GEPHARDT VS. CLINTON

Of course, they hadn’t the slightest interest in Flood. House minority leader Richard Gephardt had come to New Hampshire to pitch a Democratic “kitchen-table agenda” of three issues: education, a patient’s bill of rights, and using the budget surplus for Social Security. But nobody wanted to talk about that, either. In an interview that made the front page of the Washington Post two weeks ago, Gephardt described President Clinton’s conduct with Monica Lewinsky as “wrong and reprehensible” and expressed his hope that future impeachment proceedings would be as fair as previous ones. Over the following days, he appeared to backtrack, but did not withdraw his statement, leaving much of the media at sea over what his position was. He arrived fresh from a nine-state, fourteen-district campaign tour, at every stop of which he faced journalists asking him to clarify his position on the Monica Lewinsky affair. If this canny politician has not cleared things up by now, it’s because he doesn’t want to.

Gephardt added two new wrinkles: On a day when several Democrats, from Robert Torricelli to Marcy Kaptur, described the president’s August 17 mea-not-so-culpa as “insufficient,” one staffer said, “Dick thought it was sufficient. He thought it took a lot of courage.” And standing outside an old-folks home in Manchester, Gephardt attacked Republicans for dashing the hopes of fair play he had raised days before. “They’re not talking to us,” he said. “I read in the paper that Gerry Solomon’s writing a rule [for impeachment hearings]. I don’t know that. I don’t know whether it’s true or not. Nobody’s talked to me, nobody’s talked to John Conyers, nobody’s talked to Joe Moakley. If they do this the way they’ve done just about everything else in the last three years, this will not be non-partisan.”

Gephardt acknowledges that he has had one conversation with the president since the “reprehensible” interview — an “upbeat” talk “about the issues” the weekend before the Moscow summit. He’s more forthcoming about his chat with White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles. On the Lewinsky matter, he says, “I told [Bowles] what I’ve told everybody, and that is, I’ve been saying the same thing every day.” Gephardt says there is no contradiction between any of his public statements, leaving us with this position on the matter: The president’s behavior was reprehensible, but his apology was sufficient. Impeachment is a possibility, but protecting the process from Republican partisanship is unlikely.

Is Gephardt simply trying to work out a way for Democrats to talk about Lewinsky without damaging themselves? If he does, he’ll win the gratitude of party regulars around the country. “You can’t suck and blow at the same time,” is the strange way New Hampshire state party chairman Jeff Woodburn puts it, “and it does make it difficult to get our message out.” Clinton was invited to the state August 15. But a scheduling conflict arose with the president’s grand-jury testimony, and while Woodburn says that the president has an “open invitation,” neither side has shown itself eager to carry it out.

Which leaves the field to Gephardt, who fires up New Hampshire Democrats with visions of taking the House back. He thinks six open Republican seats are already in the bag, say staff, and he’s willing to name them: Lydia Spottswood will pick up Mark Neumann’s seat in Wisconsin; pro-life Dem Pat Casey will get the Pennsylvania seat long held by Joe McDade; Brian Baird will fill the seat vacated by Washington populist Linda Smith’s Senate run; Shelley Berkley will take John Ensign’s Nevada seat; Mike Thompson is home free in the seat vacated by the retirement of Northern California wild man Frank Riggs; and Ronnie Shows’s private polling has him thrashing Republican Delbert Hosemann in Mississippi. Does Gephardt, alone among political observers, think Democrats still have a chance of getting the House back, if only candidates can put enough daylight between themselves and Clinton?

No. None of Gephardt’s six candidates (except Casey) is more than a “maybe,” and his calculation does not reckon with the Democrats’ vulnerable seats.

But this is not really congressional politics we’re witnessing. It’s presidential — not about Clinton’s future but Gephardt’s. Last spring, Gephardt attacked the White House in a speech at Harvard for having no domestic agenda. Nothing has changed in the interim, and yet Gephardt now looks content to make the party agenda his own. All wings of it: Barnstorming through New Hampshire on the very afternoon the Russian economy suffered its worst day since communism fell, he refused to stress his historic differences with the president on the global economy except to excoriate Republican irresponsibility. “One of the issues we have been talking about,” he says, “is the failure of the Republicans to replenish the funding for the IMF” — this from a man who has taken a dim view of arrangements to bail out global capitalists at the expense of workers.

Having described the president as “morally reprehensible,” Gephardt will now do nothing to break the unity of the party or its candidates. Why would he want to? President Clinton is hiding from scandal abroad; Vice President Gore hid from reporters on his recent campaigning tour through Ohio. Of the top three figures in the Democratic party, Gephardt is the only one not on the ethical disabled list. Of the Democrats aggressively campaigning, Gephardt is top dog. Whether or not the triad of Social Security/Patient’s Bill of Rights/Education is a winner, Democrats think it is. A year from now, when the primary campaign heats up, Gephardt must hope he will be the one remembered for having tramped from one end of New Hampshire to the other to pitch it. Monica Lewinsky has opened up magnificent vistas for Richard Gephardt.

Even if he’s the only person in the world who can’t say so.

Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.