Presidential hopeful Gary Hart, the former Senator from Colorado, had a lot of people scratching their heads last week when he identified the latest menace to our country’s national security: Irish Americans.

Addressing the World Affairs Council and the Council on Foreign Relations in San Francisco last week, Mr. Hart delivered a deadly serious and strange warning: “We must not let our role in the world be dictated by ideologues with their special biases and agendas, by militarists who long for the clarity of Cold War confrontation, by think-tank theorists who grind their academic axes, or by Americans who too often find it hard to distinguish their loyalties to their original homelands from their loyalties to America and its national interests.” He made a similar remark last week in another speech, at Stanford Law School. He’s even posted the speech on his Web site, GaryHartNews.com, suggesting it was hardly a casual remark.

When asked afterward by ABC News to give an example of an ethnic group that has trouble distinguishing loyalties, Mr. Hart singled out Irish Americans, along with Cuban Americans.

One wonders why Mr. Hart set his sights on two ethnic groups whose home lands have little to do with America’s greatest current foreign policy challenge, the war on Islamic terror. Perhaps he missed the recent discovery that John Forbes Kerry, the Massachusetts Senator, had a Jewish grandfather and has been going to St. Patrick’s Day breakfasts all these years as purely a political matter. Perhaps Mr. Hart was a little too mesmerized by Daniel Day-Lewis’s portrayal of a rabidly anti-Irish Manhattan nativist in “Gangs of New York.” Perhaps he’s forgotten the service to this country by such patriots as President Kennedy.

Mr. Hart’s attack on Cuban Americans, who oppose Castro’s Communist regime, is also unfortunate and contradicts his speech, in which he states as one our chief policy goals: “We should encourage democracy.”

The more likely basis for his insult against Irish and Cuban Americans is that it was much safer for Mr. Hart to insult those two groups than to specify the group that other commentators assumed was his target: Jews.

The presidential candidate who won the last election ran by repeating the phrase, “I’m a uniter, not a divider.” That was George W. Bush. If the Democrats hope to defeat him in 2004, they will need a candidate for themselves who is a uniter, not a divider like Mr. Hart.