Word: gephardts
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...ARENA: Slow and steady, Dick Gephardt is back in the race...
...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...
...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...
...recent weeks, though, the tortoise has begun to stir. Gephardt had strong performances in the first two presidential debates--and last week he chose a quiet Friday afternoon to take a roundhouse swing at Dean on the ancient but still potent issues of Social Security and Medicare. In each case, he used a most un-Gephardtian quality to drive his point home: a flushed, sputtering anger...
...Gephardt's anger is an utterly transparent industrial age process, like a steam locomotive creaking out of a station. A calculation is made: Dean's anti-Bush ballistics are working. Chug. Need to match that. Chug. In the first debate, Gephardt slowly torqued himself into--chug-chug--fury over the President's foreign policy, which "is"--chug-chug-chug!--"a miserable failure." Wild applause. Gephardt seemed to blink, surprised. "I came up with that line right there, on the spot," he told me. "It just spilled...