Former Senator Gary Hart slowly walked across the Green, wearing a tie with bald eagles clutching the Declaration of Independence in their talons, and spoke of his admiration for Thomas Jefferson.
He did not say whether or not he would be running for the Democratic nomination for president in 2004. Hart ran in the 1984 and 1988 primaries, but prematurely dropped out of the second race. He is currently presenting his ideas on national and international issues to gauge his level of support if he were to seek the Democratic nod next year.
Hart's first political work was as a volunteer for John Kennedy in 1960, handing out pamphlets to passersby as he stood on street corners.
"Kennedy challenged my generation to give something back to our country, not just take out of it what we could. And that was very idealistic. He was a new, younger politician that appealed very much to my generation," Hart remembered, when asked how he developed his ideals of public service.
"And I think out of that and my interest in Jefferson, I've spent a lot of my lifetime thinking about national service and citizen duty and things like that, and it all sort of morphed together," he added, speaking haltingly as if he were fondly recalling a memory.
Hart recently published a book form of his Oxford thesis, entitled, "Restoring the Republic: The Jeffersonian Ideal in the 21st Century," in which he applied Jefferson's 200-year-old ideas of citizenship and public responsibility to our present-day nation. It has been said of Hart that Jefferson is his political idol.
"I think idol is too strong a word," Hart countered, responding to the allegations. "I've read Jefferson all my life. He just remains endlessly fascinating to people because of the breadth of his mind and interests, and his talents and probably the most, how should I say, diverse, widespread personality of any American that's ever lived."
Hart decided to write about Jefferson for his doctoral thesis because he wanted "to test a world-class academic theory" such as Jefferson's ideas, and to see if they were still applicable in this vastly different world than the one in which the author of the Declaration of Independence lived.
Hart was not a traditional Oxford student -- he was in his sixties when he applied for the doctoral program -- yet he described his time at Oxford the way most students would have, as a time when he did very interesting work and met equally interesting people.
"As you know, the academic atmosphere is much different at an English university," he said. "It's very self-starting, even at the graduate level and at the doctoral level. It's much less structure. There are only two requirements -- that you submit a thesis and defend the thesis and put in a certain number of terms in residence. So I went to lectures and I went to some seminars, but I was pretty much on my own. I had a great time."
Hart has written a multitude of books since his last try for the presidency. If he declines to enter the race this time around, he'll probably continue his work as an author.
"I love to write books and I'm presently writing a book for Oxford University Press called, 'A New Grand Strategy for the United States in the 21st Century,'" he said. "So I would work on that book, I would continue my international law practice and try to be of service to my country some way -- I don't know how."
But Hart would not run for the Senate again.
"I'm not a career politician. It's arguably the best job in the world but I don't believe you should go there and try to die there. I feel that you should do what you can and move on and let others serve," he said.
Hart was co-chair of the Commission on National Security in the 21st Century, and predicted the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 from empirical evidence gathered by the Commission. He claims with certainty that the United States is still very vulnerable to attack, and that it will be local citizens -- not Tom Ridge and the Homeland Security Department -- that will attempt to come to the rescue.
"I think we ought to have a citizen core, and that citizen core should incentivize people to volunteer part of their time in the National Guard or as auxiliary firefighters or, most importantly perhaps, emergency health workers, get training, they don't have to be full-time, just available on an emergency basis in case there's catastrophe," he said.
"We have a tremendous shortage of emergency health workers for catastrophes. And we have nurse shortages in almost every state, and there could be training for things like that. You wouldn't necessarily need a federal program to do this. But it would be a way for the people to be brought into public service. There's a lot of jobs that people could do."
