[A-List] US elections: Bush's war service

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

War is hell for Bush
By Jim Lobe
Asia Times, February 13 2004

WASHINGTON - Just as a bona fide war hero is nailing down his candidacy for
president of the United States, the man who already has that job is fighting
persistent allegations that his own service during the Vietnam War was less
than stellar, and that he dragged his country into another war on false
pretenses.

After key wins in primary elections in two southern US states on Tuesday,
Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, the Democratic Party candidate long
considered by George W Bush's top political aides as their most formidable
foe, looks increasingly certain to become the party's choice to oppose Bush
in the November presidential election.

Kerry, who won decisive victories in both Virginia and Tennessee, knocked
retired General Wesley Clark out of the race for the nomination and did
better than expected against his nearest rival, North Carolina Senator John
Edwards, who defeated Kerry last week in the South Carolina primary.

If Kerry wins again next Tuesday in Wisconsin, where the former
front-runner, former Vermont governor Howard Dean, has been concentrating
his campaign efforts, most analysts believe he will in effect have wrapped
up the nomination.

Indeed, party leaders and past rivals have been steadily lining up behind
Kerry since his big victory in last month's Iowa state caucus, a process
that will undoubtedly accelerate now that Kerry has shown
stronger-than-expected support among southern Democrats, traditionally the
party's conservative stronghold.

"It's all over but the shouting," Donna Brazile, who managed former vice
president Al Gore's 2000 presidential run, told the Washington Post on
Wednesday.

Kerry's emergence as the Democrats' standard-bearer comes at a particularly
awkward time for Bush, who has already been forced on the defensive over
mounting charges that he and his top officials exaggerated the threat posed
by former president Saddam Hussein in order to convince Congress and the
public to go to war against Iraq.

Bush is now also struggling with questions - mostly raised by top
Democrats - over his service in the National Guard during the Vietnam War.

On Tuesday, the White House released previously undisclosed National Guard
payroll records for Bush during the period that he was supposed to be
serving, but they only raised new questions about whether he was "absent
without leave" (AWOL) for at least a six-month period in 1972 - a charge he
has previously dismissed out of hand.

"If President Bush thought that his release of selected payroll and service
records would quell the growing controversy over whether he ducked some of
his required service in the Air National Guard three decades ago, he is
clearly mistaken," the New York Times wrote in its lead editorial on
Wednesday.

The reasons for the renewed attention to Bush's service are clear and, if
not addressed adequately, could be potentially disastrous for the
president's re-election prospects, particularly if Kerry is the Democratic
nominee.

Although opposed to the Vietnam War, Kerry, who clearly had the
socio-economic means and contacts to avoid the military draft if he had
wanted, chose to serve in Vietnam, where he became among the war's most
highly decorated combat officers.

The contrast with Bush - whose enlistment in the National Guard was typical
of well-connected college graduates who wished to show military service but
minimize their chances of going to Vietnam - works strongly in favor of
Kerry, although he returned to the United States as an outspoken leader of
the veterans' anti-war movement.

Bush's apparent determination to define himself as a "war president" in the
upcoming campaign - a moniker he used repeatedly in an hour-long interview
on NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday - only works to highlight the contrast in
the two men's records.

(It also makes Vice President Dick Cheney's increasingly tenuous viability
as Bush's running mate even more doubtful, according to knowledgeable
Republican sources. When asked why he did not serve in the military during
the Vietnam War, the administration's most powerful hardliner said it was
because he "had better things to do".)

The renewed questions about Bush's National Guard service might also be
seriously damaging because they come precisely at the moment when his entire
administration is besieged by Democratic charges and media reports claiming
that top officials, including Bush, deliberately misled Congress and the
public about the intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq.

"For a president, trust is the one asset that, once lost, he can't buy
back," noted liberal political analyst Robert Kuttner in a recent column.
"This may be especially true for George W Bush, whose appeal has always been
personal as much as political."

"The polls consistently show that while support for the president has
seriously declined on a policy basis," said Chris Nelson, a Washington
veteran who publishes a private newsletter for foreign embassies, senior
officials and analysts, "there has never been a serious challenge to public
faith in his basic character.

"So if the White House remains unable to show substantive proof that the
'AWOL' charge is false, this could be the leak in the ship which cannot be
plugged ... especially as the Democrats now seem certain to nominate John
Kerry, whose Vietnam service is the real thing."

With Kerry moving steadily toward the nomination, the key question among the
Washington chattering classes now is whom he will pick as his
vice-presidential running mate.

Speculation has focused on Edwards, who, despite less than one full term as
senator, has impressed many analysts as an effective politician -
reminiscent of Bush's predecessor Bill Clinton - able to communicate
extraordinarily well with working-class audiences, in particular.

Not only would Edwards, as a southerner, balance the ticket in a geographic
sense, but his natural rapport with people - honed by a career as a trial
lawyer - also makes up for Kerry's image as somewhat aloof and dour.

A key political analyst for The Nation magazine, a left-liberal news weekly,
is even calling for voters of a similar persuasion to back Edwards against
Kerry in the remaining primaries, for ideological reasons.

"Where Edwards diverges from Kerry is in addressing a series of issues of
distinctive concern to progressives - inequalities of race and class,
abusive corporate power, neo-liberal globalization, ghetto poverty and
prison, and the importance of worker and community organization outside the
state," wrote Joel Rogers.

"And what makes him distinctive is not just that he regularly touches these
third-rail issues, but is effectively running on them."

To Rogers and The Nation, this makes Edwards a welcome contrast to Kerry,
whose long legislative record reflects traditionally liberal views on
individual liberties, neo-liberal notions about the global economy and the
importance of the private sector, and the more multilateral foreign-policy
preferences of the administrations of former Democratic presidents Clinton
and Jimmy Carter (1977-81).

But some analysts think Edwards might be too inexperienced, and believe it
makes little sense for Democrats even to try to compete for southern votes.

They suggest that a vice-presidential candidate taken from the big
industrial states of the northern Midwest or mid-Atlantic states would pay
off in electoral votes. Among the possible choices there is the former
majority leader, Missouri Representative Dick Gephardt, who bowed out of the
presidential race after the Iowa caucuses and immediately endorsed Kerry.