Gephardt Profile On Front Page of NY Times

Even in an era when outsider insurgencies are running strong — Howard Dean, Arnold Schwarzenegger — experience has to matter to voters in the end, Mr. Gephardt argues.

"Everything we care about is vanishing before our eyes.

"I feel more confident that I could walk into that office tomorrow and do a good job. I've seen what it takes to be president, what it's like to go through it day by day — the pressures, the travel, the decisions, the whole thing."

So he persuaded his wife that, as he put it, "we couldn't just wave this guy through for another four years."

He went to Congress in 1976 as an anti-abortion, anti-mandatory-busing, relatively conservative Democrat whose political philosophy mirrored attitudes in the working-class district that elected him. But issue by issue, as he moved up in the Congressional leadership and on toward a presidential campaign, he became more liberal, more of a national Democrat.

"Yes, I changed my view on abortion. I grew up in a Baptist household, I was taught certain things, I came to Congress with those beliefs. But I listened to members of my family, I listened to women, I listened to lots of people and came to a different view."

On the campaign trail he talks about the 1993 deficit reduction plan, pushed through by him and other Congressional Democrats without a single Republican vote, as a moment of great pride and high drama, when lawmakers took a stand that cost some their political careers. He has attacked Dr. Dean as not standing with the Democrats in the great budget battle of 1995-96, when Republicans sought to extract $270 billion from Medicare. Dr. Dean was governor of Vermont and chairman of the National Governors Association.

Mr. Gephardt invariably tells audiences the story of his son, Matt, who was found to have cancer at 18 months old and was expected to live only a few months longer. The doctors found an experimental treatment that looked promising, and equally important in the American health care system, the Gephardts learned that their insurance would cover it.

"We lived in the hospital for five years," Mr. Gephardt said. "Today, he's 32 years old. He's married. He's a gift of God."

"There's nothing you can tell me about this," Mr. Gephardt tells his listeners, who are utterly quiet by the end. "I get it."

Mr. Gephardt's economic message is also framed in personal terms: his father eking his way into the middle class with a union driver's job; his mother making her way through a series of secretarial jobs that left her with a $42-a-month pension; the help he got along the way; the college loans he is still paying off for his daughter Kate. (Mr. Gephardt remains a man of comparatively modest means, after educating three children on his salary and that of his wife, an administrator for a pediatric practice.)

"My philosophy is different from W's," he says in his basic stump speech. "We're all interconnected, dependent on one another. I would not have accomplished what I've accomplished without a lot of help."

"I've watched him up close and he's not a bad person, he's a fine person, but he's not doing the job," Mr. Gephardt said. "In some ways, he's inexperienced. In other ways, he's unknowledgeable. In other ways, he's rigid and unwilling to change policies that I think just obviously need to be changed."

"Every day — every day! — he was the point man," Mr. Obey said. "He's been slogging for rational policy and progressive values every minute he's spent in this puzzle factory."

So he runs. He had difficulty earlier this year meeting fund-raising goals, and he faces an extraordinary challenge from Dr. Dean in Iowa. Still, Mr. Gephardt seems at ease on the campaign trail compared to the last time. Donna Brazile remembers she told him: "This is your last shot. If you're going to go for it, remember this is it."

Still, as the Economist says: The doctor is in (the driving seat)