Gephardt's daughter supports father's policies, campaign

As part of a whirlwind speaking tour that took her to six schools yesterday alone, Chrissy Gephardt, the daughter of presidential hopeful and House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.) spoke to a handful of students yesterday evening about the importance of labor and jobs to her father's campaign.

Gephardt's most recognizable constituency is organized labor, and his daughter devoted most of her speech addressing economic issues. "My dad has been fighting for workers for a long time," she said.

She said her father's opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993, which she said "devalues the work of Americans," contrasts the position of then-Vermont governor and current rival Howard Dean.

Improved treatment of workers is important, Gephardt said, because "it's just not a reality" that everyone can attend college.

Although they live outside the traditional coastal Democratic strong states, Gephardt said unemployed industrial-sector workers from the Midwest will be able to identify with the working-class, upbringing of her father in Missouri, Gephardt said.

Gephardt outlined many of the pillars of her father's campaign, including universal healthcare. "The fact that people use the emergency room for their doctor's office is wrong," she said.

Her father's plan would repeal all of the Bush Administration tax cuts and instead give businesses a 60 percent tax credit to provide health insurance to employees. The money that businesses previously spent on healthcare, she said, could be spent on increasing pay and hiring new workers.

She explained her father's plan to make the first $10,000 spent on college tax deductible and have the government repay college loans of teachers. Gephardt mentioned her father's reaction when her sister Katie received a low paying teaching job immediately out of college. "He's like, here's the future of our country, and we're paying them $17,000?" Gephardt said.

Gephardt, who graduated from Northwestern University in 1995 with a degree in communications and received a master's in social work from Washington University in St. Louis, joined her father's campaign this past June. She said her father wanted to be a candidate "who contrasted sharply with George W. Bush."

Unlike the other Democratic candidates, she said, her father has experience working on the national budget during Bill Clinton's presidency. "When he gets into the White House, he's going to know how to do that," she said.

Gephardt briefly addressed her father's foreign policy goals, emphasizing the need for multilateral cooperation. "George Bush has leveled our relationships with other countries," she said. "Unfortunately George Bush thinks he knows everything."

She said that her father has always supported gay and lesbian issues during his time in government, but that support has intensified since she came out as a lesbian to her parents and then-husband two years ago.

"He has been a big advocate of those issues for a long time," she said, but "when it's in your family, you always look at it differently."

Gephardt said that Dean has emerged as her father's main rival. "It's typical to target your front-runner," she said. She also credited Dean's internet fundraising techniques as "monumental."

"He's gotten a lot of hype but maybe he's not all he's cracked up to be," she said.

Presidential candidate Gephardt has consistently billed himself as the candidate who supports the rights of workers. While Gephardt has the support of over 20 different unions, rival Dean recently won the support of the two largest unions of the AFL-CIO, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and the Service Employees International Union. These two represent 3.1 million potential voters.

In a recent CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, Gephardt's support has increased to 12 percent, up from eight percent in a poll earlier in the month. Gephardt and Dean are in a dead heat for first in support in Iowa, where the first primary is held.

Before stopping at Tufts, Gephardt visited Dartmouth College, Winnacunnet High School, New Hampshire Community Technical College, the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and Boston College Law School. After her speech, she traveled to Wellesley College.

The speech was sponsored by the Tufts Democrats, who hosted Democratic Party presidential hopeful John Kerry's daughter, Vanessa, last month.