The Myth of the War Room

The urban legend now in the making is that if Kerry joins Dukakis in the Democrats’ line of magnificent losers, it will be because he did not strike back hard enough or quickly enough when he was attacked twice in August–first on his war and postwar activities by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and then for his confusing stances on current events by a horde of Republicans at their convention. Actually, this gives him too much, and too little, credit: He was nasty enough, both with Bush and the Swifties. He wasn’t, however, terribly clever, as each ploy that he tried came equipped with a problem that quickly recoiled in his face.

His first move against the Swifties was to deploy his lawyers and threaten to sue them into submission, trying to scare broadcasters into not running their ads and booksellers into not stocking their book. The problem with this was that it seemed like attempted suppression of speech. His second move was to attack President Bush for not demanding that the ads be pulled. The problem with this was that Bush didn’t control the Swift boat vets; he stood in relation to them just as Kerry did to the many more numerous and much better-funded independent 527 groups on the liberal side, which have spent about $60 million to vilify Bush. When Bush said that all 527s should be suspended, Kerry refused to join him, and therefore looked petulant–demanding that ads that hurt him be pulled, while leaving his friends free to shower abuse on his rival.

The third thing he did was allow his campaign to shower abuse on the veterans who opposed him, denouncing them as sleazeballs and liars. The problem with this was that Kerry’s campaign was rooted in the claim that he as a veteran had unique moral authority, while his friends and backers trashed hundreds of other vets, many of whom had more medals than Kerry did, some of whom had been wounded more gravely, and most of whom had served much longer tours. If Kerry had had the nerve and the skill of the real JFK, he might have done what Kennedy did in 1960 when he met the Protestant ministers nervous about his Catholicism in an open assembly, taking their questions and assuaging their doubts. Kerry might have held a mega-press conference, putting all of the facts (and all of his records) in the open, inviting questions on all of the charges, and possibly inviting the Swifties themselves. Instead, Kerry has never confronted the Swifties directly, never released all of his journals or records, and, since the ads appeared, has never taken questions from the press corps that follows him. In his six-week tailspin, Kerry has given the impression of being a bully (in trying to frighten the bookstores and publisher), of being a whiner (in complaining to Bush), of being a wimp (in insisting that only ads that hurt him should be suspended), and of being a hypocrite, in claiming for himself a protected status as a veteran that he is unwilling to extend to anyone else. Democrats claim it was the Swifties’ attacks that hurt Kerry, but his own responses were just as damaging. Observers saw a man who was thin-skinned, vain, whining, and panicked, and did not seem to like what they noticed. Kerry’s numbers were slipping when the Swifties attacked him, but what really made his numbers fall was his response.

ALONG WITH THE BELIEF that any response is effective in itself goes the belief that all charges can be refuted, or that a forceful denial can automatically make a charge go away. In reality, an attack can be denied or refuted effectively only if the original attack is either false or out of keeping with what people know about the character or acts of the candidate. The 1988 attack on Dukakis–that he was soft on crime, as shown by his support of a prison furlough program through which a murderer sentenced to life without parole was released to assault and rape a young couple–was devastating because it was true. In 1976, when the Massachusetts legislature passed a measure to deny furloughs to convicted murderers, Dukakis as governor had vetoed it. From his refusal to admit error, change the law, or apologize to the victims, to his bloodless reaction to a hypothetical question in the first presidential debate about how he would respond to a crime of violence against his own wife, Dukakis himself drove home the (accurate) message that he was in fact a classically out-of-touch liberal who thought criminals were victims in need of rehabilitation, while real victims deserved no response.

By the same token, the main charge made against Kerry by the Bush campaign–that he is a “flip-flopper” who moves as the wind blows, usually for reasons of political interest–has its roots plainly planted in fact. His statements on Iraq have a whirligig quality, and, laid end to end, cover the entire spectrum. There is no stance on the war Kerry has not at one time taken. When an opponent makes a campaign ad wholly or largely consisting of a candidate’s own acts or statements, that campaign is in trouble–the kind that cannot readily be spun.

The same is true of the case against Kerry the Swifties have made. Some of their initial charges–how Kerry got his wounds, from whom he got them–were contested and inconclusive. But the deeper accusation of the Swifties, which is harder to reply to, is their belief that he was and is a narcissistic careerist, who came to Vietnam with his typewriter and camera, got an early release, and then went home to join the antiwar movement and build a political career on their backs. Their more damaging complaint is not that Kerry was not brave (he was), but that he is an opportunist who decides critical life and death issues on the basis of what serves his career.

This is a common theme among Kerry observers, and consistent across the span of his career. Kerry was for and against the war in Vietnam, as he is for and against the war in Iraq, as he believes at the same time that life starts at conception and that no form of abortion can be too extreme. Kerry enlisted in the Navy at a time when the war was considered respectable, and turned against the war when that cause became trendy; he voted for the war in Iraq when polls showed it popular; and voted against funding it when facing Howard Dean in the primaries; bragged all his Senate career about his ardent support for abortion, but discovered his inner pro-lifer when politically expedient. The famed war room of the 1992 campaign (with an invaluable assist from the candidate’s wife) fended off Clinton’s bimbo eruptions in the main by convincing people that the issue had no connection to governance, and that voters should dismiss it as irrelevant. This is not even arguable with the attacks on Dukakis and Kerry, which go straight to the heart of their governing character, and take force from their own words and deeds.

Just as there are some attacks that cannot be successfully countered, there are some counterattacks that are better not launched. It must have seemed to Kerry’s people, and probably to Kerry himself, that the symmetrical counter to the Swifties’ assault on his war and postwar record was the record of George W. Bush in the Texas Air National Guard. But if the two issues appeared as rough equivalents, this was not true of the damage they were capable of inflicting on each man’s campaign. Kerry’s war record was his campaign; most voters never knew, or had forgotten, about his postwar activities. And outside of Washington and Massachusetts, the fact that Kerry was loathed by so many of his peers and contemporaries came as news. By contrast, Bush’s National Guard record had been thoroughly vetted; he had never run on his war record, and his irresponsibility as a young man, as opposed to his post-40 redemption, was a story he told on himself. At worst, the “revelation” that he perhaps had been careless at the end of five years of otherwise respectable service would not have surprised many people. And this was before the Rathergate scandal emerged.

The Democrats planned to capitalize on the now-notorious Dan Rather 60 Minutes “scoop” of September 8, and prepared a film, “Fortunate Son,” that carried on the charges of dereliction of duty made in the program, and even incorporated footage from the show (although not of the phony memos that had been used to document the accusations). But they kept the film up for days after it had become clear that the entire Guard issue was tainted and toxic, that Rather’s claims had been based on obvious forgeries, and that the controversial name at the heart of the scandal had become Rather and not Bush. Today, anyone thinking “Texas Air National Guard” is likely to think not of George W. Bush 31 years ago, but of the Kerry campaign and its friends at CBS News. And it is worth underlining that the attack backfired even though the Bush campaign itself was neither rapid nor ruthless in its response to the original charges.

THE KERRY CAMPAIGN is so enamored of the rapid response that it is given to attacking by reflex, even when the response is doomed to be counter-productive or so dissonant that it makes people wince. Within hours, Democrats attacked a Bush ad that showed Kerry windsurfing in shorts, a response that made Kerry look humorless and petulant, and drew further attention to the ad. What was their complaint? “People do not want to see lighthearted advertising” in wartime, scolded Kerry spokesman Mike McCurry. Minutes after Bush finished his acceptance speech at the Republican convention in August, Kerry appeared around midnight in Springfield, Ohio, to attack Bush and Cheney. When Bush had barely finished his address to the United Nations General Assembly, Kerry attacked that, and when the Iraqi interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, addressed Congress late last month, the Kerry campaign wasted not a moment before attacking him. “The last thing you want to be seen as is a puppet of the United States,” said war-room maven and new Kerry spokesman Joe Lockhart. Actually, the last thing you want to be seen as is a clueless jerk who thinks the exigencies of the campaign war room more important than the respect owed an ally in a real war. Democratic senator Joe Biden had to rapidly respond to Kerry’s rapid response team, assuring Allawi personally that under a Kerry administration he “would continue to have the full support of the United States of America in order to be able to establish a representative republic” in Iraq. “The rapid response, war room mentality has its virtues,” noted the Powerline blog. “But they do not trump the imperative that a presidential candidate appear statesmanlike or at least generally supportive of the nation’s objectives. . . . You can’t . . . barge into the batter’s box when it’s the other guy’s turn to hit.”

Master politicians such as Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Reagan were tough, but they could also inspire, and none ever pulled stunts such as these. They were too self-protective, as well as too sensible: Since Kerry took up his pugnacious persona, his ratings have dropped like a rock. None of this seems likely to deter other Democrats, who, believing as they do that Republicans only win by mud-slinging, will want to sling more mud themselves.

As Kerry started his slide, cable news talking head Susan Estrich, a one-time adviser to Michael Dukakis, flipped out in an infamous column, urging her friends to run ads claiming a younger George Bush once helped a girlfriend to get an abortion, and calling Vice President Cheney a dangerous drunk. “Could Dick Cheney get a license to drive a school bus with his record?” she asked. Americans would no doubt have hired Dukakis to drive a bus anywhere, but when it comes to a matter of driving the country, they want someone a touch more hardheaded. The war-room obsession has serious drawbacks. It helps to be tough, and to press your case strongly. But first, you need something to say.

Noemie Emery is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.