Sen. Gary Hart; Penrose House
Fun facts about Gary Hart: He was a groomsman at John McCain's wedding. (They met when McCain, still in uniform, was assigned as the Navy's liaison to the Senate.) Ah, for those halcyon days when Democrats and Republicans spoke to each other.Hart was a presidential candidate in 1984, the first year that the Democrats introduced superdelegates...who voted almost unanimously for Mondale. When Mondale went on to lose 49 states to Reagan, a reporter asked Gary what he thought. "Whatever made the superdelegates super didn't make them smart," he replied.
Anyway, Hart was the guest speaker for the El Pomar Foundation's Forum for Civic Advancement, held early this evening at the posh Penrose House's Garden Pavilion. A member of the U.S. Commission for National Security in the 21st Century (which rather presciently predicted a terrorist attack on the U.S. in 2001), he espouses a view of national security that stretches far beyond the military angle, encompassing climate change, viral pandemics, energy independence, and what his commission termed as, short of a weapon of mass destruction being used on an American city, the biggest threat to our security: failure to invest in education. "We're paying our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan with money we borrow from the Chinese," as Hart says; because we can't be secure without a productive economy, and we can't have a productive economy without an educated citizenry.
