Republican meddlers tilt at Kerry, Obama
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BY WILLIAM O'ROURKE
Columnist
The Chicago Sun-Times
August 15, 2004
Alan Keyes and the swift boat vets supporting President Bush have a lot of things in common, but military service in Vietnam isn't one of them. Keyes was nowhere to be seen in Southeast Asia back then. Like Vice President Dick Cheney, he had other priorities and availed himself of student deferments. However, the anti-Kerry vets' TV ad that has garnered so much attention is a version of Keyes running for the U.S. Senate in Illinois.
How is that? This is how: John Kerry is a decorated veteran of the Vietnam War, and the only way Karl Rove and the Bush campaign apparatus could attack that service is through surrogates -- namely, other Vietnam veterans. So, they found them. That wasn't particularly hard, because John O'Neill, co-author of the ad's accompanying book, Unfit for Command, and lynchpin of the group, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, was recruited by the Nixon White House in 1971 to attack John Kerry when Kerry was associated with the Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
And, recent reports contend, the White House wasn't happy with a number of the potential Republican candidates offered to oppose Barack Obama, but smiled upon Alan Keyes. Keyes' candidacy allows for the same sort of spectacle: The Democrats have their swift boat veterans, and the Republicans have theirs. The Illinois Democrats have their black candidate for the U.S. Senate; now the state Republicans have theirs.
Of course, the White House claims it had nothing to do with the anti-Kerry swift boat ad, and Keyes claims that race has been ''taken off the table'' in the Illinois U.S. Senate contest.
Usually, the fantasies of political campaigns are confined to ad duels and media wars. This time, actual humans are involved, even though one had to be imported from Maryland to Illinois.
Keyes did fume about Hillary Clinton's carpetbagging ways in New York in 2000, denouncing her quest to be its junior senator. But at least Hillary had longstanding dreams of living in New York and aspirations never to set foot in Arkansas again after leaving the White House. But Keyes says he never gave Illinois (or Chicago) a thought until he was approached to run for the Senate.
Keyes' make-believe campaign follows another. Jack Ryan's crashed and burned because of his own fantasies, which voters wouldn't accept -- not the sex club excursions with his wife, but Ryan's portrayal of himself as the all-American boy, the morally straight high school-teaching good guy, not the actual decadent rich man with special tastes. Pretend to be one thing and turn out to be another, and the public will, on occasion, rebel.
So, in the presidential race, we have the he said/he said debate over what Kerry did or did not do in the rivers of Vietnam, brought about by large contributions from a few wealthy Texas Republicans who financed the book, Web site and Swift Boat Veterans for Truth group, coincidentally fulfilling Karl Rove's desires of trashing Kerry's war record. Rove is a master at making a sow's ear out of a silk purse. He can rightly claim that his candidate, the president, never killed a Vietnamese teenager.
And in Illinois, Keyes can promise he will give Obama a ''battle like this nation has never seen.'' Trouble is, the nation sees such battles regularly. Bush supporters in print and TV will be going over Kerry's swift boat days as thoroughly as Ken Starr fingered through Bill Clinton's minutes with Monica Lewinsky. If there's dirt to be thrown, it will be thrown.
Keyes' role, like the swift boaters' in the presidential race, is to muddy the Illinois U.S. Senate race as much as possible, to smear and pontificate -- so others can, too -- in an attempt to diminish Obama's standing now and later, after Obama wins.
Keyes' earlier campaigns for public office (twice each for president and senator) have been money-making career builders. He paid himself a handsome salary when he first ran for the Senate in 1992. One wonders how much the Illinois GOP is forking over this time, or whether Keyes thinks the in-kind payment is sufficient: the national notoriety and the fun he has in store making a fool of himself and the people of Illinois, as well as pleasing the Bush White House and its band of merry troublemakers.
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