The Problem With Gephardt

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This Column from The American Prospect was written by Garance Franke-Ruta.

The choice of Gephardt would reinforce every negative stereotype about Kerry in current circulation while muddying the picture of what he actually stands for. Put Gephardt on the ticket and suddenly, instead of an experienced moderate leader with a progressive bent, you have a pair that can be caricatured as two aging, pro-tax creatures of Washington, both of whom backed the president's war in Iraq for purely opportunistic reasons and both of whom want to transform the American healthcare system with a massive government give-away instead of balancing the budget. Or so some will say, and be able to argue with newfound plausibility.

Nor does Gephardt bring those benefits to the ticket that one might typically want. It's not entirely clear that he can deliver his home state of Missouri, and there's even less polling data suggesting he would bring an electoral bump to the Kerry campaign nationwide. Indeed, the latest data point -- the latest six data points -- we have say that Dick Gephardt is an electoral loser. Under his leadership, the Democrats lost the House of Representatives in 1994, and then failed to regain it in four successive elections. Undeterred by party losses in 1996, 1998, and 2000, he took them to defeat again in 2002 -- the first mid-term election in which a first-term president's party gained seats since 1934 -- and then left his leadership post to run in the 2004 presidential primary, which he once again, inevitably, lost.

Gephardt didn't just lose the Democratic primary. He was trounced. In Iowa, he came in fourth in a state he had won 16 years earlier and in which he'd maintained a polling lead or strong second for most of the year. His collapse was more spectacular than Howard Dean's -- and more total, revealing that not only did he have no base in Iowa, he had no base of support outside that state that could buoy him when he lost it.

John Edwards lost with grace, withdrawing from the race after mounting a surprisingly vigorous challenge against Kerry in the South and inspiring many Democrats with his powerful message about "two Americas." Dean lost, in effect, in a torrent of sound, his scream speech in Des Moines putting the penultimate nail in the coffin built by his Iowa implosion. But he chugged along with persistence and newfound humility before finally giving up the ghost of his campaign in Madison. Lieberman's withdrawal from the race was as unremarkable as the Lieberman campaign itself, and Wesley Clark withdrew from the race the same way he entered it, in a chaos of decency and confusion.

There is always something poignant about a losing campaign, as with Clark stopping voters at a polling place outside Memphis to tell them, "See, that's my name on the ballot," as dusk fell and aides tried to suppress their sniffles around him, knowing the outcome was already set. But Gephardt's decline was perhaps the saddest of them all.

In the final days of the Iowa contest, Gephardt was a lackluster campaigner, incapable of drawing an audience and equally incapable of inspiring one. His union friends were loyal to the very end, but he was a one-trick pony. In the end most of his allies in Iowa seemed to be union members who'd come in from out of state. The working-class energy was all with Edwards; when the exit polls came in, Kerry had won the union households tally, while Edwards and Gephardt ran even. The difference was that both Edwards and Kerry also did well with non-union households, while Gephardt drew only about a third as much support from non-union caucus-goers as he did from the house of labor. Nor were all unions his supporters during the primary season; the most rapidly growing and powerful national unions, AFSCME and SEIU, did not back Gephardt. In the end it was the man who had fewer formal ties to labor who beat the two labor-backed candidates, Gephardt and Dean.

Looking back at my notes from caucus night, I found these quick summaries about the precinct captains for each candidate in the caucus I attended: "Gephardt: old. Dean: hip. Kerry: blonde. Edwards: middle-aged."

And that about sums it up. Gephardt supporters in Iowa tended to be retirees, while Kerry and Edwards attracted voters in the prime of life, between 30 and 64 years old -- the kind of people you need to win across the country. Twenty-somethings, who went for Dean, have never been a substantial portion of the electorate. And while union workers represent a big chunk of it -- 26 percent in 2000, according to the National Annenberg Election Survey -- they represent a small and shrinking fraction of the working public and voting-age population. Only 8.5 percent of private-sector workers are in unions, and 37.5 percent of government workers, according to the AFL-CIO. An even smaller group of voting-age people are unionized, just seven percent in 2002.

Now, unions have done a fantastic job of on-the-ground organizing in recent years and the Democratic Party would be suffering even more than it is without them, but it seems unlikely that Kerry will really need Gephardt in order to encourage high union turnout and labor organizing in 2004; George Bush's labor policies are enough. Even the Teamsters have already endorsed Kerry.

America needs a candidate not only for the unions, but for the rest of the country, people who don't identify themselves as workers -- our wannabe middle-class, those with unstable, crappy jobs, who can't understand why they can never get ahead of their bills, are forever paying excessive credit card fees, and don't have adequate health insurance.

Already I hear grumbling from party faithful that insomuch as Kerry has yet to connect with the nation, they'd find it that much harder to drag themselves to the polls for a Kerry-Gephardt ticket. Gephardt is the opposite of an inspiring choice; his presence on the ticket would be actively enervating.

Further, Gephardt uniquely has the potential to alienate both centrists and those on the leftmost edges of the party. Some prominent New Democrats tell me they're backing Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack out of fear for how Edwards' warm populism will mesh with Kerry's more cerebral grab for the political center. Double that worry with Gephardt, who they definitely oppose. To many of them, Gephardt is the last of the big-spending liberals. His primary campaign rhetoric was more protectionist and fiery than was Edwards'; his gargantuan healthcare plan was completely politically unrealistic in today's deficit-burned economy, even were a future president to have a Democratic Congress to work with.

Most importantly, Gephardt is the single Democrat most associated with enabling President Bush's intervention in Iraq. With the Democratic base and independent voters increasingly turning against that war and seeing the intervention's costs as having outweighed its benefits, and with the entire national-security justification for the war having collapsed, choosing the Democrat who did the most to get us into this mess seems like a bad move. If Nader were not in the race, it might be a different story. But so far, it seems that Nader is already drawing more support than he did in 2000.

Furthermore, Gephardt and Dean may have made up by the end of the primaries, but during his campaign to destroy Dean, Gephardt was responsible for the only unforgivable act of the entire primary season. Gephardt's cronies put together a 527 committee that hid its donors and ran a TV advertisement in South Carolina effectively comparing Howard Dean to Osama bin Laden. There are few lines any longer in politics, but Gephardt's allies crossed a pretty big one. Most people have probably forgotten this ad, but -- trust me here -- many Dean supporters have not. Rather than bringing the leftmost wing of the party back into the fold, a Gephardt candidacy would drive anti-war voters and not a few former Deaniacs right into the waiting arms of Ralph Nader. That he'd be able to do this while simultaneously turning off moderates and failing to rouse anyone outside of the unions would be a neat trick, indeed.

"I'm happy to do it if he wants me to do it," the Gephradt told The Associated Press before meeting with Kerry. "I'm equally happy to not do it, and just help in other ways."

Gephardt has served his party and his country nobly in the past. He really has. But the best he can do right now is to know that it's time to step aside.

Garance Franke-Ruta is a a senior editor at The American Prospect

By Garance Franke-Ruta
Reprinted with permission from The American Prospect, 5 Broad Street, Boston, MA 02109. All rights reserved