January 07, 2008 10:49 PM UTC

Hart Heart Obama

• 4 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

Jim Spencer reports:

Ex-Colorado Sen. Gary Hart boarded the Dump Hillary bandwagon over the weekend. So did ex-New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley. Both endorsed Iowa caucus winner Sen. Barack Obama for President.

“As one who has struggled throughout a lifetime for restoration of idealism to American politics, I can only smile, and perhaps shed a tear of happiness, that our time may have come,” Hart wrote in a Huffington Post blog item.

Let’s put the emphasis where it should be in that quote – on the “may have.”

If Obama wins the New Hampshire primary Tuesday, he may have separated himself from the quixotic dreams of former would-be reformers.

Hart and Bradley – and to a lesser degree current national Democratic chairman Howard Dean – each tried to reinvent the Democrats in campaigns for their party’s presidential nomination…

The wild card for Obama may still be race. In 1990, Doug Wilder of Virginia became the country’s first elected African-American governor. The polls showed him with a comfortable lead on Election Day. He won by a much narrower margin.

Fiscally moderate and socially progressive, Wilder tested a presidential run in 1992 and got buried by indifference.

Wilder came out for Obama over the weekend, too…

These days, Hart insists a candidate’s ethnicity no longer matters.

“The torch has been passed to a new generation of American leaders, and we don’t care what color it is,” Hart wrote in the Huffington Post.