Gephardt Tries to Put House in Order Before a 2004 Run

After a quarter-century in national politics, it’s impossible to calculate how many times Rep. Richard A. Gephardt has been standing in a room like this: a crowded, warm, featureless reception hall at an arts center, where the line for the bar is too long, the lights are too dim and the ceiling is too low.

Yet Gephardt, the Missouri congressman who leads the House Democrats, betrays neither boredom nor impatience. In a dark blue suit, crisp blue shirt and red tie, he stands on a hot summer evening as solidly as a rock in a river, his handshake firm, his gaze earnest if distant as he greets the lawyers and the developers who stream past him at this party for big donors to the Florida Democratic Party.

“Good to see you,” he says to one in a voice incongruously gravelly for a man with features so delicate. “Thanks for all the work you are doing,” he says to another.

Other than, perhaps, former Vice President Al Gore, no one considering a campaign for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination has shaken as many hands, for as many years, in as many rooms like this, as Gephardt. Neither has anyone else in the potential 2004 field campaigned for as many Democratic candidates or carried water on Capitol Hill for as many of the key party interest groups, particularly organized labor.

Most of the early media attention in the Democratic race has focused on the freshest faces among the potential contenders: Sens. John Edwards of North Carolina and John F. Kerry of Massachusetts. But if Gephardt runs--and he is actively considering doing so--the depth and breadth of his connections likely would provide him with financial and organizational assets that considerably exceed any of his potential rivals, except Gore.

And that could make Gephardt a much more formidable competitor for the nomination than it appears today, especially if the Democrats retake the House this fall and give him a powerful platform as speaker.

“The only guy who can stop Gore is Dick, if he gets the House,” insists one senior Democratic strategist close to both men.

Yet, to an unusual degree, Gephardt’s strengths are precisely his weaknesses. His ties to the party’s core constituencies are built largely on conventional liberal positions that could limit his appeal to moderate and upscale voters, especially in coastal states such as California. And the same long experience that makes him so familiar to party insiders may make him look shopworn to average voters.

If Gephardt runs, his greatest hurdle may be to sell himself as a man with a vision, and not just a resume, to an electorate that has grown resistant to presidential contenders too long marinated in Washington, especially on Capitol Hill--as former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole painfully learned during his 1996 race.

“The challenge Gephardt will have in this race will be newness, freshness,” acknowledges one of his top advisors. “The opposition will try to turn him into Bob Dole.”

The miles wear lightly on Gephardt. At 61, with reddish-blond hair as thin as corn silk, he looks not much different from the young lawyer who arrived in Washington in 1977, representing a middle-class white ethnic district in St. Louis.

Gephardt served his political apprenticeship as a ward-level foot soldier in the old St. Louis political machine; he was a precinct worker and an alderman before he won his congressional seat. In those trenches he acquired habits that still define him: a bottomless capacity for work (he was famous for trekking door to door in his ward), a talent for forging consensus and a knack for climbing past rivals without making enemies.

With those machine-taught skills, Gephardt rose quickly in the House. By the early 1980s, many of his colleagues saw him as a future speaker.

Instead, in 1988, Gephardt ran for president. For such a careful politician, it was an uncharacteristic roll of the dice: James Garfield in 1880 was the only sitting member of the House ever elected president. But Gephardt approached the campaign with a characteristic belief that enough work could overcome any obstacle. He assiduously organized the House; more than 80 of his colleagues endorsed and campaigned for him. And he practically relocated to Iowa, home of the first caucus, investing more than 100 days in the state before the vote, and moving his wife, his kids and his nearly 80-year-old mother to Des Moines.

For all that, Gephardt was languishing toward the back of the pack just a few weeks before the caucus. Then, just after Christmas 1987, he released an incendiary ad on trade--forever known as the Hyundai ad--in which he threatened to impose massive tariffs on South Korean cars if that country didn’t lower its barriers to U.S. vehicles. In a state struggling economically, it was bottled lightning.

Behind the Hyundai ad, Gephardt rocketed to victory in the Iowa caucus. But his candidacy quickly deflated amid charges of opportunism and inconsistency.

When Gephardt arrived in Washington, he was a centrist who frequently broke from the party line. In his first years, he voted for President Reagan’s tax cuts and led a rebellion against President Carter’s hospital cost-containment plan. After Walter F. Mondale’s landslide defeat in 1984, Gephardt was one of the founding members of the Democratic Leadership Council, formed to tug the party back toward the center.

But in his 1988 presidential race, Gephardt veered left. While his hawkish rhetoric on trade was consistent with his congressional record, Gephardt reversed several conservative positions he had taken. Instead, he presented himself as a prairie populist, bellowing, “It’s your fight too!” on the stump in Iowa.

After Gephardt’s Iowa win, his opponents--led by eventual nominee Michael S. Dukakis and Gore, then also making his first bid for the nomination--ferociously accused him of flip-flopping on issues. Lacking the money to effectively respond, Gephardt was routed in a series of primaries and soon was forced from the race.

Returning to Washington, Gephardt continued his rise in the House leadership, becoming majority leader when Thomas S. Foley succeeded Jim Wright as speaker in 1989. (Later, after Foley was defeated and the Democrats lost their majority in 1995, Gephardt became the House’s top Democrat as minority leader.) But the 1988 race was a turning point in his career. From that point since, he has been much more closely allied with the party’s liberal wing, and he is a frequent target of criticism from centrists, including the DLC.

Indeed, through the 1990s, Gephardt emerged as a liberal leader largely through his opposition to some of President Clinton’s priorities. Gephardt led the unsuccessful fight against Clinton’s North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993, voted against the welfare reform legislation Clinton signed into law in 1996 and joined just one-quarter of House Democrats in opposing the balanced-budget agreement Clinton negotiated with the congressional GOP in 1997.

Later that fall, Gephardt accused the White House of offering “small ideas that nibble around the edges of big problems” in a Harvard University speech widely viewed as the kickoff for a potential challenge from the left to Gore for the 2000 nomination. In the end, though, Gephardt decided not to run, believing that his odds of recapturing the House and becoming speaker were greater than his chances of denying Gore the prize.

Now, as he slogs through the fourth attempt to retake the House from the GOP, Gephardt is seriously considering a presidential bid again. He has said that he will not decide whether to run until after November, but he has also instructed his staff to lay the foundation for a possible campaign. Some around him believe it is more likely that he will run if the Democrats fail to recapture the House, but aides say that even if his party does regain the majority, Gephardt might renounce the speakership or step down after a few months of holding it to seek the presidency.

With typical diligence, he is making weekly calls to activists in the early primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. He also appears to be trying to mend fences with centrist Democrats. He has spoken twice to the DLC this year, expressed support for welfare reform, backed military action in Iraq and tried to reframe his trade position as a commitment not to closing American markets but to upholding labor and environmental standards abroad.

“Clearly the gap is narrowing,” says Ed Kilgore, the DLC policy director. “He seems to have implicitly accepted much of the new Democratic argument from the 1990s--not all, but much.”

That may overstate the convergence.

Gephardt recently helped craft a House Democratic proposal that would have spent at least $800 billion over the next decade to subsidize prescription drugs for older Americans--far more than centrist Democrats preferred. While many centrists want to return the federal ledger to balance as quickly as feasible, Gephardt said in an interview that he would keep the budget in the red indefinitely to pay for a prescription drug plan. And in a recent vote, he continued to oppose providing President Bush expedited “fast-track” authority to negotiate trade deals.

Given those views, Gephardt’s principal assets as a candidate probably would be his long-standing ties to liberal Democratic activists and interest groups.

If Gore doesn’t run, Gephardt’s aides believe that he would receive the endorsement of the AFL-CIO; if both men run, labor probably would split, with many of the industrial unions supporting Gephardt, primarily because they prefer his views on trade to Gore’s free-trade posture.

With union and agricultural support, Gephardt would also probably start the race as the most formidable competitor in Iowa other than Gore.

“I’m sure there would be a large coalition around him,” says Dick Neil, the United Auto Workers’ legislative director in Iowa.

All that suggests that in a second presidential bid, Gephardt could stack up institutional support like cordwood. The question is whether he could find a spark to ignite it.

His supporters believe cresting concern about the economy and corporate corruption could provide a favorable backdrop for his long-standing populism. But others say Gephardt may also need the jolt of attention that would follow from a Democratic victory in recapturing the House to convince voters outside of the party’s core constituencies to give him a second look.

“If he doesn’t get the House, what is his story?” asks the Democratic strategist close to Gephardt and Gore. “Without the House, I don’t know where he gets the oomph from to run.”