Some Wonder if Gephardt Can Lead While Following His Own Path

During the waning days of last year’s budget stalemate between Congress and the White House, House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas) was chewing over President Clinton’s latest offer when he ran into Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), the leader of the House Democrats.

What would happen, Armey asked Gephardt, if he brought back a budget deal that a majority of his members opposed? “They would be electing a new leader,” Gephardt told Armey, according to “Mirage,” an engaging new book on Washington’s budget wars.

Well how about the opposite situation: What would happen to a legislative leader who rejects a budget agreement endorsed by a majority of his caucus? Would he remain a leader?

It’s not a theoretical question. Gephardt dramatically denounced the balanced-budget deal Clinton recently negotiated with the congressional GOP, but nearly two-thirds of House Democrats voted for it. The same thing could happen next week when Congress is scheduled to vote on whether to uphold Clinton’s decision to extend most-favored-nation trading status for China: Gephardt says no, but Democratic vote-counters now believe that a majority of House Democrats may say yes.

Such are the hazards facing Gephardt as he balances his role as a potential presidential candidate with his position as the leader of House Democrats. With an eye on 2000, Gephardt is aggressively differentiating himself from Clinton and Vice President Al Gore. Beyond the budget and China, Gephardt is resisting the president’s call for expedited fast-track authority to negotiate future trade deals. He opposed the welfare reform bill Clinton signed last year, and if the president moves forward with more sweeping entitlement reform--as he’s said he intends--it’s virtually inevitable Gephardt will oppose that too.

All this has cheered liberal activists who believe that Gephardt is laying the foundation to challenge Gore and overturn Clinton’s “third way” centrism in 2000. But Gephardt’s course is provoking an audible rustle of discontent in the electorate that decides whether he keeps his day job in the House.

While no one is plotting a coup, some centrist House Democrats are ever so cautiously starting to publicly question whether Gephardt can indefinitely remain as the Democratic leader while consistently defining himself in opposition to the White House--and in key instances like the budget, a majority of his own members.

Rep. Calvin M. Dooley (D-Visalia) serves as co-chairman of the New Democrat Coalition, an alliance of 35 House moderates. “At this point I don’t think there is a lot of serious talk about a need for Dick to step down,” Dooley said. “But if our leadership is constantly promoting an agenda that is supported only by a minority within the caucus . . . at some point there is going to have to be a serious discussion of [whether] our leadership is reflective of the membership.”

Likewise, Rep. John S. Tanner (D-Tenn.), a leader of his party’s conservative wing, has pointedly warned that with most Democrats backing the budget, the leadership eventually “may have to put aside personal desires and represent the entire caucus.”

These murmurs matter because the moderates, after losing ground in the 1994 election debacle, are regaining strength in the Democratic caucus: Revealingly, 33 of the 42 first-term House Democrats voted for the budget deal. The moderates believe that Clinton’s centrist course offers the party’s best chance of recapturing the swing districts they need to retake the House. And privately they worry that Gephardt’s loud challenge to the president will allow Republicans to make the case in 1998 that a Democratic majority would careen the House back to the left.

With keenly incendiary timing, the AFL-CIO has poured gasoline on this smoldering dispute by deciding to target its lobbying and advertising campaigns this year at Democrats as well as Republicans. As first reported in the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call, labor will use television ads and grass-roots organizing to pressure as many as three dozen Democrats--almost all of them moderates--toward union positions on issues such as the budget, health care and trade.

That prospect has the centrist Democrats apoplectic. “They are practicing the politics of intimidation,” fumed Dooley. In separate meetings, moderate House Democrats have urged both Gore and Gephardt to ask AFL-CIO President John Sweeney to back off. But there’s no sign of Sweeney obliging. “We are not going to back down in Democratic districts,” said one senior federation official.

It’s difficult to quarrel with labor’s right to arm-twist Democrats as well as Republicans on its goals. But the unions have greatly escalated the hostilities by simultaneously prodding Democrats to quit the New Democrat Coalition--a maneuver that Dooley describes as perilously close to inciting “civil war” in the party.

All of this has contributed to the sense of lines hardening in the House--and complicated Gephardt’s balancing act. Gephardt isn’t oblivious to the problem. Despite his ideological differences, he’s kept good personal relations with the moderates, and he’s reaching out to them on policy too: After initially tilting left in the internal negotiations, he pushed to include some of moderates’ priorities in the alternative tax bill House Democrats unveiled last week to surprisingly broad approval across the party.

With such artful bridge-building as evidence, Gephardt’s allies argue that there’s no ready replacement who could more effectively unify the party. Besides, says one Gephardt advisor, if Democrats can live with a president willing to occasionally pursue ideas most House Democrats oppose “it shouldn’t be a problem to have a leader who from time to time” does the same thing.

Maybe. But a better bet is that the tension in the caucus persists. Even leaving aside 2000, Gephardt--and the AFL-CIO--are already advancing an agenda that would point the party back toward pre-Clinton liberalism. The House centrists think that’s a path to electoral oblivion. Inevitably, fresh conflicts (such as the fall’s looming battle over fast-track trade authority) will continue to expose the distance between those visions--and rattle the tightrope Gephardt is trying to walk from one end of Pennsylvania Avenue to the other.