On Friday morning, Dick Gephardt’s campaign staffers were circulating an email to political reporters that the Missouri congressman would make an important announcement about the campaign and a major domestic policy in a speech in Iowa.
It turns out it wasn’t so much an announcement as it was an attack — against Howard Dean’s position on Medicare.
Gephardt has been one of the two candidates most expected to go after Dean (the other being Kerry), but before Friday, nary a word about the Vermont governor. Nothing in the debates, nothing in the stump speech, nothing in media interviews.
Friday, however, the gloves came off. Gephardt discovered (or more likely, his staff discovered) that Dean’s support for Medicare has not always been as solid as the good doctor would have us believe.
Gephardt explained to a largely-union audience in Des Moines that Dean “actually agreed with the Gingrich Republicans” when it came to Medicare.
“It was in this period when Gingrich said Republicans wouldn’t immediately kill Medicare. Instead, they would let it wither on the vine,” Gephardt said. “And it was also during this time that Howard Dean, as chairman of the National Governors Association, was supporting Republican efforts to scale back Medicare.”
The charge is not without merit. In 1995, shortly after the so-called GOP “revolution,” Gingrich and the new-found Republican majorities in Congress pushed for shifting Medicare patients to managed care. Dean, who believed the move would help the federal government balance the budget, expressed support for the change. As we now know, of course, congressional Dems and the Clinton White House successfully resisted the tactic and were able to balance the budget without changing Medicare.
But at the time, Dean apparently was in lock-step with conservatives on Medicare, not his Democratic brethren.
According to information uncovered Gephardt campaign, Dean has called Medicare “one of the worst things that ever happened,” and a “bureaucratic disaster.”
On May 16, 1995, the day before the Republican Congress voted to cut Medicare by $282 billion, Howard Dean delivered a speech praising the GOP’s cuts. In 1993, the AP called Dean “a liberal Democrat who sounds like an arch conservative when it comes to talking about Medicare…”
In response to the Gephardt attack, the Dean campaign said, “It is a sad day for Dick Gephardt when he compares any Democratic candidate running for President to Newt Gingrich and his divisive policies. No Democrat in the presidential race bears any resemblance to Newt Gingrich on any major issue. And for Dick Gephardt to suggest otherwise is simply beyond the pale.”
I found this to be an interesting response. On the one hand, there’s some truth to it. Comparisons between any Dem candidate and Newt Gingrich are pretty harsh. On the other hand, the Dean campaign never actually denied the charge, they just criticized Gephardt for making it.
Following up on the flap today, the Washington Post reported, “Dean said he couldn’t remember who was on which side of the Medicare fight, but he said he and other governors were only trying to reduce the federal budget deficit, not destroy Medicare.”
Couldn’t remember? That’s hardly reassuring.
Dean, in responding to the charge yesterday on ABC’s This Week, said of Gephardt, “I think he’s desperate. I worked for his campaign in ’88. And this is really the pathetic politics of the past.”
Again, nice rhetoric without an answer. Why is Dean afraid to address the substance of Gephardt’s criticism?
Even Dean’s legion of online fans — including the official and unofficial Dean blogs — seem to have completely ignored the Gephardt criticism. Usually these sites are all over every stray attack, explaining why they’re unfounded, proof of Dean’s popularity, etc. Since Friday’s Medicare charge, however, they haven’t said a word.
Gephardt’s attack may have been aggressive, and the Gingrich comparison may have been unkind, but it’s a fair question to raise and the Dean campaign needs a real answer. After all, Dean has spent the better part of the last year telling anyone who would listen that his Democratic rivals should stand up and be proud of the party’s principles. “We shouldn’t try to be more like them, we should stand up and defeat them,” Dean likes to say.
With this in mind, it’s worth knowing if Dean agreed with Gingrich and the GOP on Medicare in ’95 when the rest of the party was fighting the Republicans tooth-and-nail. Medicare is not some obscure domestic issue — it’s a core Democratic priority.
If this is yet another Dean flip-flop, he should say so and explain why he’s changed his mind. If Dean stands by his 1995 position, and this isn’t another switch, he should explain why he supports moving elderly Americans who rely on Medicare to managed care.
Accusing Gephardt of being mean is not a defense.