Gephardt Takes Break From His Iowa Campaign

In the fight of his political life, the congressman had wowed them half an hour ago at Steam’n Koffee in Council Bluffs, Iowa. He got wound up about health care, trade, Medicare, global poverty, wind power, ethanol, Dean and “W.” The crowd responded; one woman even fainted.

All the polls and his own gut tell him the race in the nation’s leadoff caucus state is almost a dead heat. Yet Democratic presidential candidate Dick Gephardt is about to take himself out of Iowa for nearly 40 hours, not resurfacing in-state until Wednesday at 3 a.m. That is a scant five days before the caucuses that could lift or crush his White House bid.

Just now, it is early Monday afternoon and Gephardt is crossing the Missouri River into Nebraska. In Omaha, he and his entourage hop onto a chartered Gulfstream jet that will carry them on a mad dash to New York, Seattle, Los Angeles, then back to Iowa.

This is what schedulers call a “fly-around” -- on a continental scale. In abandoning the Iowa trail briefly, Gephardt, a U.S. representative from Missouri, hopes to raise money and build his national profile without hindering his push toward caucus night. At 1:30 p.m. CST, the jet takes off. It is a plush vehicle for a populist candidate who stresses his poverty growing up in St. Louis.

Gephardt settles into a leather-upholstered chair with a stack of newspapers and magazines. He is wearing khakis and a black V-neck sweater, one of his two uniforms on the road (the other: a dark three-button suit with blue tie). A broad-shouldered, clean-cut aide -- Gephardt’s “body man” -- sits at his right hand. Among Mike Kelley’s jobs: hold the candidate’s coffee when he shakes a hand; hand him a pen when someone asks for an autograph; tug his elbow when it’s time to leave.

Seven reporters are behind them. The group is heading to New York for a date with TV talk-show host David Letterman, a fundraiser and a foreign-policy speech. Gephardt stays in the forward cabin during the flight. But press secretary Erik Smith chats up reporters about new Gephardt TV ads (an attack on his rivals’ trade flip-flops in New Hampshire and a warm-and-fuzzy spot in Iowa). Another tidbit: Gephardt has been endorsed by crooners Tony Bennett, Barry Manilow and Michael Bolton. This provokes back-row mirth. “I’m not kidding. They’ve all done events for us,” Smith says.

The jet lands in Teterboro, N.J., at 4:40 p.m. Gephardt, who is to recite an already-scripted Top Ten list on Letterman (“Signs You’ve Been on the Campaign Trail Too Long”), expands the list to 12, joking about his trail-inspired affinity for Super 8 motels and Big Macs. But then he adds: “I really do think Super 8’s a great motel. You know where everything is.”

A siren-flashing police escort clears a path for Gephardt’s sport utility vehicle and a press van to get to the Ed Sullivan Theater at Broadway and 53rd Street. He just makes the 5:30 p.m. stage call.

The candidate pulls off his lines without a hitch. But Letterman seems to omit a “t,” introducing him as “Gephard.”

After the taping, the candidate disappears. Reporters, barred from the fundraiser, learn the next day that he garnered $100,000 at an event hosted by someone from the Rothschild clan. That is about 1/50th of what President Bush can raise in a night. At 7 a.m. on Tuesday, he appears on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” Diane Sawyer introduces him with a montage of Gephardt campaign footage.

Gephardt, at 62 the oldest candidate in a nine-way race, talks with Sawyer about his “steady hands” and experience as longtime House leader. He riffs on a quote circulating this week from fired Treasury Secretary Paul H. O’Neill. “I’ll tell you this, when I walk into that Cabinet room, it’s not going to be a blind man leading the deaf,” Gephardt tells Sawyer.

The campaign moves uptown to the East Side. At the Council on Foreign Relations at 8:30 a.m., Gephardt delivers a half-hour foreign-policy address on “Reconciliation and Renewal” that both assaults Bush and scolds rival Howard Dean. Moderator David Sanger of the New York Times notes: “Every additional minute he spends here is a minute he’s not in Iowa.”

But when the Gephardt campaign climbs back into the jet at 10:45 a.m. in Teterboro, he is not bound for the Midwest. Rather, he takes a five-hour flight to Seattle. He lunches on spicy jumbo shrimp cocktail and poached salmon with rice, asparagus and mango salsa. Then he ventures to the rear cabin to banter with reporters about foreign policy and the campaign. He explains how he handles campaign exhaustion at the end of his 18-hour days: “I try to just be quiet before I go to bed. I just sit down in a chair and shut down.” No books, no television.

The plane lands at 1:20 p.m. at Boeing Field in Seattle. Not far away is Vice President Dick Cheney’s Air Force Two, parked on the tarmac.

In Seattle, Gephardt holds two union events to lay the groundwork for the state’s Feb. 7 caucuses. He draws a raucous crowd of 500-plus at a Machinists hall -- at least twice as large as any group that has seen him recently in Iowa.

Clearly fired up, he roars to the Bush-despising crowd: “This guy is a job-killer! He’s declared war on the middle class in this country, and he’s declared war on labor unions, and we need to get rid of him!”

At a media “avail,” he parries questions about a new Dean attack on his vote in favor the Iraq invasion. But he is careful to hedge his criticism of the Democratic front-runner. “We’re still friends,” he says of Dean. “I respect Gov. Dean and I respect what he’s done with his candidacy.”

At 5 p.m., the campaign is airborne again, heading for Los Angeles so Gephardt can make a two-hour pit stop for cash in Beverly Hills. He reminisces with reporters about family vacations in Yosemite and Yellowstone national parks, his lifelong love of the St. Louis Cardinals (favorite team: 1964 World Series champs), and his little-known role as a broker in bringing the National Football League Rams from Los Angeles to St. Louis.

A fundraising aide says the Democrat’s $1,000-a-head event, hosted by talent agency International Creative Management, pulled $200,000.

On the way back to LAX to leave for Iowa, a long motorcade holds up traffic at Santa Monica Boulevard and Interstate 405. The vice president apparently has struck again.

“Dick,” Gephardt says. “Dick’s in town. We never get a break from this administration.”

At 9:50 p.m., the candidate and entourage are back on the plane, and land at 2:50 a.m. on Wednesday in Ames. The passengers shake themselves awake for a brief bus ride to a hotel. As they pull up, a marquee board outside greets them: “How About a Winter Getaway?”