Leadership Quote by Gary Hart

It is the kind of dare that only works if you believe your own myth. Gary Hart's "put a tail on me" line lands as bravado masquerading as transparency: a politician performing innocence by inviting surveillance, betting that the gesture itself will inoculate him from suspicion. The punchline - "They'd be very bored" - is doing double duty. On the surface, it's self-deprecating. Underneath, it's a taunt: you won't find anything, and you're ridiculous for looking.

The subtext is pure late-20th-century American politics, when the press was shifting from policy referee to character detective and candidates were learning, often badly, how to manage that new scrutiny. Hart is trying to seize control of the narrative with a macho, media-savvy shrug. He's also implicitly recoding private life as a non-story: even if you watch, the tape won't be worth airing. It's an attempt to set the terms of relevance.

In context, the line reads less like confidence than miscalculation. Hart, a leading Democrat in the 1980s, was dogged by rumors of an affair; after this sort of challenge, reporters did exactly what he suggested, and the resulting photos detonated his presidential campaign. The rhetorical move is classic political hubris: treating investigation as theater, assuming the spotlight is a prop you can direct. The irony is that the sentence invites the very power it tries to dismiss, and proves how quickly "boredom" can turn into scandal once a camera is already in place.