
The person spreading the rumors that Senator Hart "couldn't keep his pants on", was none other than Clinton operative James Carville. Carville's job then was to sabotage the Hart campaign after Bill Clinton had been rejected as Hart's potential VP. That was the real story behind the alleged anonymous phone call to the Miami Herald in 1987. (See above at post 41.)
Should Senator Hart choose to enter the primaries, NO ONE will care about what happened in 1987, especially since he and his wife have now been married for over 50 years. In all of his time in public life NOT A SINGLE WOMAN HAS COME FORWARD TO CLAIM THAT SHE HAD A SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP WITH HIM.
More here:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x1876521#1876866