Okay, Gephardt fans - a warning. This article is pretty tough on Gep. But I think it's incisive. Please read the entire article if you can.
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=7885**********
See Dick Run, Part II
On Wednesday, Matthew Yglesias listed the reasons Dick Gephardt should not be vice-president. He was right -- but he forgot a few.
By Garance Franke-Ruta
Web Exclusive: 06.18.04
-snip-
The choice of Gephardt would reinforce every negative stereotype about Kerry in current circulation while muddying the picture of what he actually stands for. Put Gephardt on the ticket and suddenly, instead of an experienced moderate leader with a progressive bent, you have a pair that can be caricatured as two aging, pro-tax creatures of Washington, both of whom backed the president's war in Iraq for purely opportunistic reasons and both of whom want to transform the American healthcare system with a massive government give-away instead of balancing the budget. Or so some will say, and be able to argue with newfound plausibility.
Nor does Gephardt bring those benefits to the ticket that one might typically want. It's not entirely clear that he can deliver his home state of Missouri, and there's even less polling data suggesting he would bring an electoral bump to the Kerry campaign nationwide. Indeed, the latest data point -- the latest six data points -- we have say that Dick Gephardt is an electoral loser. Under his leadership, the Democrats lost the House of Representatives in 1994, and then failed to regain it in four successive elections. Undeterred by party losses in 1996, 1998, and 2000, he took them to defeat again in 2002 -- the first mid-term election in which a first-term president's party gained seats since 1934 -- and then left his leadership post to run in the 2004 presidential primary, which he once again, inevitably, lost.
Gephardt didn't just lose the Democratic primary. He was trounced. In Iowa. He came in fourth in a state he had won 16 years earlier and in which he'd maintained a polling lead or strong second for most of the year. His collapse was more spectacular than Howard Dean's -- and more total, revealing that not only did he have no base in Iowa, he had no base of support outside that state that could buoy him when he lost it.
John Edwards lost with grace, withdrawing from the race after mounting a surprisingly vigorous challenge against Kerry in the South and inspiring many Democrats with his powerful message about "two Americas." Dean lost, in effect, in a torrent of sound, his scream speech in Des Moines putting the penultimate nail in the coffin built by his Iowa implosion. But he chugged along with persistence and newfound humility before finally giving up the ghost of his campaign in Madison. Lieberman's withdrawal from the race was as unremarkable as the Lieberman campaign itself, and Wesley Clark withdrew from the race the same way he entered it, in a chaos of decency and confusion.
-snip-
Most importantly, Gephardt is the single Democrat most associated with enabling President Bush's intervention in Iraq. With the Democratic base and independent voters increasingly turning against that war and seeing the intervention's costs as having outweighed its benefits, and with the entire national-security justification for the war having collapsed, choosing the Democrat who did the most to get us into this mess seems like a bad move. If Nader were not in the race, it might be a different story. But so far, it seems that Nader is already drawing more support than he did in 2000.
Furthermore, Gephardt and Dean may have made up by the end of the primaries, but during his campaign to destroy Dean, Gephardt was responsible for the only unforgivable act of the entire primary season. Gephardt's cronies put together a 527 committee that hid its donors and ran a TV advertisement in South Carolina effectively comparing Howard Dean to Osama bin Laden. There are few lines any longer in politics, but Gephardt's allies crossed a pretty big one. Most people have probably forgotten this ad, but -- trust me here -- many Dean supporters have not. Rather than bringing the leftmost wing of the party back into the fold, a Gephardt candidacy would drive anti-war voters and not a few former Deaniacs right into the waiting arms of Ralph Nader. That he'd be able to do this while simultaneously turning off moderates and failing to rouse anyone outside of the unions would be a neat trick, indeed.
-snip-
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=7885
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