WI: No Donna Rice

There would have been another "Donna Rice" out there for Gary Hart to meet and get involved with.
 
I was at work when the news of the big "scandal" came out, and was shortly thereafter accosted by a female coworker (how does one "ork" a cow?) wanting to know how I felt about Hart in light of the news. I confounded several people when I replied (as close to the actual words as I can remember), "This doesn't change anything, I was going to vote for him before this came out!" She was speechless...good times...
 
There would have been another "Donna Rice" out there for Gary Hart to meet and get involved with.
But Donna had a click with Hart with her wanting to help fundraiser for his campaign. It also depends if you believe he was a womaniser or just a guy who had a close woman friend.
 
Reagan was a shoe-in for 1984 because of the economy. If Hart stayed scandal-free, he might have been electable in 1988.
 
If there's no Donna Rice, Hart gets nominated and narrowly beats Bush in the general. Even a weak candidate like Dukakis was leading Bush by 17 points in the summer of 1988, it took Duke making one novice mistake after another and Bush/Atwater running a brilliant and and the same time historically dirty campaign to make it a landslide GOP victory. A stronger Dem who runs a better campaign than Dukakis has a very good chance at beating Bush.
 
Part of what made the scandal so damning was the photo, if there's no Donna Rice, then it's way less damning. But there are other issues, he had been tailed by a PI before staying the night at a woman's house, he had some kind of weird stuff (changing his name in college, for example) that could cause him to kind of look like a flake. Furthermore, he actually had a strong charge against Dukakis when he got back in the race, but reports of his unpaid debts from 1984 ultimately crushed his momentum. So, assuming no Donna Rice, he takes a hit on the flake issue and 1984 debts, but I could still see him being the frontrunner. Atwater is still going to find an issue to race-bait on though, 1988 wasn't the only cycle he did that, and there's going to be some Senate vote that Atwater is going to blow out of proportion and drive certain people to the polls.
 
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