Former Missouri Congressman and House Democratic Leader Dick Gephardt is endorsing Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic nomination today, Beth Fouhy of the Associated Press reports:

The endorsement came as Clinton finished up a four-day campaign swing through Iowa, which hosts the first voting contest Jan. 14. Former President Clinton campaigned with his wife for the first three days of the Iowa trip.

Gephardt won the Iowa caucuses in his first presidential bid in 1988. But his underfunded campaign lost steam and he dropped out of the race in March after doing poorly in that year's "Super Tuesday" contests.

Gephardt banked heavily on winning Iowa again during his second presidential bid in 2004. He finished fourth that year after engaging in a nasty battle with Howard Dean, and ended his campaign the next day.

Read the whole story at the above link. Gephardt's own Presidential ambitions were snake-bitten. He may have been the most electable potential Democratic candidate in 1988, and won Iowa, but couldn't keep it going in the famous field of "Seven Dwarves."

He would have been one of the favorites for the nomination in 1992, too, but Bush's high approval numbers after the Gulf War in '91 caused him (and several other Democrats, including Gore and Mario Cuomo) to announce early he would NOT run.

Then, in 2004, with Kerry fading and Dean collapsing, he was poised to win Iowa again and take the momentum into New Hampshire. Instead, he allowed himself to get into a negative campaign with the nasty little freak from Vermont and ended up turning off the Iowa caucus-goers he had spent two decades cultivating.

Ah, what might have been . . . Gephardt is still popular among Democrats, particularly traditional liberals from the midwest (although less so with the sicko left which has grown into a powerful force in the Party). His endorsement helps Clinton by cementing her lead among the Democratic establishment, and by the fact he isn't endorsing Obama (which would have been a major coup for the Illinois Senator). It increases the aura of inevitability around her.