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If you had any thought that the first presidential campaign after 9/11 would be especially sober and responsible, give it up.
There are a million angles to the saga of John Kerry and his swift boat enemies and none of them reveal anything virtuous about politics. But one element that is missing from this story is surprise.
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. (Historical footnote: Horton actually went by William, not Willie, and is referred as William in all legal documents; the ad makers thought Willie sounded scarier and blacker.)
That ad was produced by an outfit allegedly independent of the official campaign. It wasn't aired on TV much but got most of its play in the press. Papa Bush and his official staff maintained they knew nothing about such déclassé skullduggery. There was nothing blatantly untrue about the ad, but it was hugely misleading and subtly racist.
The ad also attacked Dukakis right where he was supposed to be strongest. If the Duke had a strength (a big if), it was as a highly competent government CEO who led the Massachusetts Miracle. The ad gave an emotional snapshot of a guy whose incompetence let a killer out of jail so he could commit assault and rape. It worked.
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.
When the swift boaters launched their dark craft did he think it would just vanish? That would be like Bill
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