Swift Boating the Fighting Dems
News: How do you nail a Democrat with genuine military bona fides? The G.O.P.'s answer: Tar him for not being antiwar enough.
November 2, 2006
|
|
When conservative voters in rural Pennsylvania's 10th Congressional District opened their mailboxes early this month, they found a primer on the debacle in Iraq, blaring that the intelligence leading up to the war was "wrong" and "exaggerated." The man to blame? Chris Carney, a Navy lieutenant and intelligence officer running for Congress as a Democrat. "Chris Carney failed our nation once," the mailer said. "Don't give Chris Carney the chance to fail us AGAIN!" Reading like a yellowed page from a MoveOn crib sheet, the mailer was in fact a Republican attack ad—never mind that it was the GOP incumbent, Rep. Don Sherwood, who had voted to authorize sending in the troops.
Republican-led Swift Boat attacks are charting new waters this year, as heightened public disdain for the Iraq occupation sends Republicans scrambling for new ways to shoot down "fighting Democrats." Having often supported the war in its early days and waged it gun-in-hand, the 50 veterans running for Congress as Democrats aren't easily stereotyped as weak-kneed or patrician: "I mean you've got a 6-foot-1, 240-pound, red-state guy talking about how screwed up the Republicans are," notes Erick Mullen, a Democratic media consultant. "What are you going to do to that?" One answer, apparently, is: You nail him for not being antiwar enough.
The Pennsylvania mailer, for example, criticized Carney's work for the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, created by the Bush administration after 9/11 to look at connections between hostile governments and terrorist groups. The mailer extensively cited "The Lie Factory," a 2004 Mother Jones article on the manipulation of Iraq intelligence, which pointed out that the group had claimed a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda; the story never mentions Carney, who served as one of numerous intelligence analysts in the evaluation group.
Carney says that at the time he did believe there was a connection between the Iraqi government and terrorists, but adds that he only pegged the link's strength as a 2.5 on a scale of 10. And he says he stressed the possibility of a strong postwar insurgency—a concern that he says was roundly ignored by his superiors. Today, Carney says he wants to bring troops home as Iraqi replacements are trained, though he won't set a specific schedule. Sherwood, who has not publicly endorsed any specific withdrawal plan, did not return calls seeking comment.
Stung by the Kerry campaign's inability to blunt challenges to its candidate's military credentials in 2004, Democrats have been strategizing for a while about how to counter Swift Boat-style attacks on veterans. Last year, 23 Democratic congressional candidates who are veterans assembled in Washington to talk strategy with retired General Wesley Clark. "These candidates were not going to be surprised," says Mullen, who handles communications for Clark. Since then a passel of political groups has sprung up to defend the veterans. The Patriot Project researches anti-veteran front groups; the Democratic National Veterans and Military Families Council, a branch of the Democratic National Committee, helps plug candidates into party resources; the political action committees Band of Brothers, VoteVets, and VetPac finance ads and organize press conferences to counter attacks. "I suspect what's gonna happen is Republicans will just unleash a whole bunch of new crap starting next week," says Colonel Richard Klass, VetPAC's founder. "We will immediately zap out a press release or send someone out as a surrogate speaker to help them."
Donald Fowler, a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee who serves as cochair of the party's veterans' council, says attacks like these are designed to hurt a candidate's support from the Democratic base. "I'm sure all of these charges can be effectively responded to," he adds. "But you have to respond, and if you don't, you're just sunk."
Veterans have also been accused of improperly using their military positions: In July the executive director of the Republican State Committee of Pennsylvania, Scott Migli, claimed that Admiral Joe Sestak, the Democrat challenging embattled Rep. Curt Weldon, had campaigned for office in uniform and worn the wrong rank, though Migli failed to produce any evidence. In Kentucky, a television ad accused Democrat Mike Weaver of involvement in a 1992 "pay to play" scandal in which members of an Army review board pushed National Guardsmen to donate to the campaign of a Democratic gubernatorial candidate. Weaver had been exonerated in a 2002 review by the Kentucky Department of Military Affairs, which concluded that he "took no part in fundraising or other activities" involved in the scandal.
Even straight-up Swift Boating of the 2004 variety has made a comeback: In yet another Pennsylvania congressional race, Iraq veterans speaking at a press conference organized by 8th District Republican incumbent Mike Fitzpatrick slammed Democrat Patrick Murphy, an Army JAG lawyer who served in Iraq, for exaggerating his role there, saying he was "not a frontline fighter" and "didn't see the same things we did." The attack backfired when a past commander of the state's Veterans of Foreign Wars said the comments were "a slap in the face of anyone who ever wore the uniform for our country." Congressman Fitzpatrick soon backpedaled, telling a Pennsylvania paper, "Those are not my views."
Paul Rieckhoff, the founder of the nonpartisan Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, says Democrats aren't the only ones determined to counter attacks on vets this year: Military people, too, will fight for their own. "We are always going to get the back of veterans," he says, "no matter what party they are from." And some observers believe that post-2004, Americans are less easily swayed by Swift Boat attacks—one reason, perhaps, why some Republican campaigns have resorted to painting Democrats as too Rambo-like, rather than too cowardly.
Josh Harkinson is an Investigative Fellow at Mother Jones.
