Perennial loser:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/06/21/opinion/main625090.shtml
Good excerpt:
"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 to 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."
Other Good Excerpts:
"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."
"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."
DAMN, HE SUCKS!!! Read this ...
"In the final days of the Iowa contest, Gephardt was a lackluster campaigner, incapable of drawing an audience and equally incapable of inspiring one. His union friends were loyal to the very end, but he was a one-trick pony. In the end most of his allies in Iowa seemed to be union members who'd come in from out of state. The working-class energy was all with Edwards; when the exit polls came in, Kerry had won the union households tally, while Edwards and Gephardt ran even. The difference was that both Edwards and Kerry also did well with non-union households, while Gephardt drew only about a third as much support from non-union caucus-goers as he did from the house of labor. Nor were all unions his supporters during the primary season; the most rapidly growing and powerful national unions, AFSCME and SEIU, did not back Gephardt. In the end it was the man who had fewer formal ties to labor who beat the two labor-backed candidates, Gephardt and Dean."
Good and decent guy, but horrible, losing candidate.