John (Donald Trump) Miller, meet Gary Hartpence
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Donald Trump presidential campaign, 2016
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 Date: November 8, 2016 |
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May 16, 2016
A friend of mine asked me over the weekend, why is the media interested in a story from 25 years ago about Donald Trump posing as his own PR person? I replied, “Remember Gary Hartpence?”
The Washington Post published a story on May 13 that in 1991 Trump called up Sue Carswell, a reporter at the time for People magazine, and masqueraded as his own publicist, “John Miller,” to promote the celebrity image and dating life of the New York City developer. The Post also put a recording of the conversation between Carswell and ‘Miller,’ who sounded a lot like Trump, on its website. After The Post story ran, Trump denied that he was the man talking to Carswell in that recording. But several years ago he acknowledged using that alias and another, “John Barron.” A few weeks after the conversation with Carswell, People published a story on Trump in which he said his ‘Miller’ call was a “joke gone awry.”
The Post story has captivated cable TV and it was a primary topic on the Sunday morning talk shows. More grist for the media mill: Sunday’s editions of The New York Times included a story on Trump’s “private conduct with women” with pro and con accounts dating back to the 1980s.
Trump, not surprisingly, blasted both newspapers. He dismissed The Times story as a “lame hit piece,” and told Fox News that Jeff Bezos, the relatively new owner of The Post, is “worried about me” and that the internet retailing mogul is “using The Washington Post for power so that the politicians in Washington don’t tax Amazon like they should be taxed."
But prying into the life of presidential candidates is hardly a new media trick and back when Bezos was a sophomore at Princeton University, The Post published an eyebrow-raising story on 1984 Democratic White House hopeful, Gary Hart. That year, Hart was a little-known Colorado senator running against former vice president Walter Mondale for their party’s presidential nomination. The Post reported on old court records that showed Hart had petitioned to change his name from “Hartpence” to Hart, presumably to be more politically palatable. Post correspondent George Lardner also discovered that Hart’s age in his campaign biography was incorrect—he was 47, not 46, as the candidate and his bio had claimed.
Hart, as veteran political reporters Jack W. Germond and Jules Witcover recounted in their book on the 1984 campaign, Wake Us When It’s Over, tried to brush off the story saying, “It’s no big deal.”
But it was. At the time, Hart was riding a wave of momentum after upsetting Mondale in the 1984 New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary. He was a youthful insurgent, campaigning as the candidate of “new ideas” against the party establishment’s overwhelming choice, Mondale, who’d been in politics for decades. In some reporters’ eyes, Hart was the 1980s’ version of John F. Kennedy while Mondale was a throwback to the New Deal and his mentor, Hubert H. Humphrey. Lardner’s piece provoked a skeptical new take on Hart in the media.
In 1984, the three television news divisions at ABC, NBC, and CBS dominated media coverage. After the discrepancies on Hart’s age and name surfaced, the network correspondents were asking on air, “Who is Gary Hart?” Other alterations in Hart’s back-story were noted: he became a Presbyterian after being raised in evangelical Methodism and he changed his signature. Jim Johnson, Mondale’s campaign chairman later recalled to Germond and Witcover, “The goddamned networks turned like a firing squad on Gary Hart.”
The new questioning tone in the media towards Hart fed into Mondale’s memorable “Where’s the beef?” critique of Hart’s new ideas that played off a popular fast food TV ad at the time. Soon thereafter, Mondale made a comeback by winning the Alabama and Georgia presidential primaries and went on to capture the Democratic presidential nomination.
The media flap over Hart’s age and last name were not the singular cause of Hart’s demise, but it was damaging which raises the question about the potential impact of the latest stories about Trump’s pre-presidential life. As Trump himself has noted, his appeal to his supporters seems almost unshakable. Whether swing voters and independents who haven’t been tuned into the presidential race during the party primaries and caucuses recoil at these latest stories on Trump is unclear. The Post and Times stories don’t help and they’re distracting from the larger task at hand of unifying the Republican Party, but it’s probably worth noting that Trump has made enough controversial statements in this presidential campaign to fill a two-act play.
And then there’s the credibility of the media messenger. Back in the 1984 election, the press as an institution was taken more seriously by Americans than it is today. As John Miller might ask, “Aren’t these old stories about Trump just nitpicking? Do you really think he’d act that way as president?”
James A. Barnes is a senior writer for Ballotpedia and co-author of the 2016 edition of the Almanac of American Politics. He is a member of the CNN Decision Desk and is helping to project the Democratic and Republican winners throughout the election cycle.
See also
- Donald Trump presidential campaign, 2016
- Presidential candidates, 2016
- Presidential debates (2015-2016)
- Presidential election, 2016/Polls
- 2016 presidential candidate ratings and scorecards
- Presidential election, 2016/Straw polls
