Gephardt Puts Candidacy on Line With Trade Stance

Stuart Karl, a millionaire movie and video producer, was shopping around for a new presidential candidate after Gary Hart, his first choice, vaporized. So he laid down $250 to meet Missouri Democrat Richard A. Gephardt at the swank Pacific Club in Newport Beach recently and came away sold.

Karl, who produced the best-selling Jane Fonda exercise video, said he chooses candidates on the basis of character and electability, not on ideology. So he wasn’t deterred by the trashing Gephardt has been getting in the media lately over his controversial trade amendment, which many editorialists consider a demagogic call for protectionism.

“Any press is good press,” said Karl, who, after years in Hollywood, ought to know.

Gephardt agrees. And he is betting his candidacy on it.

“I’d rather have that issue than no issue at all,” Gephardt said in an interview on a recent flight from Washington to California. “It shows I can lead.”

The 46-year-old congressman’s supporters and detractors alike acknowledge that he has proved himself an effective lawmaker in his 10 years in the House, where he holds a top leadership post. The question he confronts now is whether he can persuade an entire nation to follow him. By his own choice, his first test will come on the trade issue.

Gephardt’s trade stance sets him apart from the rest of the Democratic field, if only by the virulence of the opposition to it by the editorial pages of most newspapers and a large body of academics and economists. Sometimes it seems that the entire Establishment is arrayed against poor Dick Gephardt, the blue-eyed innocent from St. Louis.

“Rep. Richard Gephardt, once dismissible as just another policy quack peddling trade-deficit snake oil, is now emerging as a genuine menace to the world economy,” sneered the New Republic, an influential journal of opinion. Many other publications were less complimentary.

Gephardt is crying all the way to Iowa, where many in the state’s battered farm and manufacturing sectors welcome his tough trade position and where he leads the seven-man Democratic field in the most recent Des Moines Register poll.

The Gephardt trade amendment mandates stiff retaliation against countries with chronically high trade surpluses with the United States who do not fully open their markets to American goods. The measure, which narrowly passed the House in April and is now before the Senate, is not expected to survive in its current form because of its strong protectionist flavor.

Deft Horse Trader

The Missouri Democrat has managed to use the trade issue to dramatically transform his image. Just a year ago, Gephardt was seen as the consummate Washington insider, a deft legislative horse trader who serves as House Democratic caucus chairman. He claims the support of 70 House members in his presidential quest, including such leaders as Majority Whip Tony Coelho (D-Merced) and Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.).

Today, however, because of his widely publicized amendment, Gephardt can run as a populist in the Farm Belt and in blue-collar towns, standing up for American goods and American jobs against unfair competition from abroad, especially Japan.

Although Gephardt’s position is often portrayed by his critics in politics and the media as Japan-bashing and pandering to his audience, it plays well in the South and the Midwest, areas critical to Democratic success in 1988.

Renegade vs. Establishment

If he can maintain the support of his congressional colleagues and party regulars while convincing the electorate that he is a renegade running against the Establishment--and it’s a big if--Dick Gephardt could be the next President.

But if the public reaches the opposite conclusion--that his trade bill is simply part of a cynical scheme to generate controversy and grab union votes--his campaign may be short-lived.

“He’s figured out his race and how he wants to run it,” said Democratic pollster Peter D. Hart. “He’s better organized, better prepared than the other candidates. That puts him ahead of many others.”

According to the most recent poll of Iowa Democrats, Gephardt leads the pack with 24% support, followed by the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, with 11% each. The other candidates trail far behind.

Gephardt was the chief beneficiary of Hart’s withdrawal on May 8; a poll taken just three days before Hart quit in the wake of a sex scandal showed that Hart was the first choice of 56% of Iowa Democrats.

‘A Winnowing Place’

A victory in Iowa’s Democratic caucuses next February is the centerpiece of Gephardt’s strategy.

“Iowa is a winnowing place,” Gephardt said. “If you don’t do well there, you don’t go on.”

The importance of Iowa in the primary process explains why Gephardt is willing to take all the heat on his trade bill. Editorial writers don’t decide who goes on from Iowa; Democratic voters in Iowa do.

At the same time, Gephardt and his advisers are trying to paint the candidate as something more than a Johnny-One-Note on trade.

“On the one hand, he’s accused of pandering and using the trade issue for political purposes; on the other hand, we’re catching holy hell from editorial boards across the country,” said Gephardt campaign manager William Carrick, former top political adviser to Massachusetts Sen. Edward M. Kennedy.

“The challenge of the campaign is to expand his issue profile above and beyond trade,” Carrick said. “It’s a challenge to expand his profile, period.”

‘Measured Progress’

Gephardt likes to joke that his name recognition has risen from an asterisk three years ago to 3% today. “That’s 1% a year. I call that measured progress,” he tells audiences.

Gephardt’s record in Congress presents adequate evidence of interest in a broad variety of issues. He is co-sponsor of so many well-known legislative initiatives that his own staff sometimes jokingly refers to him as “the hyphenated candidate.”

Harkin-Gephardt was a bill to help save failing family farms; Bradley-Gephardt was the basis of last year’s tax revision initiative; Kennedy-Gephardt was a proposal to revamp Medicare, and Schroeder-Gephardt advocated an expanded nuclear test-ban treaty.

Even Republicans in the House consider Gephardt an effective parliamentarian, although whispers of “opportunist” are not hard to hear.

‘Not a Headline-Grabber’

“He’s serious, hard working, dedicated. He’s not perceived as a phony or a headline-grabber,” said Rep. Jim Courter (R-N.J.). “But I think he tried to grab the brass ring pretty quickly with respect to using trade and protectionism to chip away at the union vote. I think that’s going to hurt him, even in his own party. That’s not the direction the party is going.”

Gephardt also raised some eyebrows with his sponsorship of a bill to give screenwriters and directors the right to control what happens to their films, a move that was widely seen as pandering to Hollywood’s current anti-colorization drive. Gephardt promoted his bill in a Capitol Hill press conference last month with actor-director Woody Allen.

Critics called Gephardt’s backing of the bill a brazen attempt to hog the spotlight and attract Hollywood money for his presidential campaign. Gephardt replied: “The idea that this was a political effort is completely wrongheaded. It probably has hurt my efforts,” in part because many studio chiefs and others are opposed to the bill.

Joseph Badaracco, a St. Louis attorney defeated by Gephardt in his first run for Congress in 1976, has watched the younger man’s career with interest and some admiration over the last decade. He marvels at Gephardt’s ability to attract and retain votes in Missouri’s 3rd Congressional District, which is overwhelmingly white, working-class and conservative. It includes the south side of St. Louis, with its large German immigrant population of craftsmen and factory workers.

‘Votes With Liberals’

“I’ve always thought that he didn’t represent his constituency, which is a pretty conservative bunch, blue-collar types,” Badaracco said. “Dick really votes the other way, along with the liberals. . . . He’s an opportunistic sort of fellow.”

The district is a perfect microcosm of the larger national constituency of conservative blue-collar Democrats, whose votes for Republican presidential nominees have cost the Democrats the White House in three of the last four elections. Gephardt’s district gave President Reagan strong majorities in 1980 and 1984; Richard M. Nixon won the district by a wide margin in 1972. Even Gerald R. Ford eked out a narrow victory over Jimmy Carter in 1976.

Despite that record of preferring Republican presidents, the district’s voters return Gephardt to Washington by large majorities every two years.

Gephardt consciously caters to this conservative constituency. In his speeches, he always mentions that his father, a milk-truck driver, and his mother, a legal secretary, never finished high school but labored to ensure that Gephardt and his brother had the chance to go to college.

‘Doing Good, Aiming High’

“My folks worked and saved so my brother and I could get the education they never had,” he said in the speech announcing his candidacy Feb. 23. “I remember it well--sitting with them on our front porch, a little brick bungalow on Reber Place--on those warm summer nights. They talked with us about working hard, being honest, doing good, aiming high. The air was hot and muggy, but it was full of dreams. America was on the move.”

That brilliant piece of speech writing hits just the right notes with the conservative Democrats Gephardt wants to lure back into the fold, according to pollster Hart. “It was one of the best announcement speeches I’ve ever seen in presidential politics.”

The speech was written by Bob Shrum, who also has worked with Kennedy. In it, Gephardt made his case for a muscular trade policy, going over the heads of the editorial writers and the economists to speak directly to hard-pressed farmers and factory workers.

“I know this position will not be popular with everyone. But people sitting in cushy offices, in secure jobs, have no right to tell workers on assembly lines that their hopes and livelihood have to be sacrificed on the altar of a false and rigid free trade ideology.”

Coming from some, this might sound like demagoguery, and many have accused Gephardt of pandering to prejudice. An aide defended Gephardt against the familiar charge, saying: “This isn’t pandering. Dick really believes this stuff.”

“He really believes that this country is the land of opportunity,” said another adviser, Joanne Symons, a longtime Democratic activist and political director of the American Nurses Assn. “It’s a cliche, but in fact Dick believes that the role of government is to see that the barriers to achievement are removed.”

If the President’s role is to believe all the cliches about American democracy and opportunity, and to strive to make them true, then Gephardt is working hard to qualify for the job.

‘Opportunity for Everyone’

“My concern is that the country’s standard of living is declining,” Gephardt said when asked to justify his presidential ambitions. “If we don’t turn America in a more positive direction, it will be a different place, and in many ways an undesirable place. Realizing human potential, opportunity for everyone, is what this is all about.”

Gephardt attacks his mission with indefatigable zeal, regularly putting in 18-hour days on the road, traveling with his blond-haired wife, Jane, 44, whom he met at Northwestern University when they were undergraduates there in the 1960s. A former Eagle Scout, Gephardt studied drama and speech at Northwestern, where he was president both of his fraternity and the student body.

Gephardt then went on to the University of Michigan Law School and returned to St. Louis to practice law and dabble in local politics. He began his political career as a precinct captain and was elected to the St. Louis Board of Aldermen in 1971 as one of several Young Turks seeking to transform city politics. Gephardt, a Baptist, worked to wipe out smut shops in aging city neighborhoods and was a leader of a drive to build public housing for the city’s poor.

Moved Up to Congress

In 1976, he moved up to Congress, capitalizing on a vacancy created by the retirement of an incumbent. His campaigns, even when he is unopposed, have always been well-greased with individual and special-interest money, and he has won reelection easily each two years.

Gephardt said he is not driven by ideology, but rather by an instinct for the practical. He once described himself to an associate as a “terminal moderate.”

Together Gephardt and his wife present a picture of well-scrubbed Midwestern virtue, an image that leads Gephardt to laughingly dub the campaign “The Dick and Jane Show.”

He doesn’t duck the highly personal questions that have become part of the political landscape since the collapse of the Hart candidacy. “The way you conduct yourself, the way you treat your family are all relevant questions,” he said.

Adultery Answer Is, ‘No’

Asked by a reporter in San Diego recently whether he had ever committed adultery, Gephardt looked the interviewer in the eye and answered point-blank, “No.”

The Gephardts have three children, a boy and two girls, ages 16, 14 and 9. The oldest, Matthew, survived a battle with cancer before his second birthday. After several years of chemotherapy treatment, Matt is now an apparently healthy teen-ager who is enthusiastic about the campaign, his parents said.

For now, everything is going right for Gephardt. He is on target in his goal of raising about $5 million by the end of the year, he is strong in Iowa, he has been able to attract first-rate staffers, and his controversial trade position is keeping his name in the headlines.

“It’s ours to lose,” said Rep. Mike Synar (D-Okla.), a Gephardt supporter and traveling companion.

Gephardt hopes that remark doesn’t prove prophetic.