| Winners Never Quit |
November 2002
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Gephardt Quits
The conclusion that flows from the major premise, winners never quit, and the minor premise, Gephardt quits, is that Dick Gephardt, leader of the House Democrats until he resigned after the November 5 massacre, is a loser. That sums it up.
It is tempting to say that the Democratic leadership, of which he was such a big part, failed to put forward a progressive enough agenda. However, Gephardt is a moderate, and he has spent 13 terms in the House being a centrist. To expect anything else of him was non-sense form the beginning.
No, what one should have expected, what one had a right to see, was a centrist effective Democratic party. Gephardt spent the last two years explaining to the press and his constituents why he was going along with the White House. Instead, he should have introduced moderate legislation at odds with Bush administration policies and forced the GOP to vote it down, force the Republicans to let things die in committee, and then run a campaign about moderate Democrats and extremist Republicans. That is the way out of the minority.
Speculation is that he will now run for the White House in 2004. There is something unsettling about that. Perhaps, it is because he will had to decide what it is that Dick Gephardt believes in that George Bush does not. For the last two years, there has been little evidence of disagreement.