In methodical style, Gephardt pursues must-win strategy in Iowa
MASON CITY, Iowa -- It's a Sunday night, and Richard A. Gephardt makes his pitch to a packed house in a glass-walled room in The Music Man Square, a new museum dedicated to composer Meredith Willson, who grew up next door.
The Missouri congressman wants their votes on Jan. 19, when this unusually warm autumn day will be a dim memory and 100,000 or so Iowa Democrats will trek to 1,997 precinct caucuses to begin winnowing the party's nine-candidate presidential field.
Perhaps 10 of the 170 people in attendance this night are under 60, and Gephardt warms them up with stories about life on the campaign trail.
The crowd laughs, and Gephardt launches into his stock 15-minute stump speech -- universal health care, financial incentives to recruit teachers, a shift from foreign oil dependency to renewable energy, and foreign trade agreements aimed at stopping the export of American jobs.
Iowa is the Super Bowl of field organizing, a dying art in American politics in which candidates and their supporters campaign from town to town and door to door, building a base of support through repeated personal contacts with people who are likely to participate in the caucuses.
For nearly 20 years, Gephardt has been cultivating support in Iowa, targeting the constituencies that can deliver at caucus time.
Iowa is a must-win state for him. Not only is he from next door, Missouri, he won the caucuses in 1988 before dropping out of the presidential race about two months later. If he loses this time, Iowa will be Gephardt's Alamo, the last stand in a distinguished 28-year congressional career.
Howard Dean's tech-savvy insurgency threatens to derail him. Polls have shown the former Vermont governor and Gephardt locked in statistical ties for the lead, with Gephardt slightly ahead recently.
Dean's opposition to the US-led invasion of Iraq "put him on the map here," said Dennis J. Goldford, a political science professor at Drake University in Des Moines. "It allowed him to break through, because Democrats here tend to be more dovish than Democrats generally."
Since Sept. 30, Dean has doubled the size of his staff in Iowa, giving him a powerful organizational tool to use against his competitors. Joe Trippi, Dean's campaign manager, said: "We're competitive with Gephardt in Iowa and with [Senator John F.] Kerry in New Hampshire. Last January, no one thought we'd be in that position in either state."The Massachusetts senator is also running hard in Iowa, holding a steady but distant third in most polls, and has picked up the most endorsements from legislators in the Hawkeye State. Jerry Crawford, Kerry's Iowa chairman, said the race remains "very fluid at the caucus participation level at this point." A Des Moines lawyer and veteran of every caucus campaign since its 1972 inception, Crawford said Gephardt's best weapon might be John Lapp, his Iowa campaign director. Lapp managed Governor Thomas Vilsack's reelection effort last year, and "is as good at this business as there is," said Crawford.
Gephardt's rise in recent polls might have been helped by television advertising as much as organization. Gephardt outspent Dean by a 4-to-1 ratio on Iowa television in September. But it is the day-after-day campaigning in the state that distinguishes the Gephardt campaign from his rivals.
The night before his Mason City speech, an edgier Gephardt was on stage, stoking more than 250 loyalists at a Teamsters union hall on the outskirts of Cedar Rapids. During a 40-minute address, expounding his plan to internationalize the minimum wage, he pauses four times during standing ovations.
Steelworkers and machinists rise and roar when the son of a Teamster -- and the only person wearing a tie in the gymnasium-size hall -- declares: "Your fight has been my life's work. And respect and honor for the dignity of your life's work is why I am running for president."
These snapshots encapsulate the Gephardt Iowa campaign. This is a single-minded pursuit of a core demographic consisting of 50-year-old auto workers in Waterloo and their 75-year-old parents.
Along with family farmers, these are the key constituencies that dominate the caucuses and shape the field heading into the New Hampshire primary eight days later.
Union members traditionally account for 30 percent of caucusgoers, and Gephardt has been endorsed by 20 internationals, with more than 50,000 members in Iowa combined. Of the 105,000 participants in the past three caucuses, logged in an Iowa Democratic Party database, 79,000 are 50 or older, party spokesman Mark Daley said.
Erik Smith, Gephardt's spokesman, said there is no mystery about what the campaign is doing.
The Iowa caucuses are "unlike any other electoral competition anywhere," he said. "We are competing to get people into school gymnasiums, libraries, or VFW halls at 6:30 on one cold night in January. It's unique, and organization is the key."
Dean has deep strength in Iowa's largest metropolitan areas, Des Moines and Cedar Rapids, and strongholds in college towns, particularly Iowa City (University of Iowa) and Ames (Iowa State University).
Dean also has torn a page from Gephardt's 1988 Iowa playbook. On Oct. 22, Dean became the first candidate to visit all 99 counties, as Gephardt did in 1988 when he logged a record 148 days campaigning in the state. By the end of this week, Gephardt will have visited 70 counties, according to his Iowa spokesman, Bill Burton.
As of yesterday, Dean led all candidates with 47 days on the ground in Iowa, followed by Kerry at 41 and Gephardt at 39. Senator John Edwards of North Carolina and Representative Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio had spent 34 and 32 days in Iowa, respectively.
Days on the ground are the staple of every campaign in Iowa. Candidates might hit five to seven counties in a single day, with speechmaking stops in small cities and towns.
After his Teamsters hall speech in Cedar Rapids, for example, Gephardt's campaign swung north, then west, in a 200-mile arc across five northern counties. He spoke to about 400 potential caucusgoers in total at five events.
At each stop, staff and volunteers circulate clipboards with sign-in sheets for attendees to jot down their names, postal and e-mail addresses, and phone numbers. They will be contacted, perhaps several times, before Jan. 19. This is the blocking and tackling, the fundamentals of an Iowa caucus campaign. From this, campaigns will compile a "hard count" of voters they are certain will turn out for their candidate.
Like the candidate, Gephardt's campaign lacks bells and whistles. There is none of the innovation or razzle-dazzle of Dean's campaign. That's unless you count "The Great Gephardt Iowa Pie Challenge" link on his campaign website. There, visitors are invited to "tell Dick where you think he should go for his next slice of pie."
The subject earns snickers from journalists, but the locals, like a standing-room-only crowd at Mabe's Pizza in Decorah, smile when Gephardt, who has been known to make three pie stops a day in Iowa, describes the strawberry-rhubarb slice he just consumed at the Family Table Restaurant in town.
Greg Murphy, 47, a construction worker, drove 20 miles from Cresco to hear Gephardt. Before the speech, Murphy said, he was leaning toward Dean, or maybe Kerry.
But after hearing Gephardt rip into President Bush's economic policies and his handling of postwar Iraq, he's impressed.
"I think maybe I've got to lean toward Dick Gephardt," he said. "There's an anger there. I like it. That's the most fired up I've seen him."
Gephardt's standard speech, delivered almost word for word at each stop, avoids Iraq, but the subject always comes up when the audience asks questions. Then, Gephardt explains that he voted for the congressional resolution authorizing Bush's use of force because he was convinced Iraq was a potential terrorist threat to the United States.
At Charles City, Gephardt is pressed angrily and persistently on his vote in favor of an $87 billion appropriation for military and rebuilding efforts in Iraq. "How are you going to pay for it?" asks a man who later says he is leaning toward Dean or Kerry.
Gephardt replies that it would be irresponsible and dangerous to leave Iraq now, saying it would become a vast terrorist training ground. He had no choice but to approve the funding, he said, because Bush has failed to persuade allies to bear more of the costs.
If Gephardt's campaign has a distinguishing characteristic, it is the candidate's discipline. He avoids mistakes by hewing to the central themes and diction of both his speech and answers to most questions.
He can be spontaneous, though.
Outdoors at Charles City, unseasonably warm temperatures brought a swarm of gnats. As Gephardt ran through his rote list of promises to solve this problem and that, audience and candidate alike swatted incessantly at the minuscule pests.
"I'm gonna do something about these bugs, too. The Republicans sent these bugs," Gephardt deadpanned, adding one more campaign promise to the list. 