Another year when New Jersey mattered in prez politics

With one more full day before New Jersey’s Democratic Party primary, neither candidate has melted down into the 1984 version of presidential hopeful Sen. Gary Hart, who was leading by double digits in the Garden State when he committed an irrecoverable gaffe.

Speaking about his and his wife’s coastal campaign duties at a fund-raiser in Los Angeles 24 years ago, Hart told an audience that Lee Hart got to campaign in California while he was stuck with, punch line coming up... New Jersey.

According to campaign consultant Robert Shrum, who writes about the incident in his book, "No Excuses," Hart then answered his wife’s cuddly California anecdote about getting to hold a koala bear, by prompting belly laughs from the L.A. crowd with this rejoinder: "I won’t tell you what I got to hold - samples from a toxic waste dump."

Wins in both California and New Jersey would have propelled Hart to seal the nomination. But New Jersey primary voters weren’t amused.

A little over a week after the fund-raiser, on June 5, Hart won in California, as expected; and he went belly up in Jersey, losing every delegate except one, and handing the nomination to Walter Mondale.