Wednesday, Jul 9, 2008
John Kerry's band of Vietnam War brothers has the Bush army running for their lives.
Feb 19, 2004 | It was an unscripted scene, nothing like the polished photo ops the Bush team, plundering the resources of the government, liked to put together. Near the end of the Iowa caucus campaign, former Green Beret Jim Rassmann stood on a Des Moines stage and quietly described how John Kerry had saved his life in Vietnam. By the time he was finished, something remarkable had happened: a presidential challenger had, as the world watched, grown larger than the incumbent president.
But something even more important happened as well: In that moment, Vietnam veterans, with characteristic modesty, claimed their long-overdue seat at the head table of American politics. And that brought an unexpected threat to the Bush team's reelection plans, which relied on beating up liberals who didn't know how to fight back. Standing beside Kerry at campaign stops, working the phones, or simply filling the front rows, the veterans, powerless but for the witness they bore, took aim to blow those plans away.
Their presence made the election itself larger. The contest became more than a choice between Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals. It became a referendum on whether Vietnam still matters to us, and perhaps on whether it ever did. And thus it became our best, and perhaps last, chance to use the Vietnam War to make ourselves a better nation, rather than allow it to make us a worse one.
Like Dylan's thin man, the Bush team knew something was happening, but they didn't know what it was. Almost without thinking, they reached for the weapon they'd used to eviscerate Clinton and everyone in his vicinity: character. Though it has multiple uses, in the context of war "character" is a code word for courage and patriotism, just as "states' rights," "soft on crime" and "quotas" are for race. It lets a skilled attacker pretend to be above the fray by refraining from directly calling others unpatriotic, while making clear that they are.
The character weapon has been particularly useful to neoconservatives, the right-wing hawks who form the heart of the Bush administration -- and who avoided military service in Vietnam. Having declined the opportunity to prove themselves the traditional way, they desperately needed to establish that they alone have the character -- that is, the honesty, integrity, courage and especially patriotism -- to guide the nation morally and lead it militarily. Lacking proof of their own character, their only option was to attack their rivals'.
So Team Bush could hardly do less when the veterans' threat dawned. Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie was soon intoning that "John Kerrys record of service in our military is honorable. But his long record in the Senate is one of advocating policies that would weaken our national security." Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman said virtually the same thing the next day. When Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe slugged back, claiming that Bush had been AWOL from his National Guard duty, a fierce three-part counter-counter-attack from Gillespie, White House press secretary Scott McClellan and Bush campaign chairman Marc Racicot let the world know that Republicans were shocked and outraged at the accusations.
Perhaps only the Bush team was surprised when the attack went wrong. The weapon that had won them the White House, and was supposed to help them keep it, blew up in their faces, like a claymore mine a sapper on the perimeter had aimed back at the defenders. Talk of Kerry's voting record failed to catch fire, while interest in the president's National Guard record, which the rapid-fire response was supposed to suppress, exploded. Bush himself was soon promising on "Meet the Press" to release records to prove he'd never been AWOL. And the incoming only intensified after that, to the point that the White House, in a rare cave-in to the press, actually did release some 400 pages of Bush's military records less than a week later. What new information they contained proved little and did nothing to shelter Bush from the questions that were increasingly finding their mark.
The skirmish conjured the ghost of Tet, of doing all the right things to win according to the rules of the game, only to realize with a sinking heart that you were losing a bigger game you'd never suspected you were playing. Only this time it was American soldiers who were playing the bigger game.
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