Gephardt acts boldly to save his party from catastrophe

Here's something you won't often see in this space: Praise for outgoing House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt (D-St. Louis) as he prepares to gear up his second presidential campaign. Dick Gephardt almost surely saved his party from an election wipeout far worse than they suffered last month.

How do I know? A couple of weekends ago found this writer at a post-election conference in Florida. Among the fine speakers we heard was William Kristol, publisher of the Weekly Standard. Kristol, a leading conservative intellectual and wit, told of visiting with his friend Howard Wolfson, director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Wolfson told Kristol of his great alarm when two Democratic congressmen showed up in Baghdad about three weeks before the election. Wolfson says that when U.S. Rep. David Bonior (D-Mich.) and U.S. Rep. James McDermott (D-Wash.) appeared in Baghdad to take the side of Saddam Hussein and criticize our commander in chief, Democratic congressional polls immediately collapsed across the country.

It was at this moment that Gephardt stepped up to show real leadership. The Missourian went to the White House to declare his support for the congressional resolution backing the president on Iraq. It is Kristol's and Wolfson's opinion that Americans, rightly horrified at this bizarre congressional junket, were willing to give Democrats the benefit of the doubt if their congressional leader was willing to step up to the requirements of leadership. And this, even though the overwhelming majority of House Democrats voted against the resolution Gephardt supported.

All this makes Gephardt's action -- going against the true believers in the rank and file of his party's caucus -- all the more praiseworthy.

Missouri election potpourri:

Urban dominance? Former U.S. Sen. Jean Carnahan carried the St. Louis and Kansas City areas by 114,000 votes.

A once-great city? For the first time in living memory, perhaps in the history of the state, the city of St. Louis, shrinking in population these last 60 years, doesn't have a single member of the majority party in either the Missouri House of Representatives or the Senate.

The mighty Southwest? A concern for Show Me State Republicans in recent years has been creeping Democratic gains in the once-solidly Republican southwestern corner of the state. Not any more. After last month's election, every representative and senator from the region bordering Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas is a Republican. You must go north to Lafayette County, northeast to Pulaski County, or east to Texas County to find a Democrat in the House.

Civil War ends? So great were the Democratic loyalties of that section of Northeast Missouri known as Little Dixie that that region's tiny Monroe County was the only county in the state to back George McGovern over Richard Nixon in the latter's historic 1972 landslide. For two elections in a row, Monroe County has voted heavily Republican, re-electing state Sen. John Cauthorn, the first Republican ever to represent the area, whose fiercely Democratic voting pattterns date to its settlement by Confederate-sympathizing slaveholders before the Civil War.

Peter Kinder is assistant to the chairman of Rust Communications and president pro tem of the Missouri Senate.