The Tortoise Is Stirring

[Nicholas_J]

Dick Gephardt's campaign may have started slow, but it's gaining momentum




Sunday, Sep. 14, 2003
By early December of 1987, Dick Gephardt had been stumping Iowa for two years. He had visited all 99 counties—and his first campaign for the presidency seemed a total bust. He was in last place in the polls, having once been first. He had literally lost his voice. I remember him sipping boiled water laced with lemon and honey as he trudged door-to-door in the snow. "People were telling me, 'I know I promised to support you, but I think I made a mistake,'" the Congressman told me, with a laugh, over turkey sandwiches in his Iowa campaign office last Friday. "But my mother had always told me to keep steady, don't get too emotional, take it day by day."

Gephardt won the Iowa caucuses in 1988. He turned the campaign around with a single television ad, about the alleged unfairness of free trade. The victory proved his electoral apogee that year. But he had learned something about the subtle arc of a political season, a lesson about patience and timing that none of his current opponents for the Democratic nomination, rookies all, could possibly understand. This year, he has plodded along—the tortoise—as Howard Dean, who races through sentences so quickly that the words often tumble into one another, drew huge summer crowds and seemed to be gliding toward the nomination...

Gephardt began his speech by saying, "Most of us in this room can remember 1950"—a line Howard Dean undoubtedly has never uttered, since most of his supporters weren't born then. And it does seem that Gephardt's world view was pickled in 1950, in the era of big manufacturing and big unions and Big Government. There is a fair amount of nostalgia in Iowa for those days—and Gephardt's geriatric strategy, bolstered by his door-to-door stubbornness, may prove a stultifying antidote to Dean's unnerving whoosh of a campaign.

Dean has had a rough couple of weeks. In the debates, he's been less of a fresh breeze and more of a suit—and not a very charming one at that. When attacked, he righteously tucks his chin into his chest and looks a bit like the Saturday Night Live Church Lady. He is learning the perils of impolitic candor. A national cnn poll last week put Dean's summer surge in perspective: Gephardt, Dean, Joe Lieberman and John Kerry were bunched in the teens, with the flavor of next month, General Wesley Clark, surprisingly strong at 10%. This is a wide-open race—and the tortoise is a player.

http://www.time.com/time/columnist/klein/article/0,9565,485704,00.html