Republicans Miss the Point (4/28/04)
by Dean Hartwell
The Bush campaign has made an issue over why John Kerry did not throw his own medals away in protest of the Vietnam War. They have brought up two interviews eleven years apart that Kerry gave as proof that he lacks credibility.
Why should we care?
This strategy looks like the one Bush’s father used against challenger Bill Clinton in 1992. During that campaign, the elder Bush kept on insisting that voters could not trust Clinton because he had given conflicting stories as to how he avoided military service in Vietnam.
The voters saw right through it by remembering that Bush had pledged “no new taxes” to get elected and had gone back on that pledge a couple of years later. By reading his lips, they silenced him and voted him out of office.
Republicans later tried to force Clinton from office when it became known that he had lied about an affair. They went all-out to get an impeachment and pushed for Clinton’s removal in the United States Senate.
The Senate refused to go along with it, acknowledging that the affair and the lying were wrong, but that the conduct did not rise to the Constitutional level for removal. The fact that no one has recently gone to prison for behaving as Clinton did put the issue into perspective.
In the 2000 election, once more the Republicans tried to make character an issue, this time with Al Gore. They railed against his supposed exaggerations about such unimportant topics as whom he flew with to a disaster site and whether a school child had to stand outside of a crowded classroom.
Once more, the voters did not buy it. They gave Gore a half million more votes than George W. Bush and the win in the Electoral College if the votes in Florida were all re-counted.
So why try this strategy with Kerry?
It deflects attention away from issues that really matter to the voters in the United States. Children are going hungry and without medical care. Troops and Iraqis are dying in Iraq. Millions of people are out of work. There is a lack of funding for the “Leave No Child Behind” Act. Corporations are finding it easier to pollute the environment. Osama bin Laden is still unaccounted for. And so on.
Some Republicans want to focus on the truth selectively. They want to tell us that because Kerry may have been inconsistent in recalling the reasons he did not throw his own medals back to the government, he is permanently inconsistent or permanently lying.
These critics of Kerry miss the point. The truth matters most when it is relevant. Give us a President who can distinguish between what is important to the United States and what is not. Then we can set to work on solving the problems we face.