I’m not talking about the Rick Lazio-Hillary Clinton Senate race in New York, though that one certainly has a gravity of its own. No, the contest in question is for Missouri’s Third District Congressional seat, and the combatants are House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt and his Republican challenger, Bill Federer. The outcome of this race will determine if Mr. Gephardt, who went to Congress 24 years ago as a pro-life, conservative Democrat but then worked his way to the top of the Democratic Party’s power structure by abandoning those views, will become Speaker of the House or is retired from Congress.
At America’s Crossroads, the Third District combines historic Route 66, the legendary Highway 61, and U.S. 40, the extension of the old National Road. It sits alongside America’s great river, the Mighty Mississippi, and is home to a heavily Catholic population of primarily middle-class families that finds itself in the position of determining whether its “much-evolved” long-time representative will or will not ascend to perhaps the most powerful position in American politics, should the Democrats recapture control of the House of Representatives.
The Incumbent
Even though Dick Gephardt is a representative from Missouri, he’s been out of touch with his constituency for years. Living in a posh home in Sterling, Virginia, Gephardt holds on to his residency rights in the Show-Me State by claiming his 92 year-old mother’s one-bedroom apartment as his address. However, the apartment has long been vacant because his mother is in a retirement home.
Since entering Congress, Gephardt has watched his city of St. Louis lose population faster than almost any other city in the country. Almost three-quarters of a million people called St. Louis their home in 1971, when Gephardt was first elected. On his watch, the city’s population has dwindles to a mere 330,000.
Gephardt is running for re-election claiming that as Speaker he can do more for Missouri. But St. Louis’ deteriorated neighborhoods, lost jobs and higher taxes should give the Missouri electorate pause. Congressman Gephardt’s priorities have long-since switched from provincial concerns to promoting the national social agenda of the most radical element of the party of Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy. He now positions himself as a leading champion of unrestricted abortion, homosexual rights, tax increases and more centralized government control over education.
The once pro-life Gephardt has voted to use taxpayer money to fund development of the abortion pill, RU-486. He supported President Clinton’s executive order permitting fetal tissue research. He has voted to allow transportation of minors across state lines to have abortions. He has voted against 24-hour waiting periods before minors can have an abortion. He has voted for U.S. foreign aid to countries that can be used in part for forced abortions. And he has voted for government-funded abortions for prisoners and U.S. military personnel.
The Challenger
But Gephardt’s ascent to the Speakership is no slam dunk. He is facing a serious challenge by Bill Federer, a businessman in his family’s three generation-old real estate firm and a nationally-known historian, author, publisher, speaker and Catholic. Two years ago Gephardt nearly lost to Federer in the fourth most expensive Congressional race in the country, in which he outspent Federer 16-to-1 and ran a campaign notable for its reliance on the “politics of personal destruction.”
Gephardt’s 1998 victory over Federer was also rife with the type of voting irregularities common to places like Cuba and the Sudan. “On election morning, 1998,” Federer said in an interview, “the phones at my headquarters started ringing and people were telling me my name was not on the ballot in five wards in the city of St. Louis. When I complained to the county clerk, Gephardt’s people responded by asking that the polling stations around the district be closed. We had to get attorneys to keep the polls open.
“At noon, by the time the results started coming in, I was ahead of Gephardt 52-48; but then, the computers went down in the city of St. Louis and the electricity went off in the Jefferson County clerk’s office. This was the third time the electricity went off at the county clerk’s office in a close election,” he said.
According to Federer, on the day before the last election, Gephardt’s push pollers called all the registered pro-life voters to tell them Federer was 100 percent pro-abortion in all cases when it is Gephardt himself who owns a 100 percent voting record, according the National Abortion Rights Action League. Federer, conversely, is tireless in trumpeting his 100 percent commitment to the right to life.
Federer is the fifth of 11 children, and now the father of four. He attended St. Louis University, graduating with a degree in Accounting and Business Administration, and has worked in the family real estate business, the oil and gas industry, and is active in more than a half-dozen community and church organizations. He is also founder of AmeriSearch Publishing Company, which specializes in work of historical research.
The candidate received more votes than Gephardt in the Missouri primary, and has made reform the hallmark of his campaign, citing Gephardt’s consistent flip-flops on the issues and his refusal to even address the issues during this current campaign. Gephardt has ducked every challenge by Federer to a public debate. Meanwhile, Gephardt’s early voting record shows a centrist young congressman who was pro-life and a supporter of Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts.
The Stakes
The national Republican Party would obviously like to replace Gephardt with Bill Federer. But the George W. Bush family would also like to send Gephardt packing, for it was he who forced President George Bush to famously renege on his “no new taxes” pledge in order for Bush to obtain the funds he needed to pursue the Gulf War. If George W. should win tomorrow’s election, and Gephardt become Speaker of the House, Gephardt could easily tie up any and every Republican initiative, in the same way Speaker of the House Tom Foley routinely frustrated the initiatives of his father.
After the race for the White House, many political observers see this as the most important race in the country, and so some major Republicans are offering Federer their full-throated support. “We believe we’ve got an excellent shot at winning this race,” said Congressman J.C. Watts of Oklahoma. “Never before have we had the opportunity that faces us today,” said Missouri Senator John Ashcroft, himself involved in a tight race against deceased opponent Mel Carnahan. And Oklahoma Senator Don Nickles said, “This is a most important race that we can and must win.”
But winning will be difficult because, according to Federer, Gephardt has not in the past and will not now play fair. “[His] media strategy,” Federer points out, “is to smear his opponents, and hope his opponents don’t have the money to answer back. What I have to get across is that Gephardt is selling out America for his career. If people know who he is, then he is very vulnerable.”
Church Teaching
Addressing some 300,000 pilgrims in Rome two weeks ago, Pope John Paul II urged Catholics to vote pro-life. He asked that all “people of good will who believe in these values remain united and strong … in political selection.” He also pleaded with the families to “defend with all your might family values and respect for human life, right from the moment of conception.”
On homosexuality the pope said, “No one but parents can know just how important it is for children to have both figures — that of the mother and the father. It is not a step forward for civilization to favor those tendencies which put in the shade that elementary truth, and would like to see themselves put on the same legal footing.”
Fr. Frank Pavone, National Director for Priests for Life, is one who sees no wiggle room in the pope’s words. “To those who would allow abortion and claim to be Christian, we say, stop being a scandal to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. To those, furthermore, who identify themselves as Catholic, we repeat the words of our bishops:
“We urge those Catholic officials who choose to depart from Church teaching on the inviolability of human life in their public life to consider the consequences for their own spiritual well being, as well as the scandal they risk by leading others into serious sin. We call on them to reflect on the grave contradiction of assuming public roles and presenting themselves as credible Catholics when their actions on fundamental issues of human life are not in agreement with Church teaching. No public official, especially one claiming to be a faithful and serious Catholic, can responsibly advocate for or actively support direct attacks on innocent human life” (LGL 32).
Election Day 2000
On Tuesday Americans face a number of critical choices, and Catholic voters once again find themselves in a position to decide in which direction our country will go — further down the road of risky social experimentation, or back toward some semblance of family-based morality. The choice in Missouri presents a stark contrast between a man who turned his back on his own values to gain the high heights of national power, and another who stands with his Christian values and principles intact.
Dick Gephardt, like Al Gore on the presidential ticket, doggedly defends and promotes irresponsible sexual license of all varieties on the one hand, and then a woman’s wholesale license to murder the children produced by this activity on the other — even during the actual birthing process — with unprecedented federal protection, paid for with American tax dollars, in contravention of the Constitution and a range of Church teachings.
By contrast, Bill Federer has stuck to his Catholic values throughout his career, and now has the opportunity to do to Mr. Gephardt what Republican George Nethercutt of Spokane, Washington, did to Democratic Speaker of the House Tom Foley in the historic Congressional election of 1994 — send him home to meditate on his abandonment of the principles that got him elected in the first place.
Two men with radically different views of right and wrong and which direction to take the country. Two men with radically different views of what it means and what it takes to be a follower of Christ. Two men from the Show-Me State, from the city named after one of the greatest figures in the history of the Catholic Church. The difference is that one is authentic and the other is not. Tomorrow, Catholic voters in Missouri’s Third District will show America, and the world, whether they can tell the difference.
