GEPHARDT VS. CLINTON
Caldwell, Christopher
Gephardt vs. Clinton by Christopher Caldwell Merrimack, N.H. PETER FLOOD'S A NO-HOPER. He became the Democratic nominee for Congress from New Hampshire's first district when the original...
...He thought it took a lot of courage...
...Monica Lewinsky has opened up magnificent vistas for Richard Gephardt...
...But nobody wanted to talk about that, either...
...I read in the paper that Gerry Solomon's writing a rule [for impeachment hearings...
...Mike Thompson is home free in the seat vacated by the retirement of Northern California wild man Frank Riggs...
...It's presidential—not about Clinton's future but Gephardt's...
...They're not talking to us," he said...
...He became the Democratic nominee for Congress from New Hampshire's first district when the original candidate was found to have assaulted a state cop...
...Why would he want to...
...and Ronnie Shows's private polling has him thrashing Republican Delbert Hosemann in Mississippi...
...He thinks six open Republican seats are already in the bag, say staff, and he's willing to name them: Lydia Spottswood will pick up Mark Neumann's seat in Wisconsin...
...But a scheduling conflict arose with the president's grand-jury testimony, and while Wood-burn says that the president has an "open invitation," neither side has shown itself eager to carry it out...
...Gephardt says there is no contradiction between any of his public statements, leaving us with this position on the matter: The president's behavior was reprehensible, but his apology was sufficient...
...Nothing has changed in the interim, and yet Gephardt now looks content to make the party agenda his own...
...And standing outside an old-folks home in Manchester, Gephardt attacked Republicans for dashing the hopes of fair play he had raised days before...
...Nobody's talked to me, nobody's talked to John Conyers, nobody's talked to Joe Moakley...
...Over the following days, he appeared to backtrack, but did not withdraw his statement, leaving much of the media at sea over what his position was...
...Is Gephardt simply trying to work out a way for Democrats to talk about Lewinsky without damaging themselves...
...pro-life Dem Pat Casey will get the Pennsylvania seat long held by Joe McDade...
...House minority leader Richard Gephardt had come to New Hampshire to pitch a Democratic "kitchen-table agenda" of three issues: education, a patient's bill of rights, and using the budget surplus for Social Security...
...None of Gephardt's six candidates (except Casey) is more than a "maybe," and his calculation does not reckon with the Democrats' vulnerable seats...
...of course, they hadn't the slightest interest in Flood...
...Clinton was invited to the state August 15...
...If he does, he'll win the gratitude of party regulars around the country...
...I don't know that...
...He's more forthcoming about his chat with White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles...
...I don't know whether it's true or not...
...Vice President Gore hid from reporters on his recent campaigning tour through Ohio...
...He's oratorically clumsy, short on money, and sure to get clocked by Republican incumbent John Sununu Jr...
...Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Impeachment is a possibility, but protecting the process from Republican partisanship is unlikely...
...And yet the whole national media—CNN, Fox News, the New York Times, the Washington Post—gathered in Merrimack, N.H., last Thursday for the opening of Flood's campaign headquarters in an old caboose that used to be a head shop...
...Of the Democrats aggressively campaigning, Gephardt is top dog...
...All wings of it: Barnstorming through New Hampshire on the very afternoon the Russian economy suffered its worst day since communism fell, he refused to stress his historic differences with the president on the global economy except to excoriate Republican irresponsibility...
...Even if he's the only person in the world who can't say so...
...A year from now, when the primary campaign heats up, Gephardt must hope he will be the one remembered for having tramped from one end of New Hampshire to the other to pitch it...
...He arrived fresh from a nine-state, fourteen-district campaign tour, at every stop of which he faced journalists asking him to clarify his position on the Monica Lewinsky affair...
...Gephardt added two new wrinkles: on a day when several Democrats, from Robert Torricelli to Marcy Kaptur, described the president's August 17 mea-not-so-culpa as "insufficient," one staffer said, "Dick thought it was sufficient...
...If they do this the way they've done just about everything else in the last three years, this will not be non-partisan...
...If this canny politician has not cleared things up by now, it's because he doesn't want to...
...In an interview that made the front page of the Washington Post two weeks ago, Gephardt described president Clinton's conduct with Monica Lewinsky as "wrong and reprehensible" and expressed his hope that future impeachment proceedings would be as fair as previous ones...
...President Clinton is hiding from scandal abroad...
...You can't suck and blow at the same time," is the strange way New Hampshire state party chairman Jeff Woodburn puts it, "and it does make it difficult to get our message out...
...But this is not really congressional politics we're witnessing...
...One of the issues we have been talking about," he says, "is the failure of the Republicans to replenish the funding for the IMF"—this from a man who has taken a dim view of arrangements to bail out global capitalists at the expense of workers...
...Gephardt acknowledges that he has had one conversation with the president since the "reprehensible" interview—an "upbeat" talk "about the issues" the weekend before the Moscow summit...
...Does Gephardt, alone among political observers, think Democrats still have a chance of getting the House back, if only candidates can put enough daylight between themselves and Clinton...
...Brian Baird will fill the seat vacated by Washington populist Linda Smith's Senate run...
...Last spring, Gephardt attacked the White House in a speech at Harvard for having no domestic agenda...
...Whether or not the triad of Social Security/Patient's Bill of Rights/Education is a winner, Democrats think it is...
...Which leaves the field to Gephardt, who fires up New Hampshire Democrats with visions of taking the House back...
...Shelley Berkley will take John Ensign's Nevada seat...
...Having described the president as "morally reprehensible," Gephardt will now do nothing to break the unity of the party or its candidates...
...On the Lewinsky matter, he says, "I told [Bowles] what I've told everybody, and that is, I've been saying the same thing every day...
...on Election Day...
...Of the top three figures in the Democratic party, Gephardt is the only one not on the ethical disabled list...
Vol. 4 • September 1998 • No. 1
