Posted on 01/21/2004 6:33:28 AM PST by Jean S
“I want to say a special thank-you to every member of every labor union in this country who has stood by my side throughout my career,” Rep. Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.) said as he gave up his presidential campaign Monday night.
“Your fight is my fight, and it will always be that way.”
It’s no surprise that Gephardt, who had just finished fourth in the Iowa caucuses, reserved a special place in his concession speech for the unions. God knows he has owed them big time over the years. But this time, they couldn’t deliver.
Media entrance polls revealed that only 23 percent of the voters who showed up at the caucuses were from union households.
Of those voters, just 22 percent chose Gephardt. The winner, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), got 29 percent.
Of the nonunion voters, who made up 73 percent of caucus attendance, Gephardt won just 8 percent. Kerry got 37 percent.
At Gephardt’s rallies in Iowa, there were always members of the Teamsters and Laborers’ and Steelworkers (“Backbone of Steel”) unions, along with organizations you don’t hear much from, like PACE, the Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical & Energy Workers International Union.
They were all big, brawny, old-fashioned industrial unions, not the service workers who had endorsed Howard Dean.
Gephardt told them what they wanted to hear about trade, about how big corporations were sending jobs overseas to low-paid workers in a “race to the bottom.”
He promised to put an end to that race, in part by demanding that every country in the world institute a minimum wage. It wasn’t terribly realistic, but the audiences liked it.
As it turned out, Gephardt did very, very well with voters who named U.S. trade policy as the most important issue in the campaign.
The only problem was, they made up just 4 percent of caucus-goers.
Gephardt also promised his audiences universal health insurance that “can never be taken away.”
His plan, he claimed, would be money in their pockets.
“My healthcare plan will put $3,000 a year into the average family,” Gephardt told the workers. “His [President Bush’s] tax-cut plan gives you $500. So do the math.”
It was old-time Democratic religion, and Gephardt sometimes seemed to sense it was out of date, that he was on his last campaign.
At times, that campaign had the feel of a long, lonely slog around Iowa. It wasn’t unusual for Gephardt to speak to a room full of people who seemed almost comatose — well, at least very unresponsive.
Gephardt would try to buck them up, saying, “We’re gonna win!” repeatedly, but it didn’t appear that anyone actually believed him.
At one point, when he couldn’t stir any enthusiasm, Gephardt told the group, “This will be fun! This will be good! This will be optimistic!”
Still no reaction.
Gephardt’s audiences were often made up mostly of retired people. It was thought that, steady and reliable as they were, they would turn out in big numbers for him on caucus night.
But they didn’t. In fact, Gephardt won just 17 percent of the votes of caucus-goers over 65 years old — to Kerry’s 43 percent.
Gephardt did pretty badly with almost everyone else, too.
He did badly with women. He did badly with college graduates. He did badly with families making more than $50,000 a year. He did badly with people who use the Internet a lot.
And Gephardt did particularly badly with people who made up their minds in the last week before the caucus. He had been campaigning in Iowa for 15 years, since he won the caucuses in 1988. But a large number — 41 percent — of caucus participants made up their minds in the last week, and just 6 percent of them chose Gephardt, compared to the 39 percent who went to Kerry and 35 who went to Edwards.
Gephardt used to tell audiences that he wasn’t the flavor of the month. It turned out he was right.
It was the cliché of the Gephardt campaign to say that he was making a last stand. It was true, but one reporter, after watching a particularly lackluster performance, said the whole enterprise didn’t have enough spirit to qualify as a last stand; Gephardt seemed to be just going through the motions.
After he conceded, the other candidates went out of their way to praise Gephardt. Kerry and Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) were gracious; Dean was not.
“I worked for him in 1988 and still feel some loyalty to him,” Dean told his supporters Monday night in what would become a strange, shouting, nearly out-of-control concession speech. “He did the best he could.”
It could have been a bit warmer, but in truth, that’s not a terribly bad epitaph for Gephardt’s political career. “Speaker Gephardt” — remember the Republican nightmare? — never happened, and neither did “President Gephardt.” But he slogged on anyway.
| Byron York is a White House correspondent for National Review. His column appears in The Hill each Wednesday. E-mail: byork@thehill.com |
Michael
No. His only hope for further govt employment would be as Secretary of Labor in either a Kerry (04) or Clinton (08) administration. Let's give him lots of "more time with his family".
He has said that he will serve out the remainder of his present term [one year] and then retire from politics.
On a related area-they did likewise to Kerry/Lieberman, asking 50-odd% refund.
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