Karl Rove's hired guns slipped a powerful cocktail of hooey into the electorate's drink, inducing a stupor that could last quite a while.
We all knew this presidential election would eventually go down the crapper. But the Vietnam psychodrama that dominates campaign news - and has apparently stalled John Kerry in the polls - is straight out of the septic tank.
It was Kerry, flanked at the Democratic National Convention by his swift boat crew and a revved-up Max Cleland, who first engaged Vietnam, "reporting for duty" to establish himself as a credible commander in chief, and confront the president directly over questions of national security. Bush-Cheney '04's response, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, is beyond a ploy to save Bush's "strong leader" margins. It is the politics of deception and distraction: from continuing deaths and uncertainty in Iraq, from the Administration's meager progress in stemming global terrorism and nuclear proliferation and from a domestic record which includes increased poverty and inequality, a soaring deficit, vanishing healthcare coverage and the accelerated breakdown of our fragile democracy.
The Swift Boat Vets are a tenuous legal entity, cultivated by Herr Rove in the gray areas of the McCain-Feingold Act. While coordination between campaigns and unregulated money groups is illegal, Eleanor Clift in a recent Newsweek article quotes a senior staffer for a Republican senator who confirms that the swipes at Kerry's military service "came straight from the West Wing."
At this point, however, it doesn't even matter that the majority of the Swift Boat Veterans' factual assertions have been categorically disproved. Facing a challenger with military cred, the War President's team is doing what it does best: obfuscate the truth.
The initial smear regarding Kerry's medals muddied the candidate's service record. But the lockstep effort of Mr. Bush and his surrogates to keep Kerry's service in the Mekong Delta running through negative cycles is serving a larger purpose.
By exhuming Vietnam, the Bush campaign can resurrect the social tensions at the root of America's culture wars. Particularly for the small pockets of swing communities and white independents whose votes will influence the electoral college, the tumult of the Vietnam era was a political crucible, what Ambassador Richard Holbrooke '62 calls "our Second Civil War."
One trope of that era - the "America-hating leftist"- is an integral part of the GOP's Vietnam encore. Zell Miller's convention keynote on Wednesday vilified Democratic leaders as seeing "America as an occupier, not a liberator."
Miller bashed Kerry for the post-9/11 political crime of making "national security a partisan political issue." The conflation of Vietnam with Iraq serves a larger historical analogy between the threat of communism and threat of terrorism. This is a dangerously ill-premised bait-and-switch, but one which promises dividends for the grand old party.
And that's really the point: Republicans are more eager to play hardball, lie, distort and do anything to win. If that means dredging up Vietnam, financing a quasi-legal smear campaigns or drugging up the public with a steady dose of lies, so be it. The president's political shop, which sets the industry standard in disinformation, brought us Willie Horton and John McCain's black baby. And now this. Our wartime president can't sell a "secret plan to stabilize and reconstruct Iraq" with his numbers in the mid to high forties, and the less attention the public pays to the president's bungling, the better.
So despite AP headlines like "Swift Boat Writer Lied on Cambodia Claim," polling shows large chunks of voters unable to distinguish fact from compelling, well-financed fiction. The dupability of the electorate isn't breaking news. It's the art of the meta-dupe - the use of a series of lies to generate an alternate reality - that sets Rove's team apart. Every day of election coverage infused with the war in Vietnam further recasts the Democrats as a stereotype of their new left forebears, and allows Mr. Bush to attack Mr. Kerry on national security issues despite the latter's superior service record. Republicans have been tagging Kerry as weak on defense for over a year, but lies and deception can create a deeper imprint than budget votes in the Senate ever can.
The president doesn't even need to win the debate on Vietnam - he just needs to suspend as much national conversation as possible. The Marx-achusetts liberal bogeyman is not as effective a smear in the wake of the Democratic as the new tactic of conflating Kerry the candidate with Kerry the anti-war figure. The "embers of Vietnam" (as John McCain put it) ignite the culture war that sustains the political right as nothing else can. And so America polarizes as it turns away from the issues that confront it.
Ari Savitzky '06 is a history concentrator.
