All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid

<b><br><b>Yahoo's</b> national political columnist and the f<b>ormer chief political correspondent for <i>The New York Times Magazine</i> brilliantly revisits the Gary Hart affair and looks at how it changed forever the intersection of American media and politics.</b><br></b><br>In 1987, Gary Hart-articulate, dashing, refreshingly progressive-seemed a shoo-in for the Democratic nomination for president and led George H. W. Bush comfortably in the polls. And then: rumors of marital infidelity, an indelible photo of Hart and a model snapped near a fatefully named yacht (<i>Monkey Business</i>) , and it all came crashing down in a blaze of flashbulbs, the birth of 24-hour news cycles, tabloid speculation, and late-night farce. Matt Bai shows how the Hart affair marked a crucial turning point in the ethos of political media-and, by extension, politics itself-when candidates' &quot;character&quot; began to draw more fixation than their political experience. Bai offers a poignant, highly original, and news-making reappraisal of Hart's fall from grace (and overlooked political legacy) as he makes the compelling case that this was the moment when the paradigm shifted-private lives became public, news became entertainment, and politics became the stuff of Page Six.<br><br><br><i>From the Hardcover edition.</i>