The only person that sank Gary Hart's Presidential aspirations is Gary Hart. That is, unless someone put a gun to his head and said go find some strange, but I don't think that happened.
Oddly enough, in my opinion only, the "target" on public figures backs insures that the people who actually run for public office tend NOT to be the "doers" in the world, but the mediocre non-doers. "Doers" all have skeletons and can't run.