Campaign Portrait

By Michael Duffy/Washington

The young politician was poised. He had spent three years making friends, holding important lower offices, erecting sturdy coalitions with a wide range of key political operatives. His platform, dubbed a "blueprint for action," promised "creative long-term leadership" and was full of ideas that evoked his "pragmatic vision." He was popular, handsome and articulate. No one was surprised when, in April 1961, campus voters made Richard Andrew Gephardt student-body president of Northwestern University by a 2-to-1 margin.

Twenty-six years later the young candidate again claims to be ready. At 46, Gephardt is a driven politician who has maneuvered from obscurity in Congress to the top rank of the 1988 Democratic pack. Serious and smiling, able and ambitious, he has long had his eye on the prize, rarely missing a chance to advance to the highest office in sight. He is, at his core, the student-body president who turned pro.

With three years of national campaigning under his belt, Gephardt is a practiced and polished performer, doggedly crisscrossing the country, prescribing tougher trade policies and heavier doses of education to bolster "human capacity" as cures for an ailing America. His stump speech is a stark sweet-and-sour concoction that warns audiences of inevitable economic decline because of surging foreign competition, yet promises a revitalized America. "I worry about an America where dreams don't come true," he tells Democrats in his earnest style. "Our country has sunk to a low, but we can make it great again."

The wave of economic anxiety that swept the country after the stock-market crash should have offered Gephardt a receptive audience for his message: he had staked his claim as the candidate most concerned about economic complacency and most alarmed about the nation's slow loss of its competitive edge. But though he remains among the top tier of Democrats, he has had trouble capitalizing on the crisis or convincing undecided voters that he has the heft to handle troubled times. Despite his lengthy legislative scorecard and his earnest doggedness both in Congress and on the campaign trail, he remains a dispassionate figure who has sparked little excitement. On the stump in Iowa, he tells voters that they must choose the person they trust the most. But even as he works to personalize the race with a what-a-nice-young-man appeal, Gephardt remains the candidate in the plain vanilla wrapper.

Some of his stances reinforce lingering qualms that he is driven primarily by a desire to leap to the top of the ladder. Many of the causes he has embraced, like revitalizing education, are apple-pie issues that provoke little dissent. Others, such as his opposition to the colorization of Hollywood films, can be ridiculed as merely trendy. More significantly, he has edged leftward from his moderate moorings (he was a founder of the Democratic Leadership Council, a centrist group) as he plays to the liberal activists who dominate the Iowa caucuses. He has reversed his support of tuition tax credits and now opposes back-door federal aid to private schools. He has soft-pedaled his stance on abortion, which he had opposed since his aldermanic days. "Current law should not be changed," he quickly suggests when asked.

Nowhere is Gephardt more susceptible to the pandering charge than on his controversial belief in retaliatory measures to narrow America's trade deficit. In the past year the candidate's forceful pursuit of tougher trade laws has helped nudge the White House into imposing trade sanctions against Japan, Canada and Brazil and has won for Gephardt scads of publicity. But because the Gephardt Amendment has helped him win the support of labor activists -- key to the Iowa caucuses -- critics have called Gephardt the "Walter Mondale of 1988." After briefly distancing himself from labor, Gephardt went against the wishes of his advisers last month and embraced the cause even more fervently. "If standing up for American workers and insisting on prying open foreign markets are protectionist," he says, "then I want to be a protectionist."

But Gephardt cannot simply be tagged an opportunist. Both his record and rhetoric show a deep concern for certain values. His impassive face brightens when he talks about the need to adapt to a changing world economy. He cares deeply about education. Embedded in his personality and political vision is a basic set of heartland values that, like his ambition and his solidly normal character, were nurtured in his Midwest upbringing.

Born in 1941 to farm-reared parents of German stock, Gephardt spent his youth on the south side of St. Louis, playing ball, keeping a string of pets and always sporting a red Cardinals cap. His father Lou was a quiet Republican who peddled insurance, oil and dairy products door to door before meeting late / in life with modest success in real estate. His mother by contrast was a Democrat and a dynamo; she pressed young Dick and his older brother Don to set firm goals and never quit. A well-used switch atop the icebox made the boys mind their chores; if they did well, she showered them with praise. When the local principal pronounced her sons "college material," Loreen Gephardt returned to work as a legal secretary for 13 years. "The only way the boys got to go to college was because I decided they were going to go," she says.

Her uncommon self-discipline stuck to young Gephardt. He staged "one-man" baseball games -- pitching, hitting and fielding by himself -- against the back wall of the family's five-room brick bungalow. An eagle scout, he delivered sermons at the Baptist church and for a while pondered the most disciplined of careers, the ministry. In an autobiographical sketch written at 15, he noted, "I am trying to impress upon my mind that every day of working and praying is a stepping-stone to a happy life."

Along with taking himself seriously, Gephardt liked the limelight: he took lead parts in school productions, playing Henry Higgins and King David, worked up a magic act, and still does a fair imitation of Jonathan Winters and Red Skelton. After high school in 1958, his flair for drama took him to Northwestern's School of Speech, where his stand-up comedy act won him notice in the dorms. "He always liked to please people," says his mother.

Soon after arriving in Evanston, Gephardt leaped from drama to campus politics. Known then as Rich, he wore trousers with razor-sharp creases, was a preciously good speaker and even knew how to pull cub reporters aside at student senate meetings to explain the complicated goings-on. Friends kidded the student-body president about combing his hair down over his forehead in the style of John Kennedy. A college sweetheart recalls that the constant comparisons had an effect on Gephardt. "It was hard to look that much like J.F.K. and not talk of the presidency," she says.

After law school at the University of Michigan, Gephardt joined an up-and- coming St. Louis law firm and married Jane Ann Byrnes, a manager at a shoe company whom he had dated at Northwestern. Immersing himself in the affairs of his old south-side neighborhood, where delivery of city services was the major issue, he rose from ward committeeman to the board of aldermen by 1971. With relentless energy and a flair for press coverage, Gephardt helped residents keep grocery stores and hospitals in the neighborhood and massage parlors out. He developed a quick eye for compromise, harnessing reluctant conservative aldermen to his own group of Young Turks to start the city's revival. Many logically pegged Alderman Gephardt for the mayor's office, but he opted instead for Congress in 1976. Opponents criticized his national ambitions, and his own party favored another candidate, but Gephardt and his family knocked on 50,000 doors and won anyway.

Gephardt's career in Washington is a testament to his creed that "good policy is good politics." It began slowly. After the Congressman won a second term, his staff convened at his suburban Washington home for what they presumed would be a victory party. They discovered instead that Gephardt had called the session to lament the lack of new laws with his name on them, an astonishing attitude for someone who had spent only two years in the House. Eventually he focused on two issues: the Bradley-Gephardt tax-reform bill and the Gephardt trade amendment. In each instance, Gephardt helped fashion new solutions to complicated problems through hard work and an unusual mastery of facts. His near evangelical faith in the power of meetings to clear legislative snags -- Gephardt is a sort of walking version of the book You Can Negotiate Anything -- won him the nickname "Ironbutt."

Meanwhile, Gephardt served his House colleagues as assiduously as they served their hometown constituents. Every working day for eleven years, he drove disabled Colleague Ike Skelton to and from Capitol Hill, and he befriended scores of lawmakers, careful to call on junior and senior members in their offices, not his. Perhaps his least-known accomplishment illustrates the point best: a 1979 amendment to the budget act allowed grateful members to vote an increase to program budgets without casting a highly visible second vote to raise the debt limit to pay for such projects. When he set his sights on the chairmanship of the Democratic caucus in 1984, he employed a trick he had used at Northwestern: he deputized peers most likely to prove strong opponents and then coasted to an easy victory. In his presidential campaign, he has built a strong organization based on the political support of more than 80 devoted House colleagues.

The flip side of Gephardt's natural feel for the legislative compromise is, as former Administrative Aide John Crosby puts it, a tendency "to be all things to all people." Gephardt is overtolerant, too slow to judgment. Other than anti-Reagan boiler plate, criticisms rarely pass his lips. Even some loyal aides concede that he has flitted from issue to issue in a way that reduces his effectiveness. Last week longtime Spokesman and Confidant Don Foley resigned from the campaign because of friction with Campaign Manager Bill Carrick. But Gephardt has often relieved subordinates by kicking them upstairs. "If I have one problem with him," said a longtime colleague, echoing others, "it is that there are no tests -- everybody's good. He is not critical enough." Gephardt notes that he has "consistently" fired people who don't perform, but adds, "I don't believe in an autocratic kind of leadership."

Gephardt decided to make the 1988 race even before the 1984 one was over, as he watched Gary Hart surge against Walter Mondale in the Iowa caucuses. Since then, Gephardt has practically moved to Iowa; in 1986 and '87 he spent 97 days in the state. But his personal dedication and his tailor-made stances have been able to carry him only so far. He rose quickly to become one of the front runners following Gary Hart's demise last spring, but he has since stalled while Paul Simon and Michael Dukakis have moved ahead of him in recent Iowa polls.

Much of the blame lies with his unwillingness to heed warnings about his hapless state organization. One top Iowa supporter, former State Party Chairman Ed Campbell, finally got his attention by asking, "How do you sleep at night?" With that, the usually unemotional candidate exploded into profanity and demanded an accounting from his organizers. He has since named his third state coordinator in a year, and the new team is scrambling to make up lost ground.

The newcomers may be just as flat-footed as the old team: three weeks ago Gephardt's Iowa lieutenants tried to organize a secret straw poll of Democrats attending the annual Jefferson-Jackson day dinner, though the party had banned such entrance surveys. The gambit failed when police dispersed the polltakers. But a greater problem is that his candidacy just has not caught fire. Instead of getting the chance to break out of the pack in Iowa, Gephardt may doom his candidacy there.

What's his hurry? Gephardt is practical to the point of expediency: "I'm in the prime of my life. I'm not going to get stronger physically or mentally, and I don't want to be sitting around on Jan. 20, 1989, wishing I'd done something." Those who once scoffed at such ambition -- and at his willingness to compromise in order to make friends and influence policy -- are beginning to realize that these very attributes are what have propelled him to the top tier of Democratic candidates.