Gephardt puts his faith in unions
DES MOINES -- Surrounded by chanting steelworkers and auto workers, Representative Richard A. Gephardt yesterday handed what could be the fate of his presidential campaign over to a blue-collar ground army, aroused by the fear of losing jobs and their way of life.
In the final hours before tonight's Iowa caucuses, the steady-as-she-goes campaign of the modest Missourian has been transformed into a fiery crusade to change US trade policy and protect American jobs.
At a series of stops that took him from Dubuque on the Mississippi River in the east to Sioux City on the Missouri River in western Iowa, Gephardt pushed his ambitious plan to provide health insurance for every American. But it was his cry for a "progressive, modern trade policy" that stoked large crowds of trade unionists yesterday at rallies at a steelworkers' union hall in Des Moines and an auto workers' local in Newton.
"Forget about me. I'm unimportant. I'm an instrument," Gephardt told several hundred union members at a hall across from the Firestone plant in Des Moines.
"I don't need the job. I don't need the title. But America needs a leader who comes from a life experience of the people."
Among those cheering this son of a Teamster from St. Louis was James P. Hoffa, general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, in Iowa to rally the state's 16,000 Teamsters to caucus for Gephardt.
At Newton, a convoy of Teamsters' 18-wheel rigs circled the auto workers' hall before Gephardt's speech.
Gephardt railed against the economic policies of President Bush, saying: "This president doesn't get it. He doesn't understand what people are going through out here."
Gephardt said Iowa has lost 30,000 jobs in 10 years as a result of "bad trade" agreements that allow US corporations to exploit low-wage labor in countries like Mexico and China.
By even his own assessment last year, Gephardt must win the tight four-way caucus test to advance in the Democratic nomination process. He has brushed aside tracking polls that have indicated him stalling or slipping against Senators John F. Kerry of Massachusetts and John Edwards of North Carolina as well as former Vermont governor Howard Dean.
At yesterday's rallies, Gephardt said the polls are flawed because caucusgoers are difficult to survey.
"The key to winning is you," he said to workers. "There has never been, in the history of the Iowa caucuses, never been an effort like this. Nothing even close."
Recalling his victory in Iowa in 1988 before he dropped out of the presidential race two months later, Gephardt said his campaign apparatus back then was good but "could not hold a candle to what's going on" here.
His campaign's large ground operation is augmented by nearly 1,000 labor union organizers from other states. They were flown in by the Alliance for Economic Justice, which includes most of the 21 industrial and trade union internationals that have endorsed Gephardt.
Gephardt's campaign was heavily outspent by the Dean and Kerry camps, both of which opted out of the public matching-funds system, which allowed them to spend more in Iowa than the cap set by the Federal Election Commission.
Gephardt's team devoted heavy resources over the past year to assemble a field operation that has identified people who insist they will turn out tonight for the former House minority leader.
