Tricky 'Dick'; During his early years in Congress, Rep. Richard Gephardt voted for Ronald Reagan's tax cut, aid to the Nicaraguan Contras and a constitutional ban on abortion. Twenty-five years later, and with an eye on the White House, he is a pro-choice, tax-and-spend liberal

0 Comments | Insight on the News, May 27, 2003 | by John Berlau

Byline: John Berlau, INSIGHT

Rep. Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.) often speaks of his humble roots as the son of a milkman in St. Louis. "My views on work and unions and the struggles of working families were shaped during this period," the former House minority leader and current candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination writes in his 1999 autobiography, An Even Better Place. On the presidential stump in Iowa last February, Gephardt again recalled his father Louis in a paean to labor unions. "He told me every time, pretty much, [when] we were at the dinner table that we had food on the table and I had clothes on my back because he was represented by a union that could bargain to get him fair wages for his hard work," Gephardt declaimed.

But Gephardt's brother Don remembers it quite differently. "My dad was in the Teamsters, but that's because he had to be to get the job." Don Gephardt spoke of his father to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: "He prided himself on being a Republican. ... He had the feeling that you had to make it on your own, that any kind of welfare program would just raise his taxes." A spokeswoman for Dick Gephardt's presidential campaign contacted by the Washington Times did not deny Don Gephardt's description, but said the candidate "truly believes the union job was the best for his dad and family because of the wages and benefits it offered."

When Dick Gephardt first was elected to Congress in 1976 from a heavily Catholic middle-class district in suburban St. Louis, his politics seemed to be a lot closer to those of his father than they are 25 years later. He was among the "boll weevil" Democrats who supported Ronald Reagan's 1981 tax cut, and he voted for aid to the Nicaraguan Contras and supported a constitutional amendment to ban abortion. In the late 1980s he moved to the left, mostly on economic issues but also on social issues such as abortion, and he now proudly calls himself pro-choice. But it was those economic issues into which he poured himself and, in the last few years, he has proposed radical changes to Social Security and taxation, urging abolition of Roth individual retirement accounts (IRAs) and calling on the government to invest Social Security revenues in the stock market (but opposing efforts to let individuals invest part of their Social Security taxes through personal accounts).

Gephardt began positioning himself as the labor-union candidate when he first ran for president in 1988, and apparently still is trying to win the Democratic nomination by making himself the candidate of organized labor.

He seems to be on a roll. After taking flak from the left of the Democratic Party's electoral base for sponsoring the resolution authorizing President George W. Bush to use force against Iraq, Gephardt stole the thunder in late April from candidates thought to be more liberal, such as former Vermont governor Howard Dean and Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry. He proposed a massive new health-care entitlement to be paid for by mandates on employers and by repealing all of Bush's tax cuts both those in place and those to be activated in the future. In one of many plaudits from liberal pundits, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne wrote, "He has drawn a clean, clear line across American politics by challenging Bush on precisely the issue that should be at the heart of the domestic debate in 2004."

Early polls among Democrats show Gephardt already is strong, even ahead of South Carolina-born Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) in the Palmetto State.

And many savvy observers of presidential politics, both on the left and the right, say that with his populist appeal, image of centrism and longtime courtship of the politically powerful labor unions, Gephardt has an excellent chance to win his party's presidential nomination. And this despite the fact that he was their congressional leader when the Democrats lost the U.S. House of Representatives in 1994, and that he never achieved his goal of becoming House speaker by taking control from the GOP.

"Gephardt would certainly be coming from a place where he would have a good chance to consolidate his whole party," says GOP political consultant Richard Nadler, president of Kansas City-based Access Communications and a longtime conservative activist in Missouri.

"I regard him as a serious contender," Nadler says. He and Edwards and Kerry are at the head of the pack. He has been a straight union boy for ages, and that is the core of the Democratic Party. He has the distinction of being the only one running who belongs to that group.

Darrell McKigney, president of the Small Business Survival Committee and a longtime congressional staffer for Midwest Republicans, says of Gephardt: "Gephardt's plan is really where the heart of most of the members of his party is among activists, which is to get big government to take over everything. The rest of the field is having an awkward time figuring out how to deal with it. They want to do everything to criticize the Bush tax cut without actually saying repeal it."