Dick Gephardt - From Labor Champion to Wall Street Flack

[otohara]

In 1988, the labor union I belonged to, the AWPPW (Association of Western Pulp and Paper Workers), hoped Missouri congressman Dick Gephardt would win the Democratic nomination for president. Of all the candidates in the field (Al Gore, Paul Simon, Jesse Jackson, Gary Hart and Michael Dukakis), Gephardt was judged to be the most labor friendly.

Not only was Gephardt clearly moving further and further to the political left (having started out as a centrist), his personal story was compelling. His modest net worth and natural humility made union folks believe that he was the one candidate who could genuinely empathize with the problems and challenges facing working people.

Yes, Michael Dukakis’ people were Greek immigrants, and, yes, Jesse Jackson had managed to rise above poverty and racial bigotry. But for working folks, Gephardt was the real deal; he didn’t just talk it, he walked it. He was brought up in a struggling, working class family in St. Louis, Missouri—his mother a housewife, his father a Teamster member who drove a milk truck.

But after getting off to a great start, winning the Iowa caucus and finishing second in the New Hampshire primary, Gephardt hit the wall. Like any front-runner in a national primary, he soon discovered he had a bulls-eye painted on his back. The other candidates attacked him mercilessly. Negative advertising, a lack of charisma, a shortage of money, and the withdrawal of the UAW’s earlier endorsement combined to sink him.

He ran again in 2004, but this time didn’t make it out of Iowa. He finished a distant fourth to John Kerry, John Edwards and Howard Dean, and withdrew the next day. By 2004, he was one of organized labor’s staunchest and most vocal supporters, having gone on record as opposing Clinton’s NAFTA agreement and criticizing as potentially catastrophic the notion of so-called “free trade.”

Gephardt boldly predicted that corporate America’s wildly enthusiastic embrace of “globalization” was a glorified scam, one that would result in a catastrophic loss of jobs at home as well as a huge windfall for the corporations, both here and abroad. Instead of the people benefiting, it would be the oligarchies who profited. He couldn’t have been more right.

In 2004, organized labor was once again split on whom to support. While the eastern, Ivy League-bred and New Age “techie,” Howard Dean, was seen as the face of Labor Future, Gephardt, the stolid and dependable choice of America’s traditional “smoke stack” unions, was seen as the face of Labor Past. Being depicted as superannuated didn’t help. Still, that any big-time union would choose a Johnny-come-lately like Dean—or a silver-tongued pretty boy like John Edwards—over himself was a body blow to Gephardt. http://www.counterpunch.org/macaray04232010.html