Gephardt's Last Stand

...This campaign is about allowing people to come together and tell their life stories...

...Put another way: How come it's Howard Dean, of all people, and not someone like . . . well, Gephardt, who appears, weeks and weeks before the first official ballot has been cast, to be running away with the race...

...He frightens me...

...Already the camera crews and stage-prop crowds are beginning to take over, and the rope lines are going up, and soon enough it'll become pretty much physically impossible to form a personal impression of the Democratic party's likely nominee for president next year...

...They "tend to be somewhat younger than voters who prefer Gephardt," as the Pew paper blandly notes...

...And I said, "Not on my watch...

...I'm gonna try to unite the country to solve tough problems...

...Before he can even dream of being president, however, he's first got to wrest his party's nomination away from Howard Dean...

...The window hasn't closed for good, and a man can still watch a real-life presidential candidate talking to real-life voters, up close and in the flesh, for hours on end, especially if he's willing to wake up at 4 a.m...

...And in purely practical terms—given the extra manpower and financial help involved: phone banks, mail drops, election-night voter roundups—yes, Dick Gephardt would unquestionably be better fixed to win the Democratic nomination had Howard Dean not managed to poach a significant chunk of his labor base...

...Because when you do that it's just revenge, it's a cycle of revenge, and you're going to wind up ruining this country...

...We're led to believe that Howard Dean is attracting sizable, fervent, financially generous support from a group of people more or less completely unsusceptible to ordinary political argument...

...By now, each of the other first-tier Democrats in the race, none more crudely and completely than Dean, has long since effected a tactical policy shift in Gephardt's direction, walking away from the free-trade past and loudly promising a fair-trade future in its stead...

...If anything, on the domestic policy front, which both candidates ritually contend ought to be paramount, a significant number of New Hampshire Democrats, whether they realize it or not, are making up their minds despite the issues...

...For the only time all day, Gephardt briefly looked distressed, paused, and then calmly remembered how, during the 2002 midterm elections I had a lot of Democrats come to me and say, "Boy, if we win we've got to give it back to 'em, we've got to come back and hit 'em just as hard as they hit us...

...Which means he has to win Iowa, since a subsequent Dean victory in New Hampshire seems virtually guaranteed at this point, and a two-state sweep, as even Gephardt has conceded, would mean "everyone else is toast...

...Also in my lap during the flight out to Des Moines is this morning's New York Times Magazine, whose cover story, "The Dean Swarm," is a deadpan and dazzling piece of psychological investigative reporting into the youth movement that is propelling this year's Democratic front-runner...

...When I showed up for this morning's first event in Oskaloosa I was immediately greeted by a Gephardt volunteer wearing a Teamsters button, who asked me where I was from, thanked me for coming, shook my hand, told me he read The Weekly Standard all the time—and then proved it, to my astonishment, by asking me whether I didn't think he deserved "extra credit for not going like this," as he wiped the hand I'd just grabbed across his chest...

...Then there's the matter of how the Dean people look and sound...

...Rosen admits, however, that he'd probably still be back in school had his first serious girlfriend not broken up with him last spring...

...But he says all this more coherently and less apologetically than he used to, and, knowing his audience, he nowadays sweetens it with some Howard Dean-worthy indignation over the Bush administration's postwar diplomacy and reconstruction policies: "This president is the worst...

...This kind of equanimity in the face of divergent political opinion, incidentally, is a general characteristic of the Gephardt campaign, populated as it is by genuine grownups who know full well that it's sometimes necessary to stand your ground and fight, but also know that it's very rarely necessary or appropriate to pee on the other fellow's shoes...

...Then comes Gephardt's kicker: "If Al Gore had beaten George Bush in Missouri alone, which he almost did, even without Florida, he would be president today...

...Howard Dean may have hurtled into the front-runner position by monopolizing the affections of those for whom it doesn't much matter, people who just wanna beat Bush, dammit...

...This Times story implies that the Dean campaign isn't even about Howard Dean, really...

...And it seems to be true as well, at least according to Pew's latest data, that party dogma still matters to Democrats...

...AFSCME and the Service Employees are unions representing public-sector employees, who have relatively secure public-sector jobs, and whose principal worry is consequently that their relatively generous public-sector job benefits might one day be reduced...

...The same goes for Gephardt's insistence that he'd be the president most loyally committed to traditional Democratic party principles as a whole...

...In any case, Gephardt is nowadays making an ever more voluble and explicit and plausibly persuasive case that he, not Dean, is in fact that fastest horse...

...Or so it's expected...

...Besides, "money isn't everything in politics...

...Those unnamed aides hadn't been speaking on his behalf "or on behalf of any known or knowable reality," either...

...Johnson "stripped to his underwear, lay on the floor in a fetal position and remained there for days, occasionally sipping from an old carton of orange juice...

...There's a rickety-looking "Boilermakers for Gephardt" van parked outside all three events I attend today, one of the many ancillary services being provided to the candidate by the "Alliance for Economic Justice," an ad hoc coalition of trade unions who've endorsed his campaign...

...a plurality of Dean supporters, for example, actually disagree with Dean—and agree with Kerry—about the need to preserve some portion of the Bush tax cuts...

...How can Gephardt hope to keep up...

...But they've also got to win "states like Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia," he explains...

...In other words: Dean voters become Dean voters—defying all the standard predictive formulas...

...These are overwhelmingly blue-collar affairs...

...on paper, either Kerry or Gephardt would be their party's stronger general-election standard-bearer— because they've convinced themselves that Dean's the winner's bet...

...This time, though, the mood appears to have changed...

...The Gephardt campaign is something altogether different...

...And "I know I can beat George Bush in Missouri...

...maries...

...The Pew numbers reflect a Dean campaign that isn't really about issues per se...

...In that sense, at least, our current election cycle is operating like any other in the modern, television age...

...stories aren't always true, as you know...

...New Hampshire, then, is not tilting hard toward Howard Dean because people are "voting their hearts," as that phrase is traditionally understood...

...How do you defend yourself against that...

...Doesn't he also think it suggests a serious and unusually tricky electioneering problem, I press...

...He has remained characteristically optimistic in public, however...

...Which is thought to mean that hard-boiled general-election imperatives remain a relatively distant concern in these contests: Iowa and New Hampshire Democrats will be less likely preoccupied with identifying the candidate best equipped to unseat President Bush in November, and more likely, instead, simply to choose the guy whose views most closely match their own...

...Come on in, have a seat...

...Perhaps Gephardt has already lost all the Iraq-related votes there are to lose...

...Alarmed, Johnson's friends scratched their heads for a way to snap him out of it...

...None of the men who still have a realistic hope for that prize will any longer be within reach of even the most determined civil-ian—certainly not where more-than-momentary, relatively unscripted, and intimate conversational encounters are concerned...

...But "if you're gonna beat him, you've got to beat him in the Midwest...

...he had every reason to believe that Saddam Hussein's determination to acquire weapons of mass destruction represented a real and imminent danger to the United States, and the risk to American lives, were those weapons to be diverted into terrorist hands, obliged Gephardt to act as he had...

...Brooks now shares a cubicle with 20-year-old Zack Rosen, who dropped out of college and moved to Vermont—"I just knew this is the guy"—after reading about Dean on the campaign website for all of 20 minutes...

...How many of these people can there be...

...How does he plan to get past the hurdles his campaign now appears to confront in Iowa, I ask Gephardt when I finally catch him alone, at the end of a 14-hour campaign schedule, carrying his own bags through the airport back in Washington, almost home...

...for a predawn flight to Des Moines on a Sunday...

...The ordinary rule of thumb is that people are disposed to "vote their hearts" in early-state presidential priDavid Tell is opinion editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...In this respect, too, Richard Gephardt would seem to enjoy a major "elec-tability" advantage over Howard Dean...

...But over the past three weeks, no fewer than seven different reputable and well-known polling outfits have released data indicating that Howard Dean is thoroughly dominating the once-heavily-favored John Kerry in New Hampshire—by a 24-percentage-point average margin...

...But we're not quite there yet...

...In demographic terms, it turns out they are very much who their detractors say they are: an elite sociocultural minority of the overall American electorate...

...Finally they hit on one: Howard Dean...

...Three times Gephardt is called upon to deliver this speechlet over the course of the day, and three times the likely Iowa caucus-goer who's requested it from him listens while nodding his head in assent—even before the part about how "this president is the worst" arrives...

...It's a fairly safe guess that no one in Iowa is backing Richard Gephardt for president because otherwise he'd be lying half-naked in a fetal position mourning a lost girlfriend...

...By contrast, fewer than half of Dick Gephardt's supporters have made it past high school and nearly two-thirds of them oppose gay marriage...

...What a jerk Dean is," this Teamster gentleman mumbled with a rueful smile, like it was the most natural thing in the world for the two of us to agree about...

...And they are unusually passionate—whether or not "voting their hearts" is the right phrase for it—about their cause...

...A bitter, distracting rift has since developed in the House of Labor, with pro-Gephardt industrial unions accusing AFL-CIO chief John Sweeney, who himself once led the Service Employees, of bias and betrayal...

...The Pew study reports that Howard Dean appeals most intensely to "the well-educated liberal wing" of the Democratic party...

...So when I'm president . . . I'm gonna try to put together bipartisan efforts...

...But Gephardt's remains the most transparently sincere and compelling fair-trade pitch...

...A 24-year-old Dean field organizer, who "broke into tears several times while trying to explain" the point, tells freelancer Samantha M. Shapiro that for her, "the thought that he'll be president is a side effect...

...But whatever the reason, over the past couple months Gephardt has become a considerably more effective—even commanding—stump speaker...

...A few hours later in Knoxville, his voice beginning to quiver just a bit, an unselfconscious Gephardt, who'd just spent 20 minutes describing what a mess George W. An irritable local asked Gephardt what he planned to do by way of punishment for the congressional Republicans...

...I have taken such a flight today, in order to watch Richard Gephardt campaign among the Iowans he hopes will vote for him in next month's caucuses...

...Gephardt briefly looked distressed...

...No question, it's a problem," Gephardt answers...

...Dean and his "swarm" routinely radiate a naive, belligerent, almost incontinent hostility toward anyone who they suspect might not be One of Us, which is not the sort of attitude you'd ordinarily expect to see in a front-running, major-party presidential campaign—and not, for that matter, the sort of attitude any responsible man, regardless of his politics, would ever want to see installed in the Oval Office...

...The 21 trade-union internationals that have lined up behind Dick Gephardt, on the other hand, are filled with people who make things in American factories —which not infrequently close down or get moved over-seas—and whose principal worry is consequently a rather more immediate and urgently political one: that they might be left unemployed and destitute by some macro-economic exigency or twist of federal trade law...

...Instead, according to Pew, Dean is far ahead of Kerry in New Hampshire, and threatening to snuff out Dick Gephardt here in Iowa, because he enjoys a sizable lead in both states among Democrats "who place a greater priority on defeating Bush...

...And I have spent my time on the mostly empty plane trying to read my way to a provisional conclusion about why our current election cycle, in every essential respect, camera crews and rope lines notwithstanding, is very much not operating on a conventional schedule, or by conventional logic...

...Here in Iowa, for instance, more than two-thirds of Dean's supporters have attended college and more than half favor gay marriage...

...A new polling analysis by the Pew Research Center confirms the anomaly...

...He'd be a president you'd have to work awfully hard to hate...

...He has, and he found it "most interesting," he tells me with a perfectly friendly and perfectly ambiguous smile...

...Who on earth are these people...

...Dick Gephardt's union support is less than uniform, of course, as he is constantly reminded by the newspapers...

...That morning's New York Times had a story in which unnamed Gephardt campaign aides were said to admit that their treasury would be empty on the day after the caucuses...

...Gephardt wants to beat Bush as much as anybody, he tells an attentive group of Iowa Democrats in an Oskaloosa junior high school conference room this morning...

...And yes, nevertheless, Dick Gephardt's position on the matter is something they can live with...

...Shapiro introduces us to 21-year-old Gary Brooks, who "drove from Alabama to Burlington at the beginning of last summer, after hearing Dean on the radio just once...

...Back in October, he was denied the umbrella labor-movement endorsement he'd badly wanted when the AFL-CIO's executive board decided to keep the organization officially neutral in the Democratic primaries...

...And Pew's research suggests that neither man's views have much to do with it: "Supporters of Dean and Kerry exhibit few issue differences...

...No, the import-export stuff hasn't got quite the distinguishing bite it might have...

...Howard Dean can't make that claim...

...Last time I saw him in Iowa, earlier this fall, the fact that Gephardt had coauthored the House resolution authorizing "Bush's war" was clearly still costing him votes...

...Dean, by contrast, has all the money he could possibly want, and has already begun spending $400,000 a week on Iowa television time—an ad blitz that has vaulted "The Swarm" back on top in the latest Des Moines Register poll...

...Money aside, though, has Gephardt also had a chance to read the "Dean Swarm" magazine report elsewhere in the Times that morning...

...Gephardt voters are an older crowd, people in their 40s and 50s and 60s, most of whom probably haven't had a girlfriend for a very long time—since they typically show up at his community meetings with their wives in tow—and few of whom could afford to lie around in a fetal position even if they wanted to, because they have to work for a living, generally with their hands...

...It's true, after all: He would...

...But most Democrats throughout the country—and in Iowa and New Hampshire, too—con-tinue to tell pollsters that they'd prefer to nominate a man who's right on the issues, even if he might not be the very fastest horse in the stable...

...The AFSCME defection alone, Gephardt privately fumed at the time, may effectively have "turned over the country to Republicans for four more years...

...Or perhaps he's simply figured out how to parry the challenge more deftly, for it certainly can't be said to have disappeared...

...The war still comes up—in Oskaloosa, and at later meetings in Knoxville and Indianola as well— and at bottom Gephardt's impressively stubborn defense of himself is still the same: His vote was the right thing to do...

...And having now seen the post-AFL-CIO-"setback" version of his Iowa campaign firsthand, I'm not sure he isn't right to be...

...Yes, they themselves opposed the war and still do, the head-nodders all later tell me...

...It was an allusion to a story I've previously told in these pages about my introductory encounter with Howard Dean this past March...

...And inside, at each stop, ID buttons from one or another of these unions adorn an overwhelming majority of audience and volunteer-staffer lapels...

...We've clearly raised enough money to compete effectively all the way through the first group of primaries...

...And rather deepens the mystery, in fact...

...He's got their votes...

...Bush has made of things, nevertheless found reason to say that whenever he goes on foreign trips, "I come back and I want to grab people and say 'Do you know how lucky you are?'" Richard Gephardt is a genial, decent man...

...The subject came up at his every public appearance, and the people who asked him about it invariably seemed disappointed or even peeved with his answers...

...And last month the movement's two largest members, the government workers' union AFSCME and the Service Employees International, actually defected to Howard Dean...

...The Times was wrong, he says...

...Democrats will win California and New York, that much is assured...

...even if you reject the argument intellectually, it takes a heart of stone not to be moved by his description and denunciation of the "human exploitation" produced in NAFTA's near-term wake...

...But you've got to ask yourself, 'How many of these people are there...

...Maybe he has been forced by circumstance to focus and intensify his appeal to such voters, I don't know...

...Half an hour later, an irritable Oskaloosa local asked Gephardt what, as president, he planned to do by way of punishment for the congressional Republicans who have done so much to "undermine our democracy...

...He scares me...

...Similarly, Rosen's 26-year-old colleague Clay Johnson got involved after a young woman named Merrill told him she didn't love him anymore...