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Sun. Aug 22, 2004

The Politics of Chest Thumping

Because it goes so well with my blown gasket rant, here’s an extensive quote from a wonderful piece by Andrew Ferguson at the Weekly Standard (not exactly a leftist institution). He doesn’t just hit the nail on the head, he hammers out a whole living room set. He makes the very sad point that, in their heart of hearts, in this election neither side is really happy with Their Guy. And that is at the root of much of the negative campaigning we’ve seen:

FOR THE PAST couple weeks Republican activists have bent themselves to the task of proving that John Kerry, who was awarded five medals during four months of service in the Vietnam war, isn’t a war hero, and the marvelous intensity of their exertions started me thinking.

As normal Americans lose interest in politics, and as their moderating influence fades from the general conversation, politics has become increasingly the plaything of obsessives. And what obsessives bring to politics, unsurprisingly, are their own obsessions, rooted in the uneasiness and insecurities that we all share to one degree or another.

The same frustration led directly to the bizarre outcome of this year’s primaries, when Democrats nominated a charmless and undistinguished candidate whom no one seemed to like very much and who displays a dazzling lack of the most elementary political skills, such as being able to deliver a speech without boring half his audience into paralytic catatonia.

But he had a single qualification that overwhelmed his many shortcomings. John Kerry is a war hero. John Kerry fought Charlie in ‘Nam. John Kerry wore the brown bar and ate the chop-chop. John Kerry was in the shit and came out alive. (Democrats can speak the lingo too, you know.) So who you calling a “peace party” now? Huh?

Conservatives actually do revere the military, without reservation. It is not their inclination to debunk combat heroes [...] Yet in 2004, Republicans find themselves supporting a candidate, George W. Bush, with a slender and ambiguous military record against a man whose combat heroism has never (until now) been disputed. Further — and here we’ll let slip a thinly disguised secret — Republicans are supporting a candidate that relatively few of them find personally or politically appealing. This is not the choice Republicans are supposed to be faced with. The 1990s were far better. In those days the Democrats did the proper thing, nominating a draft-dodger to run against George H.W. Bush, who was the youngest combat pilot in the Pacific theater in World War II, and then later, in 1996, against Bob Dole, who left a portion of his body on the beach at Anzio.

Republicans have no such luck this time, and so they scramble to reassure themselves that they nevertheless are doing the right thing, voting against a war hero. The simplest way to do this is to convince themselves that the war hero isn’t really a war hero. If sufficient doubt about Kerry’s record can be raised, we can vote for Bush without remorse. But the calculations are transparently desperate. Reading some of the anti-Kerry attacks over the last several weeks, you might conclude that this is the new conservative position: A veteran who volunteered for combat duty, spent four months under fire in Vietnam, and then exaggerated a bit so he could go home early is the inferior, morally and otherwise, of a man who had his father pull strings so he wouldn’t have to go to Vietnam in the first place.

Needless to say, the proposition will be a hard sell in those dim and tiny reaches of the electorate where voters have yet to make up their minds. Indeed, it’s far more likely that moderates and fence-sitters will be disgusted by the lengths to which partisans will go to discredit a rival. But this anti-Kerry campaign is not designed to win undecided votes. It’s designed to reassure uneasy minds.

Andrew Ferguson“Marching to November: The politics of chest-thumping”

Ouch.

But “moderates and fence-sitters will be disgusted” doesn’t begin to touch the truth. I’m hard pressed to name a single soul involved on either side that hasn’t disgusted me by the glee with which they shovel crap into the maw of this beast. Possibly John McCain, because he’s not only seen all this before, he’s been the target of it. And he’s stepped out of the Republican ranks more than once to call Bullshit on this. He seems almost as disgusted by it as I am.

Almost.