It feels more than a little surreal, rejoining the news after a week off
the grid. I seem to have returned to an alternate universe in which the
Democrats' war-hero candidate has been put on the defensive by the
Republicans' Guard-duty-shirking president thanks to a patently false
television ad. The economy wheezes on, the situation in Iraq continues to
deteriorate, but -- thanks to deft work by the Bush family smear machine --
the top political story is, what did or didn't happen on a Vietnamese river
three decades ago?
No one should question for a second the effectiveness of this Bush
tactic. It is precisely what has worked for Bush campaigns past (vide
Dukakis/Willie Horton, or the anti-McCain blitz in South Carolina 2000),
and there is every sign it is working again.
Josh Marshall accurately, I think, identifies the (crudely but aptly
labeled) "bitch-slap"
psychodynamics of the Swift Boat Veterans story: Facts are nearly
irrelevant here; this is about punching John Kerry and seeing whether he
punches back, and how hard. If he fails to punch back, he's exposed as a
sissy who's not tough enough to defend America. If he does fight back, the
Bushies simply point at him -- as they have already begun to -- and claim
that he's lost it, he's "wild-eyed" and unreliable and unfit to be
president.
It's exactly what every Democratic strategist knew was coming. It's
cunning, and inevitable, and low. And I think the only answer for the Kerry
campaign is to call Bush out, directly, on its lowness. The trouble, of
course, is that as long as you're responding to fraudulent Swift Boat
Veteran ads you're allowing Bush to dominate the agenda. You need to punch
back hard, and only then move on.
George Bush is acting like a latter-day Joseph McCarthy -- albeit one
smart enough to use shadowy surrogates for his dirty work and retain
semi-plausible deniability. So the best way to stop him, I'm convinced, is
to stand up and call out his campaign's slime for what it is. (The new
Kerry TV ad, "Old
Tricks," begins to take on this job.)
McCarthyism was stopped dead in its tracks on June 9, 1954, exactly half
a century ago, when a lawyer named Joseph Welch turned on the
Red-baiting senator with a withering, "Have you no sense of decency,
sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" Welch had finally
said out loud what a lot of people had long been thinking about McCarthy.
Today's media-saturated environment is different; nothing is left unsaid
for very long, and what matters is what gets repeated most often. Still, it
seems to me that John Kerry's best plan is to find and deploy the 2004
equivalent of Welch's retort. Have you no decency, George Bush, at long last?
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