The speculation about Kerry's pick for vice president seems to be intensifying by the day, with a post in TNR's "Campaign Blog" suggesting that Kerry might have already completed the vetting process, and therefore made up his mind, and another by Noam Scheiber parsing the statements in yesterday's Post piece on the subject, and coming to the conclusion that, according to the criteria provided, Kerry is leaning towards picking Gephardt.
I want to say that this prospect surprises me, but I have from the outset of this campaign suspected that Kerry's ear for the electorate was only slightly less tin than Al Gore's (or for that matter Michael Dukakis', Walter Mondale's, and Jimmy Carter's). This is another way of saying that while I am uncertain about most things in life, I am quite certain that putting Dick Gephardt on this ticket would be one of the most moronic (indeed, unnecessarily moronic) decisions a Democratic presidential candidate has made in years (which is quite a feat, when one considers 1968, 1972, 1980, 1984, 1988, and 2000).
Garance Franke-Ruta, in the American Prospect, says it better than I can: " 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.
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 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.
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."
Here's more:
" And that about sums it up. Gephardt supporters in Iowa tended to be retirees, while Kerry and Edwards attracted voters in the prime of life, between 30 and 64 years old -- the kind of people you need to win across the country. Twenty-somethings, who went for Dean, have never been a substantial portion of the electorate. And while union workers represent a big chunk of it -- 26 percent in 2000, according to the National Annenberg Election Survey -- they represent a small and shrinking fraction of the working public and voting-age population. Only 8.5 percent of private-sector workers are in unions, and 37.5 percent of government workers, according to the AFL-CIO. An even smaller group of voting-age people are unionized, just seven percent in 2002."
And more:
"America needs a candidate not only for the unions, but for the rest of the country, people who don't identify themselves as workers -- our wannabe middle-class, those with unstable, crappy jobs, who can't understand why they can never get ahead of their bills, are forever paying excessive credit card fees, and don't have adequate health insurance.
Already I hear grumbling from party faithful that insomuch as Kerry has yet to connect with the nation, they'd find it that much harder to drag themselves to the polls for a Kerry-Gephardt ticket. Gephardt is the opposite of an inspiring choice; his presence on the ticket would be actively enervating."
Actively enervating. Indeed. The day John Kerry announces that he has picked Dick Gephardt as his running mate is the day I write his campaign off, and I suspect I'm not alone in that sentiment. No more money, or time, from me. I will focus whatever I can on seeing that Democrats pick up a few house seats, and perhaps even win back the senate, and hope that Generation "L" (that's the generation too young to fight in WWII, and too old to be baby boomers - the generation that gave us Mondale, Dukakis, Kerry, and Gephart - and no the L doesn't stand for liberal) is never again allowed to field Democratic presidential candidates.
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=7885