MISSIONARY POSITION

A 'Moral' Mission In Political Final Act: Gephardt Crusades On Health Care
(Jim VandeHei, July 20, 2003, Washington Post)

Richard Gephardt strolled under the "Beef and Booze" greeting at the Boathouse bar here, shook a few hands and positioned himself by an inflatable Budweiser beach ball. With 50 or so Democratic faithful assembled to sip happy hour beer and size up this fellow Midwesterner running for president, he spoke about family, values and, most passionately, his personal and "moral" mission to provide health care to every American.

His son, Matthew, might be dead today from a rare form of cancer if it weren't for his family's generous health insurance policy. "He's a gift of God," said Gephardt, a House member from Missouri. Now, he adds, it's his duty to provide similar insurance to every American -- and pay for it by taking away their "Bush tax cuts." "It is immoral for anybody in this country to be out there without health insurance," Gephardt told them.

Gephardt -- a Baptist who recently toyed with the idea of writing a book about religion and God's love -- is not a weekly churchgoer, yet he prays often and is well versed in the New Testament. From it, he said in a recent interview, he gleans a much different message than the one he believes is taken away by the man he wants to replace: George W. Bush.

In short, Gephardt said, Bush focuses on the rich, while he, like Jesus, focuses on the less fortunate. Bush, he said, "seems to read a different message out of the Bible than the rest of us."

One assumes Mr. Bush reads the one that says this : "Verily I say unto thee, Inasmuch as thou hast done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, thou hast done it unto me." One doubts he reads one that allows this, Abortion stance shows wider shift on social issues (BILL LAMBRECHT AND DEIRDRE SHESGREEN, 07/05/2003, St. Louis Post-Dispatch):

As an adviser to leading Democratic politicians and an activist on women's issues, Joanne Symons helped Rep. Richard Gephardt negotiate the tricky political waters of switching positions on abortion in 1986 as he planned his first presidential campaign.

Symons told him back then that liberal constituencies that flex their muscle in Democratic Party primaries would find it hard to swallow his
anti-abortion stance.

But she warned Gephardt that he likely would face a backlash from jilted anti-abortion forces if he made the switch. She was right.

On top of that, Gephardt had to deal with suspicion from abortion-rights leaders who wondered about his motives, Symons recalled during an
interview shortly before her death in March.

"He kept churning things up inside and listening and asking questions until he came to a place where he could be. I think that when you approach things like that, you can change and evolve. Of course there was a political payoff," Symons said.

Gephardt entered Congress as a passionate opponent of abortion, taking to the House floor shortly after moving into his office in 1977 to declare support for a Right-to-Life amendment to the Constitution.

"Life is the division of human cells, a process which begins at conception," he asserted. By that spring, he had become a sponsor of legislation to ban spending federal funds on most abortions.

But in 1986, he met in St. Louis with Loretto Wagner and leaders of Missouri Citizens for Life to tell them he was defecting from their movement.

Spare us the "Moral Mission" bushwah. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 20, 2003 3:23 PM