BILL RICHARDS

Successful strategies evade Democrats

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Posted: 7/14/08

A few times a year my faith in the two-party system is momentarily brought out of cold storage, animated by a fleeting hope that the Democrats will finally learn how to stand up to decades of Republican bullying.

But then either the Democrats do something stupid or my drink wears off, and I come back to reality.

This time it happened when I saw clips of Gen. Wesley Clark's recent appearance on CBS's "Face The Nation." When pressed by host Bob Schieffer on whether or not presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain's military experience matters in judging McCain's candidacy, Clark responded smartly and succinctly. He pointed out that "riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is not a qualification to be president."

Taken on its own merits, this is an unequivocally true statement. A person's qualifications for a given job shouldn't include experiences from an entirely different job. Likewise, a person's qualifications for a given job shouldn't include entirely negative experiences in the course of performing an entirely different job, particularly if the position sought is the most powerful in the world. In one sentence, Clark drove a stake into the undead heart of McCain's entire campaign, right down to the typeface on the candidate's official logo: Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam.

Initially, the McCain campaign extended the same tone-deaf attacks made against Al Gore and John Kerry, claiming Clark's assertion proved Obama "was willing to do anything to get elected" and that he "cannot be trusted." One might have almost assumed McCain had never considered the possibility that the importance of his war record would be diminished, let alone on one of the major Sunday morning political talk shows.

At this point, we might think about what might have happened if the country had an actual opposition party. Democrats would push Clark's message on all the cable news and Sunday talk shows. They'd hammer away at McCain's crass, calculated attempts to cast himself as the candidate of "national security" while advocating dangerous, neoconservative foreign policies like an attack on Iran. They'd attack McCain's baseless reputation as a "straight talker." And they'd destroy his Vietnam record just like Bush's Swift Boat Veterans for Truth did to John Kerry in 2004. And after all that we'd be discussing President Obama's benchmarks for his first 100 days in office.

What actually happened, of course, was exactly the opposite. On Monday, Obama rejected Clark's "inartful" statement through his campaign spokesman, just as he had previously done regarding other such comments made by his most dedicated supporters. Instead of continuing to expose the dubious qualifications of his opponent, Obama said that McCain "deserves the utmost honor and respect for his service to our country."

Predictably, just as the Republicans were busy making shrill, emotional claims that Obama was "swiftboating" McCain, and just as Obama was busy reaffirming the Arizona senator's entire platform, McCain was equally busy hiring the Swift Boat Veterans to vouch for his battlefield credentials. McCain hired Swift Boat Veteran Bud Day as part of a propaganda campaign marketed as the McCain "Truth Squad." Day argued that McCain was "horribly wounded in his extremities, and it was questionable if he would survive his experience." The Veteran then made an ad hominem attack against Clark, asserting that he "spent a month in Vietnam, got badly wounded and was evacuated."

Leave aside for a second the premise that a presidential candidate must have come under enemy fire to be considered worthy of the office.

And also leave aside the worrisome tendency for the commander-in-chief role to be increasingly regarded as the most important job for a president. Why is Obama rejecting his supporters' tersest, most biting critiques of McCain when America's leading presidential candidate is deploying the same attacks and political operatives that brought down John Kerry? What marginal advantage does Obama stand to gain by co-opting Republican talking points under the guise of a "new" mode of political discourse? We'll find out in early November, I guess.

- Bill Richards is an occasional columnist for The Red & Black.