IN 1969, THE CALIFORNIA rock musician John Fogerty wrote a song called “Fortunate Son,” recorded it with his band, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and released it on the album Willy and the Poor Boys. It is a short song, lasting just over two minutes, and it is an intense one. “Some folks are born, silver spoon in hand,” Fogerty screeches, and his barely controlled fury, overlaid atop distorted guitars, made the song a classic–one that has popped up ever since in film soundtracks, television commercials, and during the occasional antiwar protest. Last week, Fogerty’s song resurfaced as the name of a high-stakes political operation run out of Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington–and as shorthand for the DNC’s accusation against George W. Bush.
“It seemed appropriate,” Howard Wolfson said, when I asked him how the project he runs came to be called “Operation Fortunate Son.” (We’ll call it OFS for short.) The goal of OFS is to paint President Bush as a spoiled “child of privilege” who used his connections to weasel his way into the National Guard, and then later used those same connections to weasel his way out of his Guard commitments. “I think [Fogerty’s song] fairly well sums up the president’s life and experiences,” Wolfson said.
He has been busy. Last week the story of Bush’s National Guard service was all over the news, though not in the way the DNC had hoped. Because CBS used now-discredited documents as the hook for its report on the president’s Guard years, the CBS story quickly overshadowed the story of Bush’s service. But a chunk of the DNC is working day and night, trying to keep alive complaints about Bush’s Guard record.
Wolfson is a political consultant, a marathon runner, and one of several Clinton operatives brought aboard the ailing Kerry campaign in recent weeks. In 2000, during Hillary Clinton’s successful run for the Senate, he served as the first lady’s communications director, and in the course of the 18-month campaign set up a rapid-response “war room” that rivaled her husband’s 1992 version. He has mastered the press secretary’s art of using clipped, one-word sentences to answer almost any question. Ask him what it was like his first time around at the Kerry campaign, which employed him for four and a half days in early April, and he’ll tell you, “Short.” And ask him if he ever thought Vietnam would figure so heavily in a 21st-century presidential campaign, and he’ll tell you, “Never.”
OFS has two goals. “One, we’re going to make the point that the president has misled the nation about his National Guard service in the same way that he’s misled the nation about so many other issues, like Iraq, the cost of his prescription drug bill, the deficit, the implications of his tax plan, and on and on,” Wolfson said. In other words, the DNC wants to turn Bush’s time in the Guard into a character issue. “And second,” Wolfson went on, “we’re going to make this point that he’s a son of privilege, a fortunate son, who’s had special privileges and favors done for him, and is now in the White House handing out special privileges and favors to special interests, like the oil companies and the pharmaceutical companies.”
It might seem a stretch for the Kerry campaign to make “privilege” a key theme of the race. After all, their candidate is the offspring of two venerable New England dynasties–the Forbeses and the Winthrops–and attended a Swiss boarding school, St. Paul’s, and Yale before marrying a billionaire heiress. But Wolfson’s team is barreling ahead. They have deployed surrogates like Iowa senator Tom Harkin and DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe to talk to reporters at press conferences and in conference calls and television appearances. Wolfson’s team has organized veterans, too; some served in the Guard, others did not. The veterans hold press conferences in swing states (Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, and so on) in which they raise questions about Bush’s Guard service.
And Wolfson’s team cobbled together a two-and-a-half-minute web movie titled, yet again, “Fortunate Son,” which splices Vietnam-era footage with ominous narration and interviews with figures involved in the National Guard controversy. You can hear a few bars of John Fogerty’s classic in the background. The video was made after CBS’s discredited 60 Minutes broadcast, and uses footage from it, although not of the documents, which purportedly were typed by Bush’s Guard commander in the early 1970s, but actually were produced on a computer with Microsoft Word.
The video came under scrutiny last week, when NBC and CBS both requested the DNC pull the ad because it uses footage from their news shows without permission. “There hasn’t been any action on that that I’m aware of,” Wolfson told me. A spokesman for the DNC, Jano Cabrera, said the networks’ complaints were “under consideration.”
Wolfson’s operation is well-oiled. His first day at the helm of OFS was Monday, September 6. On September 14, McAuliffe held a press conference and used the “Operation Fortunate Son” slogan for the first time. However, OFS was planned much earlier. Look back at the month before the operation began, and aspects of the Democrats’ strategy come into focus, like the outline of a figure emerging from the mist.
On August 11, for example, Bob Tuke, the Tennessee state chair of Veterans for Kerry, told a Nashville radio station that, soon, “We may also know why Bush failed to show up for his medical exam that caused him to lose his flight status.” A few weeks later, on September 1, liberal blogger Joshua Micah Marshall reported that Dan Rather was working on a 60 Minutes story about Bush and the Guard. On September 2, the day Bush accepted his party’s nomination in New York, the online magazine Salon published an exhaustive investigation into the “unanswered questions” surrounding the president’s service. On September 6, Terry McAuliffe issued a press release detailing “what we don’t know” about Bush’s Guard years. Another DNC release on the same topic followed on September 7. Three more followed on September 8, the day 60 Minutes aired its story featuring the now-discredited Guard memos. One of the DNC releases that day relied heavily on the 60 Minutes report.
Also on September 8, an independent group called Texans for Truth, whose founder has ties to the anti-Bush group MoveOn.org, announced it would run ads on Bush and the Guard in several swing states. A new batch of National Guard documents were released that day, too, and the Boston Globe and the Associated Press both featured stories on the new finds. The Globe story concluded that “Bush fell well short of meeting his military obligation.” Then, on September 9, the DNC issued two more press releases that again quoted extensively from the 60 Minutes report, including from the discredited memos.
The DNC continued to issue press releases on Bush and the Guard, but, after September 9, the releases no longer mentioned the memos. The absence was noticeable. “I think it’s a sign that there is plenty to talk about irrespective of the CBS documents,” Wolfson told me. “Many other news organizations have done reporting on this. There’s a set of facts that are incontrovertible and are not in dispute.”
What is in dispute, however, is how effective OFS will prove to be. For Bush, who enlisted in the Texas Air National Guard in 1968, was trained as a jet pilot, and was honorably discharged in 1974, questions about his clumsy explanations of some gaps in his service record and about his activities in 1972-1973 are perennials; they’ve come up in every race he’s run. Yet such questions haven’t had any discernible effect on voters’ behavior in the past. So why is the DNC making an issue out of them once more? Some Democrats said the Kerry campaign was forced into this situation by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and their visceral, effective attacks on John Kerry’s war record. “I do think that the fact that the president’s allies chose to make John Kerry’s service an issue makes this topic salient,” Wolfson told me. He put it more plainly to Fox’s Sean Hannity on September 13: “We are down this road, Sean,” he said, “because the so-called Swift boat veterans launched an attack.”
It’s possible, of course, that OFS could damage the president’s campaign. Every time the National Guard issue has been raised, it has receded into the background, overtaken by events. It’s hard to make such attacks stick against incumbents, who tend to be judged primarily by their record in office. But Wolfson says the operation will last “until” he is “told otherwise.” And every day that the president’s National Guard service is a story can’t be a good one for the president, can it?
Maybe. “I think Howard’s a very talented communications guy who’s unfortunately trapped in a very dumb campaign strategy,” says Michael Murphy, a Republican political consultant. “The Kerry guys are caught in this reflexive mentality that says, ‘Kerry’s a war hero, therefore he gets a pass on all criticism, and if anyone attacks him, just compare him to Bush and the Guard and we win the election.’ But they’ve been beating that dead cat for a year now, and they’ve managed to blow an election they were winning.”
Murphy continued quickly.
“So, yeah, the tactics are that they play the Fogerty song, and they put up some stupid web ads, and they attack Bush as the son of privilege,” he went on. “They’re desperately trying to refight the Vietnam war . . . counterpunching about Guard service.”
He paused, searching for the right words. “Kerry ought to follow his own advice to the Foreign Relations Committee,” he said, “and get the hell out of Vietnam.”
Matthew Continetti is a reporter at The Weekly Standard.
