Dog Fight For the Presidency

Only in an election year ruled by fiction could a sissy who used
Daddy's connections to escape Vietnam turn an actual war hero into a
girlie-man.

As we leave the scripted conventions behind us, that is the
uber-scenario that has locked into place, brilliantly engineered by
the president of the United States, with more than a little unwitting
assistance from his opponent. It's a marvel, really. Even a $10,000
reward offered this year by the cartoonist Garry Trudeau couldn't
smoke out a credible eyewitness to support George W. Bush's contention
that he showed up to defend Alabama against the Viet Cong in 1972. Yet
John Kerry, who without doubt shed his own blood and others' in the
vicinity of the Mekong, not the Mississippi, is now the deserter and
the wimp.

Don't believe anyone who says that this will soon fade, and that the
election will henceforth turn on health-care policy or other wonkish
debate. In a time of fear, the only battle that matters is the
broad-stroked cultural mano a mano over who's most macho. And so both
parties built their weeklong infotainments on militarism and
masculinity, from Kerry's toy-soldier "reporting for duty" salute in
Boston to the special Madison Square Garden runway for Bush's
acceptance speech. Though pundits said that Republicans pushed
moderates center stage this week to placate suburban swing voters, the
real point was less to soften the president's Draconian image on
abortion than to harden his manly bona fides. Hence Bush was fronted
by a testosterone-heavy lineup led by a former mayor who did not dally
to read a children's book on 9/11, a senator who served in the Hanoi
Hilton rather than the "champagne unit" of the Texas Air National
Guard and a governor who can play the role of a warrior on screen more
convincingly than can a former Andover cheerleader gallivanting on an
aircraft carrier.

Not that Bush is ignorant of the ways of Hollywood. Unlike Kerry,
whose show business pals he constantly derides, the president actually
worked in the film business. In the 1980s he lined his pockets as a
board member of Silver Screen, which financed Disney movies. Maybe he
even picked up a few tricks of the trade along the way.

The early drafts of the script pre-date 9/11. In "A Charge to Keep,"
his 1999 campaign biography crafted by Karen Hughes, Bush implies that
he just happened to slide on his own into one of the "several
openings" for pilots in the Texas Air National Guard in 1968 and that
he continued to fly with his unit for "several years" after his
initial service. This is fantasy that went largely unchallenged until
9/11 subjected it to greater scrutiny. Since then, the mysterious gaps
in the president's military résumé have been finessed by the dialogue
and wardrobe departments, from the invocation of "Wanted: Dead or
Alive" (whatever did happen to that varmint, Osama, anyway?) to the
"Mission Accomplished" rollout. Of late, Bush's imagineers have
publicized his proud possession of Saddam Hussein's captured pistol.

But with the high stakes of an election at hand, it's not enough to
stuff socks in the president's flight suit. Kerry must be turned into
a girl. Such castration warfare has long been a Republican staple.
We've had Bill Clinton vilified as the stooge of a harridan wife and
Al Gore as the puppet of the makeover artist Naomi Wolf. But given his
actual history on the field of battle, this year's Democratic standard
bearer would, seemingly, be immune to such attacks, especially from
the camp of a candidate whose most daring feat of physical courage was
tearing down the Princeton goalposts.

No matter. Once Kerry usurped Howard Dean, whose wartime sojourn in
Aspen made the president look like a Green Beret, the Bush campaign's
principals and surrogates went into overdrive. His alleged encounters
with Botox and a Christophe hairdresser were dutifully clocked on
Drudge. Eventually John Edwards would become "the Breck girl," and
Dick Cheney would yank an adjective out of context to suggest that
Kerry wanted to fight a "sensitive" war on terror.

But there was still this Vietnam problem. One guy went there, one may
have gone AWOL. Enter Karen Hughes. Having helped fictionalize Bush's
wartime years, she now resurfaced to undermine Kerry's, using her
April book tour (for her memoir "Ten Minutes From Normal") to
introduce the rhetorical insinuations of mendacity that would surface
in the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth assault four months later.

The rest is the rewriting of history. Democrats are shocked that the
Republicans have gotten away with it to the extent they have. After
all, John O'Neill, the ringleader of the Swifties, didn't serve "with"
Kerry anywhere except on "The Dick Cavett Show." Other members of this
truth squad include a doctor who claims to have treated Kerry's wounds
even though his name isn't on a single relevant document. How could
such obvious clowns fool so many?
..By turning spurious, unchecked smears into a mediathon, Fox has given
priceless nonstop hype to commercials that otherwise would have been
seen only in seven small to medium markets, where the total buy of
airtime amounted to a scant $500,000. Though the major newspapers, did
vet and challenge the Swifties' claims, aggressive reporting on
television was rare.

But Kerry, having joined the macho game with Bush on the president's
own cheesy terms, is hardly innocent in his own diminishment. From the
get-go he has tried to match his opponent in stupid male tricks. If
Bush clears brush in Crawford, then Kerry rides a Harley-Davidson onto
the set of the late-night talk show host Jay Leno. In the new issue of
GQ, you can witness him having a beer (alcoholic) with a reporter as
he confesses to a modicum of lust for Charlize Theron and Catherine
Zeta-Jones.

The flaw in Kerry is not, as Washington wisdom has it, that he asked
for trouble from the Swifties by bringing up Vietnam in the first
place. Both his Vietnam service and Vietnam itself are entirely
relevant to a campaign set against an unpopular and ineptly executed
war in Iraq that was spawned by the executive branch in similarly
cloudy circumstances. But having brought Vietnam up against the
backdrop of our 2004 war, Kerry has nothing to say about it except
that his service proves he's more manly than Bush. Well, nearly anyone
is more manly than a president who didn't have the guts to visit with
the 9/11 commission unaccompanied by a chaperone.

It's Kerry's behavior now, not what he did 35 years ago, that has
prevented his manliness from trumping the president's. Posing against
a macho landscape like the Grand Canyon, he says that he would have
given Bush the authority to go to war in Iraq even if he knew then
what we know now. His attempt to do nuance, as Bush would put it,
makes him sound as if he buys the message the Republicans hammered in
last week: the road from 9/11 led inevitably into Iraq.

The truth is that Kerry was a man's man not just when he volunteered
to fight in a losing war but when he came home and forthrightly fought
against it, on grounds that history has upheld. Unless he's man enough
to stand up for that past, he's doomed to keep competing with Bush to
see who can best play an action figure on television. Kerry doesn't
seem to understand that it takes a certain kind of talent to play
dress-up and deliver lines like "Bring it on." In that race, it's not
necessarily the best man but the best actor who will win.

-- Frank Rich, NYT