Fighting the Swiftboating
By Interesting NYT article on how John Kerry has pressed the fight against the Swiftboaters for Truth. Unsurprisingly, Kerry’s assault has been devastating; the only defense the Swiftboaters can seem to muster is that they didn’t like his anti-war speech in 1971.
Why didn’t Kerry fight back harder in 2004?
Of course, plenty of disappointed and angry Democrats would like to know why Mr. Kerry did not defend himself so strenuously before the election. He had posted some military documents on his campaign’s Web site and had allowed reporters to view his medical records but resisted open access to them as unnecessarily intrusive.
Mr. Kerry and his defenders say that they did not have the extensive archival material, and that it was too complicated to gather in the rapid pace of a campaign. He was caught off guard, he says; he had been prepared to defend his antiwar activism, but he did not believe that anyone would challenge the facts behind his military awards. “We should have put more money behind it,” Mr. Kerry says now. “I take responsibility for it; it was my mistake. They spent something like $30 million, and we didn’t. That’s just a terrible imbalance when somebody’s lying about you.”
I’m not convinced that fighting back hard would have done much good. Guys like Glenn Reynolds and Mickey Kaus constantly harped on the point that Kerry hadn’t released all of his records, but does anyone really think that such a release would have satisfied any of his opponents? Indeed, Kaus took the opportunity of the release to mock a bad picture of Kerry, to make fun of his grades, and to suggest that the records demonstrated that Kerry wasn’t really all that smart. In short, the release of the records didn’t answer any questions at all, because the point of the question was not to receive an answer, but rather to raise doubt about Kerry’s credentials.
Similarly, I doubt that a serious effort on the part of Kerry to fight the Swift Boaters would have made a difference in the campaign. There was plenty of evidence in the public sphere in the summer of 2004 that the Swift Boat campaign was garbage, but that was hardly the point. The purpose was to take advantage of a media dedicated to he said/she said coverage of major campaign issues; the accusation of cowardice was enough, even if no compelling evidence could be manufactured. I suspect that if Kerry had fought back against the Swift Boaters, the media would have portrayed him as obsessive about the issue, and Glenn Reynolds would have had the opportunity to link to a Mickey Kaus post suggesting that Kerry’s efforts to fight the charges clearly indicated that he had something to hide.
The only way that these sorts of things really go away is when the opposition party has enough basic dignity to reject the charges. When George H. W. Bush’s war record was brought into question in 1988 by someone who had served with him in the Navy, Michael Dukakis immediately and publicly rejected the opportunity to attack Bush on the issue. Given the same opportunity, the Republican Party manufactured fake Purple Hearts in a display that mocked anyone who had ever been wounded in US military service. When the proponents of the argument are driven by sufficient hate (the belief that Kerry stood for all of the things that helped us lose the Vietnam War), and have a large enough bankroll, I don’t know that there’s a good way to fight these kinds of charges.