Good "process" comments from the "Kerry Spot." NRO
SWIFT MOVES [08/09 12:34 PM]
A couple of things to keep in mind as we watch the Swift Boat ad and wonder about its impact on the campaign:
First, no one on the Bush campaign will touch this with a ten-foot pole. Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt told NRO last week, "The Bush campaign never has and will never question John Kerry's service in Vietnam."
Christine Iverson, spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, said, "It is important to remember that we have never and will never question John Kerry's service in Vietnam. The Democrats may try to claim otherwise, but that is not the case."
McCain denounced it, and Sen. Jim Talent said he "appreciated the Bush campaign's approach, stating that they respect his service and don't want to be associated with any effort to attack that. I think that's appropriate."
It's also worth noting that throughout the senator's career in Massachusetts, whenever someone uttered a discouraging word about his Vietnam service, Kerry used his veteran status on his opponents the way Al Capone used his baseball bat on a disrespectful subordinate in The Untouchables.
During his campaigns, Kerry referred to his Vietnam service again and again and prodded his opponents to talk about Vietnam. Then, when they made comments criticizing Kerry, he and his allies charged his opponent with attacking veterans.
In his first Senate primary in 1984, Kerry attacked Congressman Jim Shannon about first voting for, then against, the MX missile. Shannon said he had changed his mind, no different than Kerry had earlier in his life on the issue of the Vietnam War. "If you felt that strongly about the war, you would not have gone. I was very proud that you changed your mind."
"If you read the [Boston] Globe's coverage, they referred to it as 'a cordial exchange between the candidates,'" Shannon said in a recent interview. "But the race was tightening. I had a record on veterans issues and legislation to help veterans; he had his band of brothers. They were looking for an issue and pounced on that."
At the next debate, Kerry said to Shannon, "You impugn the service of veterans in that war by saying they are somehow dopes or wrong for going." (Realize that John Kerry, famous antiwar protestor, was attacking his opponent for suggesting veterans were wrong to go to Vietnam.)
Kerry's Vietnam buddies followed Shannon around the campaign trail, "looking for ways to pick fights," as a Kerry strategist put it to the Globe years later. Kerry beat Shannon in that primary by 3 percentage points.
Kerry had smooth sailing in his Massachusetts political career until 1996, when he faced popular GOP governor William Weld. Weld didn't touch the Vietnam issue, but he didn't need to; a Boston Globe columnist stepped into the trap instead. As NRO readers know, business columnist David Warsh wrote about discrepancies in accounts of the day that Kerry won the Silver Star, nine days before election day:
What's the best interpretation? That a breathless young lieutenant, his pulse pounding with the exhilaration of battle, ran some distance from the river bank in pursuit of a soldier, turned the corner behind the hootch and came face to face with an enemy ready to kill him — and that he fired in self-defense.
What's the ugliest possibility? That behind the hootch Kerry administered a coup de grace to the Vietnamese soldier — a practice not uncommon in those days, but a war crime nevertheless, and hardly the basis for a Silver Star.
Some Vietnam veterans who now oppose Kerry, including Capt. George Elliott, and retired Cmdr. Adrian Lonsdale, appeared at a 1996 news conference at the Charlestown Navy Yard to defend Kerry.
Kerry went after Warsh personally at the press conference. "This was a firefight, life or death, and it was that way every single day, and for some desk jockey who wants to come in, who hasn't seen a firefight in his life, to try to say that, it's just wrong. Period. Wrong."
Lonsdale and Elliot didn't say during that conference what a great president Kerry would make, or that his accusations of war crimes in 1971 weren't distortions or a hurtful betrayal, or even that they endorsed him for the Senate. They just said that they believed Kerry earned his Silver Star in that encounter and that they recalled nothing to justify an accusation of war crimes.
Kerry beat Weld, helped along by Clinton and Gore's rout in Massachusetts. Having the last week of the campaign dominated by tales of his heroism and his veterans standing beside him didn't hurt any. As the Globe put it, "Once again, in the last days of a campaign, an insult to Kerry's service in Vietnam became a rallying cry."
Wednesday, the Kerry campaign was attempting to refute the independence of the Swift Boat group and tie the Swift Boat ads to Bush and the Republican party. They pointed out that that $100,000 of the $158,000 that Swift Boat Veterans for Truth had raised by June 30 had come from a longtime GOP contributor.
On Thursday, an aide close to Kerry spoke as if the ad had come from the desk of Karl Rove himself.
"This ad is everything that's wrong with George Bush's Republican party," the adviser told NRO. "They just took us right back to the day when Rove pulled the strings and had Bush stump at Bob Jones by day and have his goons question John McCain's record as a POW by night. The Bush campaign is on the thinnest of ice and risks losing their last shred of credibility with the American people."
The campaign aide continued, "The ooze that brought us the Wyly Brothers' smear campaign against John McCain has launched an ad full of lies and character attacks, and George Bush doesn't have the backbone to say it's wrong — the polar opposite of what Kerry did when Democrats crossed the line. For a puny $125,000 ad buy, they just lit a fire under thousands of veterans who think it's wrong to question a veteran's combat record, especially to do it hiding behind some sham Republican group. Consider this the first sign that the Bush campaign is unraveling."
The controversy over the ad was a front-page story in the Washington Post and the Boston Globe on Friday. While the ad may not change many minds, and may in fact just harden views on each side, it has had one groundbreaking effect on this race: For the first time since Kerry's blowup on Good Morning America about throwing his medals, the ad brouhaha knocked the Democratic candidate off his message. His criticism of Bush's reaction in the Florida classroom was the second or third story of the day; the Swift Boat vets garnered the biggest headlines.
With a spring and summer dominated by the Bush administration reacting to books by Paul O'Neill, Richard Clarke, Joe Wilson, and movie by Michael Moore, it's an odd (and refreshing) change to see a book putting the Democratic candidate on the defensive.
SWIFT BOAT VETS LETTER TO TV STATIONS [08/09 12:52 PM]
The Swift Boat Vets have a counter-letter to television stations.
The more one hears from these guys, the more one wants a comprehensive, detailed, point-by-point rebuttal from the Kerry folks, not this "they're all crazy right wingers" defense. If the Swifties are lying, then it ought to be easy to prove. Instead, they're the ones who are citing eyewitness testimony, affidavits, records, the Globe biography of Kerry, etc.
USA TODAY EDITORS SLAM KERRY ON IRAQ [08/09 12:59 PM]
Now we know why USA Today featured an op-ed by Kerry today. The editors ripped the Democratic candidate for not enough specifics in his Iraq plans.
With the election just three months away, Kerry has done little to separate his views from those of President Bush....
Challengers prefer to camp out in the chorus of critics and offer generalized solutions. Thirty-six years ago, Republican candidate Richard Nixon made a similar pitch for ending the Vietnam War: He slammed the Democrats as incompetent, called on allies to bear more of the burden and suggested that he had a plan to end the war that he couldn't disclose until he was in office.
Four years later, he still had no answer.
Iraq isn't Vietnam, and Kerry's plan isn't quite as opaque as Nixon's, but the historical echoes are strong enough to suggest that if Kerry has a credible proposal for Iraq, he needs to fill in the blanks.
The headline? "Missing in action: Kerry's complete strategy for Iraq." Ouch.
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