Gary Warren Hart (born Gary Warren Hartpence, November 28, 1936), writing under the pseudonym of John Blackthorn, is a politician and lawyer from the state of Colorado. He formerly served as a Democratic U.S. Senator representing Colorado (1975-1987), and ran in the U.S. presidential elections in 1984 and again in 1988, when he was considered a frontrunner for the Democratic nomination until withdrawing from the race because of a scandal. Since retiring from the Senate, he has emerged as a consultant on national security, and continues to speak on issues such as homeland security. In January 2006, Hart accepted an endowed professorship at the University of Colorado. He also serves as Chairman for Council for a Livable World. 

Hart was born in Ottawa, Kansas. He changed his last name to "Hart" in 1961. He grew up in and attended the public schools of Ottawa. He also attended Bethany Nazarene College (now Southern Nazarene University), located in Bethany, Oklahoma, graduating in 1958. He graduated from Yale Divinity School in 1961 and Yale University Law School in 1964.

He became an attorney for the United States Department of Justice from 1964 to 1965, and was admitted to the Colorado and District of Columbia bars in 1965.

He was special assistant to the solicitor of the United States Department of the Interior from 1965 to 1967. He then engaged in private law practice in Denver, Colorado on and off over the next seven years, while managing U.S. Senator George McGovern's presidential campaign in 1972. He ran for and was elected as a Democrat to the United States Senate in 1974 and was reelected to a second term in 1980 before he began his own presidential runs.

Hart occasionally calls himself the inventor of the Iowa caucuses, and he is certainly one of the figures who transformed Iowa from a marginal into an early gauge of candidate strength. Following the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, U.S. Senator George McGovern of South Dakota co-chaired a commission that revised the Democratic presidential nomination structure, making the process more democratic and weakening the influence of such old-style party bosses as Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, who were once able to hand pick national convention delegates and dictate the way they voted. The new rules made caucuses an open process, in which relative newcomers could participate easily, without paying dues to established party organizations. That meant that a candidate who challenged the party establishment had a chance to win delegates if he or she set up an effective grass roots organization to identify supporters and get them to precinct causes meetings. For the next presidential election, in 1972, McGovern decided to run himself, using his knowledge of the new caucus and primary structure to his advantage. McGovern started his campaign at the bottom of the polls behind more prominent frontrunners like Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine. McGovern named Hart his campaign manager. Along with Rick Stearns, an expert on the new system, they decided on a strategy to focus on the newly important Iowa caucuses. They predicted that a strong showing in Iowa would give the campaign momentum that would propel them toward the nomination and weaken Muskie. Indeed,the strategy worked - setting a trend of focusing on the Iowa caucuses that has continued to this day - and the McGovern campaign took advantage of the Iowa results (and Muskie's perceived meltdown) to win the nomination.

However, Hart could not steer McGovern to the presidency. McGovern carried only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.

In Februrary 1983, during his second term, Hart announced his candidacy for president in the 1984 presidential election. At the time of his announcement, Hart was a little-known Senator and barely received above 1% in the polls against better-known candidates such as Walter Mondale, John Glenn, and Reverend Jesse Jackson. To counter this situation, Hart started campaigning early in New Hampshire, making a then-unprecedented canvassing tour in late September, months before the primary. This strategy attracted national media attention to his campaign, and by late 1983, he had risen moderately in the polls to the middle of the field, mostly at the expense of the sinking candidacies of John Glenn and Alan Cranston. Mondale won the Iowa caucus in late January, but Hart polled a respectable 16%. Two weeks later, in the New Hampshire primary, he shocked much of the party establishment and the media by defeating Mondale by ten percentage points. Hart instantly became the main challenger to Mondale for the nomination, and appeared to have the momentum on his side.

Hart's campaign was disorganzied and chronically in debt, with a final debt of $5 million. In states like Illinois where delegates were elected directly by primary voters, Hart often had incomplete delegate slates. Hart's "new ideas" were criticized as too vague and centrist by many Democrats. Shortly after he became the new front runner, it was revealed that Hart had changed his last name from Hartpence to Hart, had often listed 1937 instead of 1936 as his birth date, and had changed his signature several times. This, along with two separations from his wife, Lee, caused some to question Hart's "flake factor".

The two men swapped victories in the primaries, with Hart getting exposure as a candidate with "new ideas" and Mondale rallying the party establishment to his side. The two men fought to a draw in the Super Tuesday primaries, with Hart winning states in the West, Florida, and New England. Mondale fought back and began ridiculing what he claimed to be the emptiness of Hart's ideas. In the most famous television moment of the campaign, he ridiculed Hart's "new ideas" by stealing a line from a popular Wendy's television commercial at the time: "Where's the beef?". Mondale's remark was not effectively countered by Hart's campaign, and when Hart -- who was seen by many voters as a fresh, honest alternative to typical polticians -- ran stereotyped negative TV commercials against Mondale in the crucial Illinois primary, his campaign descended to the level of ordinary politics that Mondale represented, and Hart's appeal as a new kind of Democrat never quite entirely recovered. Once primaries in the delegate-rich states of New York and Pennsylvania arrived, Mondale's vast fund-raising superiority as the party-establishment candidate helped him overcome Hart's greater attractiveness as a fresher political face. Nevertheless Hart bounced back in states where there was a greater appetite for change, and he won primaries in Ohio and California. By the time the Democratic convention arrived, Mondale had a lead in total delegates that Hart was not quite able to overcome, and Mondale was nominated. But this race for the nomination was the closest in two generations, and most felt that when Mondale later was trounced in the election against Ronald Reagan, winning only his home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia, that Hart and younger, more independent candidates like him represented the future of the party.

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