HERE’S A GARY HART PROFILE from the New York Times:

”Walter Mondale can just go away,” Hart says. ”John Glenn can go away. Michael Dukakis can go away. I can’t just go away.”

”Why?” asks his wife, Lee, who is sitting at the kitchen island. She has been married to him for 44 years, and yet she seems to ask this not for my benefit, but because it is a question she would genuinely like to have answered.

”I don’t know,” Hart says, shaking his head. He thinks, then repeats himself. ”I don’t know. I don’t know.

”Let me answer you with a question,” Hart tells me finally, although I wasn’t the one who asked the question to begin with. ”If I weren’t thinking about doing this” — that is, running again — ”would you be here right now?”

I allow that I probably wouldn’t.

”Well,” he says, spreading his arms triumphantly. ”There are only two places to be in American life — on the sidelines or on the playing field. I don’t need to run for president. But I do want to be heard.”

I think that Hart should get a blog. He’d be great at it.