A Little Bushology

Dick Meyer of CBS provides decent background for a better understanding of this poster.

Writes Meyer:

Any student of Bush family campaigns could have seen the swift boat shiv shining a mile away. This old family has traditions – horseshoes, fishing, bad syntax and having the help do the dirty work in campaigns as well as the kitchen. And they are very good at getting jobs done without leaving fingerprints, without compromising their patrician image and their alleged character.

Even the audaciousness of this year’s episode is not surprising. Who would have believed that George Bush, with all the trouble over his National Guard service, could get John Kerry in hot water for his combat duty and medals in Vietnam? Well, anyone who saw what George Bush did to former POW John McCain in the 2000 primaries, which was even more outrageous.

The ancestral origin of Bush family gut fighting came in George H. W. Bush’s 1988 campaign against Michael Dukakis in the form of the infamous Willie Horton ad.

...The mantle passed to Bush the Younger in 1994 when he ran for governor of Texas against Ann Richards. She was a salty, strong, unmarried woman. And guess what? A whispering campaign got rolling in East Texas that she was gay and so were some of her staffers. Then one of the Bush campaign's local chairmen told a reporter that Richards' appointment of "avowed homosexuals" might become a campaign issue. In the twisted way the press legitimizes talking about questionable issues, that remark made the whole deal fair game.

In 2000, McCain had George W. on the ropes and South Carolina was the do-or-die state. Flyers appeared from thin air alleging that McCain had a black child (he and his wife had adopted a Bangladeshi daughter from an orphanage there). Other fliers said McCain was the "fag candidate." Rumors swirled that McCain’s time in a North Vietnamese prison camp had left him unstable and downright crazy - again, hitting at the opponent's greatest strength. Other rumors were that his wife was a drug addict. Nice stuff, and none of it had Bush’s inky fingerprints on it.

At an event with Bush, a vet from some fringe group accused McCain of abandoning veterans. That really set McCain off and he demanded an apology from Bush. Bush simply said that he believed McCain "served our country nobly." That’s what he says about Kerry now. Above the fray, clean hands, patrician.

Soon after that, a mysterious group dumped $2 million into ads in more liberal New York attacking McCain’s environmental record and boosting Bush's. Eventually, it turned out the ads were bankrolled by a big Bush donor named Sam Wyly. No Bush fingerprints there either.

You get the picture. The big question is why John Kerry didn't.

I agree with everything Meyer writes until that last sentence.

I think it's obvious that John Kerry got the picture. His thorough understanding of the low down and dirty nature of George W. Bush is precisely why he led so forcefully with his Vietnam experience. The attacks on Kerry's Vietnam era activities (both during and after the war) have been in the Bush playbook since before John Kerry secured the nomination. Anyone who didn't or doesn't recognize that fact is an imbecile.

John Kerry recognized that Bush would find some way to make an issue of Vietnam. He realized that the best way to innoculate himself was to preemptively put the issue on the table with such fervor that any subsequent attacks would be blunted. As it turns out, Kerry's forceful display of his record served to give the Swifties a convenient excuse for their antics. Oh, boo hoo. We had no choice but to bring this up cause he talked so much about his record. Waaah. But make no mistake. The attack would have come whether Kerry had fortified his image or not.

Thankfully, Kerry understood the big picture early enough to attenuate the impact of the attack when it came. As it is, Kerry has likely suffered a survivable hit of only a few points. As Kerry said during his Daily Show interview: He's "been through worse."