I asked Hart what it was he might have to feel guilty about. It seemed we were veering close to the boundary beyond which he had always refused to travel.
“I don’t feel guilty,” he said. “It doesn’t have anything to do with salving my conscience.”
“No, I don’t mean your conscience,” Lee said.
I asked Lee what she had meant to say.
“Gary feels guilty,” Lee said finally. “Because he feels like he could have been a very good president.”
“I wouldn’t call it guilt,” Hart said.
“No. Well.”
“It’s not guilt, babe,” he protested. “It’s a sense of obligation.”
“Yeah, O.K.,” Lee said, sounding relieved. “That’s better. Perfect.”
“You don’t have to be president to care about what you care about,” Hart said.
“It’s what he could have done for this country that I think bothers him to this very day,” Lee said.
“Well, at the very least, George W. Bush wouldn’t have been president,” Hart said ruefully. This sounded a little narcissistic, but it was, in fact, a hard premise to refute. Had Hart bested George H. W. Bush in 1988, as he was well on his way to doing, it’s difficult to imagine that Bush’s aimless eldest son would have somehow ascended from nowhere to become governor of Texas and then president within 12 years’ time.
“And we wouldn’t have invaded Iraq,” Hart went on. “And a lot of people would be alive who are dead.” A brief silence surrounded us. Hart sighed loudly, as if literally deflating. “You have to live with that, you know?”