Dear God, Not Dick

I've been arguing for months that Dick Gephardt would be a disastrous vice-presidential pick for John Kerry. Polls great and small, from AP to diary entries on Daily Kos and elsewhere, show minimal support for the Gepper. Even the Democrats he formerly led in the House all but concede the caucus is far stronger under Nancy Pelosi than it was under Gephardt. And yet some union leaders--particularly the less than always savory Teamsters--both have pushed Dick relentlessly and even claim he's locked up the nod for VP.

In today's American Prospect online, Matthew Yglesias lays the bigtime smackdown on Gephardt as running mate:

Indeed, electability is the order of the day. So would picking Dick Gephardt help Kerry win the election? The short answer is "no." The long answer is "no way."

One useful asset a VP pick might possess is the ability to carry his state into the Democratic fold; since Gephardt's Missouri is a perennial bellwether there's a superficially compelling case here. The main problem here, as Chris Suellentrop recently noted is that Missouri voters don't seem to like Gephardt. He's never run statewide. His actual constituents are limited to one congressional district that Gore won without him in 2000 and that will doubtless go for Kerry again. The Missouri voters with whom Kerry needs some help live in the rural and exurban parts of the state and positively hate St. Louis and Kansas City politicians, such as Gephardt. They know the guy, and they don't like him. Why would you pick a guy who's all-but-guaranteed to lose his potentially crucial home state? For the sake of Ohio, goes the theory, where Gephardt's working-class cred will provide a needed boost to the aristocratic Kerry. And perhaps it would, but couldn't Edwards do the job just as well, while also doing better in next-door Missouri and maybe even North Carolina (where things are surprisingly close)?

...

What's important is that Gephardt's record -- or rather, his many records -- will be putty in the hands of the Bush campaign, reinforcing their main line of critique against Kerry while adding nothing of value. Arguably, this would be a reasonable price to pay if we were talking about some kind of paragon of political virtue, but we aren't. We're talking about a man who helped drive the country to war in pursuit of transient electoral advantage and didn't even managed to derive any electoral advantage from it.

The whole thing is worth a read. I just hope that Kerry and his key staff people are among those who see this piece. I've said it before and I'll say it again: if Kerry picks Gephardt, he deserves to lose, and we progressives deserve a better party to champion our politics.