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© St. Petersburg Times, published November 7, 2002
WASHINGTON -- The surprisingly dismal showing by Democrats in Tuesday's elections has taken a high-profile casualty: House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt.
With angry and ambitious would-be successors nipping at his heels, the veteran Missouri lawmaker is expected to announce today that he will not seek re-election as House Democratic leader.
"It is now clearly time for him to step down," Rep. Peter Deutsch, D-Fort Lauderdale, said Wednesday. "The Democratic Caucus needs a leader who is fully committed."
Gephardt, 61, has been laying the groundwork for a 2004 presidential bid. It was not immediately clear how the election setback would affect his future, and aides did not know whether he would address that issue Thursday.
Elected in 1976, Gephardt is not resigning from Congress. But his long-held ambition to become speaker of the House -- after serving as House majority leader from June 1989 to December 1994 -- appears now to be permanently out of reach.
The House Democrats' No. 2 leader, Minority Whip Nancy Pelosi of California, is expected to vie with Rep. Martin Frost, D-Texas, to succeed Gephardt when House Democrats hold leadership elections Nov. 14.
Pelosi, 62, is an outspoken liberal from San Francisco. She will appeal to more ideological Democrats frustrated with Gephardt's support of President Bush's plans to topple Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and Gephardt's lack of clear vision for Democrats.
Frost, a 13-term member of the House from Dallas, is a former chairman of the Democratic Caucus, known more for working behind the scenes than making rousing speeches. More conservative than Pelosi, the 60-year-old Frost will appeal to practical-minded Democrats who fear straying too far from mainstream views.
"The country moved to the right yesterday and House Democrats won't win a majority by moving further to the left," Frost spokesman Tom Eisenhauer said. Pelosi spokesman Brendan Daly said staying close to the middle does not inspire Democrats to go to the polls.
"It's not a matter of ideology. It's a matter of drawing a clear distinction between the Democratic and Republican Party on issues that the Democrats are united about and that the American people strongly support," Daly said, mentioning education funding and Social Security.
Clearly, the Democrats need some shaking up. After running the House for 40 years, they were surprised in 1994 by a wave of support for Republicans, who won the House and Senate. Rep. Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., was propelled into the speakership.
Brash and abrasive, Gingrich made a series of mistakes that for years kept Democratic hopes high for winning back the House.
In 1995, Gingrich shut down parts of the federal government rather than give in to President Clinton's demands for more spending, alienating many voters. In 1998, he was speaker when the House impeached Clinton, so angering loyal Democratic voters that they went to the polls in droves to vote against House Republicans, who lost seats in the midterm elections.
Usually, the party not in control of the White House gains congressional seats in midterm elections. Gingrich's failure in 1998 to do so cost him his job, and he resigned from the speakership and Congress under pressure from his rank and file.
Now, history is repeating itself somewhat with Gephardt.
Rep. Tom Davis, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, said Democrats lost seats Tuesday because they failed to articulate an agenda.
"They used to be the party of gun control," but backed off, the Virginia Republican said. Gephardt supported a war in Iraq and many Democrats were cowed into backing Bush's popular tax cuts.
"I'm not sure who they are as a party," said Davis, head of the House GOP campaign arm. "They had no national theme."
Now, the 108th Congress will open in January with Republicans in control of the House, Senate and White House. Democrats had controlled the Senate since June 2001, when Vermont Sen. Jim Jeffords, angry about White House pressure to support tax cuts, defected from the GOP and became an independent who backed Democrats.
After Tuesday, congressional Democrats' power has been reduced to a thin but still formidable bit of leverage: the filibuster.
While Republicans will control 51 or 52 seats next year (a runoff election in Louisiana will decide the final tally), they need 60 votes to end Democratic debate on bills and move toward final passage.
"We don't control the Senate. We just preside over the Senate," Davis said Wednesday.
Senate Republican leader Trent Lott of Mississippi, who will regain his majority leader position, said he was thankful to have a second chance.
"We are ready to work," Lott said at a news conference Wednesday. "Let's roll!"
Republican priorities include pension and welfare reform, a prescription drug benefit for low-income elderly and improved homeland security, Lott said.
For the ailing economy, Lott said he hopes the temporary tax cuts Congress passed in 2001 can be made permanent.
Former Sen. Connie Mack, R-Fla., said the GOP-led Congress' "first focus is going to continue to be on the issue of the war on terrorism, the potential war on Iraq and homeland security."
But Mack said an equally important focus will be "what is necessary to get this economy going again." He predicted Republicans would try to make permanent some of the tax cuts temporarily enacted in 2001.
That will not be easy, he said.
"I think you'll see the Democrats put up a pretty strong fight in the Senate. I think they could pick the permanency of the tax cuts as a place to really stake a flag. That could be a significant fight," Mack said.
Another fight is looming over judicial nominations.
More than 80 of Bush's nominees to federal judgeships are pending in the Senate, where Democrats had been blocking nominees they deemed too conservative.
In September, the Democratic-led Senate Judiciary Committee rejected Priscilla R. Owen for the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. A staunchly conservative member of the Texas Supreme Court, Owen was the second Bush judicial nominee to be blocked.
The composition of the Supreme Court is also likely to be an issue, with Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said to be considering retirement.
National Organization for Women president Kim Gandy said the next Supreme Court appointment could determine whether women retain the legal right to abortion.
"With Trent Lott running the Senate and George W. Bush in charge of the White House and Supreme Court, women and families have never been in greater jeopardy," Gandy said.
Republicans, not surprisingly, see their victory Tuesday not as a threat but a "unique opportunity" to reshape the nation, as Rep. Davis put it. But they are also keenly aware that there will be no one but themselves to blame if the public doesn't like the laws they enact.
"You have responsibility, and with responsibility you get blamed when things go wrong," Davis said. "Obviously, there's a peril if our policies don't produce."
-- Times staff writers Sara Fritz and Bill Adair contributed to this report, which used information from the Associated Press.