Word: iowa
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...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...
...attack on Dean was similarly transparent but not as amusing as the debate performances. Demographically, Iowa is among the oldest of states. In the past Dean had been typically frank about old-age entitlements. He had supported raising the age of eligibility for Social Security, and moving away from Medicare's costly fee-for-service medicine toward managed care. These were plausible, even noble positions, but he had taken them in typical Deanian fashion, by wildly overstating the case. Medicare, Dean told the Associated Press in 1993, was "one of the worst things that ever happened ... a bureaucratic disaster...
Gephardt's assault on Dean for merely contemplating reform of both programs was almost completely irresponsible. He told a Des Moines audience of aged Iowa trade-unionists how important those entitlements had been to his 95-year-old mother, but he had nothing to say about the financial burdens they will place on his grandchildren. He did not even acknowledge the actuarial crises in Social Security and Medicare; he did not propose any reforms at all. Later, over lunch, he indicated that Social Security and Medicare should stay pretty much the way they are; a balanced budget, a growing economy...
...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...