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Yep throttle shafts are leaking. To fix that you'll need to rebuild the carb and either have bushings installed on the throttle shafts, replace the whole base plate assembly or change carbs.
But the leaking throttle shafts shouldn't cause a hard starting problem. They would just cause fuel leaks and vacuum leaks. Which may cause rough idle and some other minor driveability issues.
For the hard starting problems I'd be looking at the choke, or a fuel supply issue ( plugged filter, weak/bad fuel pump, crap in the carb plugging stuff up, etc. ) .