Sunday, January 04, 2004

By James O'Toole, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

GRINNELL, Iowa -- After a long day and a lot of words, it's the first false note he's sounded.

Talking up the value of teachers, trying to connect with a loungeful of Grinnell College students, Rep. Dick Gephardt confides, "Let me tell you, there were some days when I was tough to teach."

Dick Gephardt? A tough student? Try Eagle Scout, dramatics standout, every teacher's dream.

Greg Boll, The Quad City Times via AP RICHARD ANDREW GEPHARDT Age: 63 Political experience: St. Louis alderman, 1970-76; U.S. Congress, 1977-present; Democratic House caucus chairman, 1984-88; majority leader, 1989-94; minority leader, 1994-2002. Education: B.A., Northwestern University, 1962; Law degree, University of Michigan, 1965 Marital status: Married to Jane Gephardt, 36 years Children: Son, Matt; daughters, Kate, Chrissy, all adult. Military eperience: Missouri Air National Guard, judge advocate general's office, 1965-71 Money raised: $13,666,917 (Oct. 15 report) Issues: Would greatly expand health insurance coverage through a system relying on tax credits to employers; would revise trade agreements to guarantee that worker rights and environmental standards be enforced among U.S. trading partners. Quote: "This, in the end, is a moral issue. It's immoral to have people out there without health insurance that need it ... I am going to solve this problem. I will not rest as your president until we get this done." Web site: www.dickgephardt2004.com Index to all Democratic candidate profiles

Not a hair out of place, his wife, Jane, beside him --that's right, Dick and Jane -- Gephardt is a candidate from central casting by way of Frank Capra.

Today, like so many days in the past year, and in years past, Gephardt has been traveling from small town to small town through Iowa, in the hope that this is the road to Washington. On his second run for president, Gephardt holds the record for days spent in the Hawkeye state.

By Christmas, he had notched 53 campaign days in Iowa. That's nothing compared to the 148 days he spent in 1988, when he rented one apartment in West Des Moines for his family and another for his mother.

Gephardt turned smarts, discipline and devotion to the causes of working people into a long and influential career in Congress. He's giving up that career, one way or another, after this term.

His practiced role in House leadership placed a premium on nuance, details and compromise. But a successful campaigner cannot etch his message in shades of gray. So, in stop after stop, Gephardt mixes policy with appeals to emotion. The Eagle Scout won't win by helping old ladies across the street. He's got to muster the kind of passion that inspires people to head out to their caucuses on a cold January night.

Sticking to his story
As he walked into the Central Park Community Center, on the picturesque town square of West Washington, Iowa, on a recent Sunday, he had changed from the business suit he wore for a speech earlier in the day, when he denounced the policies of front-runner Howard Dean. Now in a regular-guy outfit of pressed khakis, and a black v-neck sweater, he works his way to the front of a room dominated by members of the local Teamsters Union.

It's a perfect audience for the capsule biography that's part of his standard stump speech. He recalls his father's labors as a milk truck driver, notes that neither his father nor his mother finished high school, that his father bought their house for $4,000 in the first year of World War II, 1941.

"And in 21 years of living there, he never made a principal payment; he paid interest and that was all he could afford," Gephardt says. "But I got a great education. I had church scholarships; I had government loans; I had a university scholarship; I had whatever my parents could save; I had three jobs; I had everything going on."

Gephardt, outstanding in his high school's theater group, used all of those resources to study drama at Northwestern University. He went on to law school at the University of Michigan and was in class there when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

"We just went down the hall and watched Walter Cronkite, and he cried, and we all cried. I remember walking aimlessly around the town of Ann Arbor," he says.

Gephardt returned to St. Louis, with his law degree in 1965. He worked for a downtown firm and joined the Air National Guard, serving in the judge advocate general's office until his discharge in 1971. He worked as a neighborhood foot soldier for the Democratic Party and won a seat as ward alderman -- the equivalent of a city councilman, in 1970.

The retirement of a veteran member of Congress in 1976 set him on the path to Washington for the first of his 14 terms in the House. Gephardt tells the assembled Teamsters and other Iowans that for each of those elections, his wife, Jane, would accompany him knocking on doors on one side of the street while he tackled the other side.

"Sometimes now, when I introduce her, I choke up," Gephardt says, seeming not too far from doing so right now. "I realize what she's done to help me. This is a good person, this is the best person I've ever met."

The tribute seems genuine -- and it does again, when Gephardt repeats it, syllable for syllable, intonation for intonation, at the next stop -- and at the one after that. His campaign discipline is remarkable.

No matter how many times he's told the story before, he will muster the intensity, the serial spontaneity, to make sure that every single voter knows why he wants to be president, why they should devote a January night to attending a caucus to vote for Gephardt delegates.

Trade still a big issue
Gephardt rose quickly in Congress, winning a coveted seat on the powerful Ways and Means Committee in his freshman term. He staked out generally centrist positions. He supported proposed constitutional amendments to restrict abortions, and to bar school busing, both positions he moved away from in later years. From his first years in the House, he was a skeptic on trade, supporting legislation designed to force U.S. trading partners to curb their trade surpluses with the United States.

The trade issue was a key to his success in Iowa in the crowded presidential field in 1988. Despite relentless campaigning, Gephardt was still trailing in the Iowa polls in the last month of 1987, with the caucuses only weeks away. But after Christmas, his campaign began airing a commercial charging that a Chrysler K-Car that cost $10,000 in the United States would go for $40,000 in Korea because of Korea's discriminatory tariffs..

The ad struck a chord with Iowans. He ended up in first place, with 31 percent of the vote, followed by Sen. Paul Simon, D-Ill., and Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis.

Trade is again a centerpiece of Gephardt's campaign, as it has been of his congressional career. He reminds every audience of his opposition to NAFTA and to the extension of permanent trade privileges to China.

"All of these other candidates are now saying that they wouldn't sign a trade agreement without labor and environmental standards," he notes. "Well check the record. All of them were for these treaties when they were in front of the Congress ... I don't just talk the talk, I walk the walk."

While trade again occupies a prominent part of his platform, the tone with which he makes his argument has shifted. Rather than the us-against-them rhetoric of the K-car ad, Gephardt's trade talk now is laced with empathy for the foreign workers who he says are equal victims of a system that sends American jobs off shore.

The K-Car carried Gephardt to a first place in Iowa, and he took second the next week in New Hampshire against Dukakis. Then, he fought back with another first place in South Dakota a week later. In that year's round of Super Tuesday primaries, however, he was buried under a tide of Dukakis money as he competed for populist votes with Simon, then-Sen. Al Gore of Tennessee and the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

Gephardt bounced back from his 1988 disappointment, and was elected House majority leader in 1989. From that position four years later, he helped guide through President Clinton's first budget, which passed the House by one vote, with no Republican support. He was also a key administration ally on the health care initiative that was the biggest failure of Clinton's first term.

Gephardt's experience championing that measure informs his signature proposal in this campaign -- an ambitious attempt to bring health care to nearly every American. The plan would require employers to offer health insurance, and help them to do so by providing refundable tax credits. It also would increase aid to state governments and the poor so that a projected 97 percent of the population would be covered at a cost estimated at $172 billion over three years.

When Gephardt is asked why he has offered this multilayered plan rather than a government-run universal heath care program, his answer reflects his years as a legislative technician.

"Because I can pass it," he says.

In his speeches, and in a commercial that began airing last week, the poster child for why such a health care plan is needed is Gephardt's own son, Matt, who was struck with cancer as an infant. In a highly praised book on the 1988 campaign, "What It Takes," Richard Ben-Cramer reported that it took an extended family argument to win permission to mention Matt's trials in an Iowa ad. There is no evidence of such compunctions this year. The son's harrowing saga is front-and-center at every appearance.

Gephardt says that his son is alive today because he has health insurance, and vows that enacting his plan will be the first priority of his administration.

After Iowa, what?
He might have hoped, too, that health insurance would be the dominant issue of this campaign. But so far, the war in Iraq has that honor, and it's an issue that dogs Gephardt.

Last year, Gephardt worked with the Bush administration on legislation authorizing a unilateral effort to oust Saddam Hussein. He appeared with Bush in the Rose Garden for the announcement of an agreement on the war resolution -- a fact that former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean has repeatedly reminded Iowans of in a widely aired commercial.

When asked about his stand -- as he was four separate times in one recent campaign day -- Gephardt says, "I did what I thought was right; what is right is to protect the people of this country."

He tells audiences that before the vote he went to the CIA and was assured by Director George Tenet that the agency believed there was a substantial likelihood that Iraq had weapons that threatened the United States.

Since the capture of Saddam Hussein, however, and Dean's controversial statement that the event had not made the country safe, Gephardt has been more aggressive in trying to turn the war issue against the national front-runner, rather than concentrating on defending his own position.

Gephardt campaign's strategy depends on a bounce from a first-place showing in Iowa's Jan. 19 caucuses. But as his own experience teaches, an Iowa victory is necessary, but not sufficient for a Gephardt nomination. With Dean's demonstrated fund-raising ability and his decision to forgo federal matching funds and spending limits, Gephardt faces a huge financial disadvantage, just as he did in 1988.

Because of that his campaign is planning on a life after Iowa, with organizing attempts, and some early successes, in the round of states that vote on Feb. 3, the week after New Hampshire's primary. Gephardt aired his first commercials in South Carolina in late November, and in early December he picked up the prized endorsement of U.S. Rep. James Clyburn, the most popular African-American politician in a state in which close to half of the Democratic primary votes could come from African Americans.

Through the fall, Gephardt and Dean exchanged leads in public opinion surveys of Iowa, although caucuses, with their quirky, labor intensive structure, are a notoriously tough target for polls. By early December, at least two surveys depicted Dean in the lead, but in a recent conference call with reporters, Gephardt sounded serene.

"I am going to win Iowa. I think I can get a top-tier finish in New Hampshire, then we all face the same challenge ... we have to keep on winning."

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