Conventional wisdom says that if the Kerry/Edwards ticket
triumphs over the Bush/Cheney ticket on November 2nd, it will be
because Americans want “fresh credibility” and a new start rather
than more of the same. Pundits riding that horse tend to have an
underdeveloped sense of irony, however: look for them to switch
mounts if the Democrats lose. To preserve the integrity of their
worldview, they have to believe that Republican defeats trace back
to message, but Democratic defeats trace back to messenger.
If the Kedwards ticket goes down, you won’t find candor in the
first blush of loss, when campaign staffers hug each other and
chirp about the great race run by their vanquished candidates.
Distraught cooing in the aviary will yield to raucous cawing when
stories about the outrages of Karl Rove and his brainwashed toadies
begin dominating the news cycle. That cathartic moment will in turn
clear space for Pulitzer Prize-winning think pieces about how hard
it is to sell nuance to the yokels in flyover country.
Only when the media have put those ground rules in place will
reporters start finding Democrats willing to speculate about the
shortcomings of their standard-bearers. As embittered interview
subjects start throwing darts at Kerry and Edwards, professional
commentators will be working overtime to preserve the health of the
“Who’s your daddy?” and “W stands for Wrong” memes on which the
Democratic Party now depends.
Stories about how Kerry never really connected with his putative
constituents will read like eulogies for a misunderstood uncle.
Edwards will revert to the “aw, shucks” form best suited for
rehabilitating his own career. Syndicated columnists will attribute
Kerry’s downfall to voter
fraud (Paul Krugman of the New York Times has already
joined the Democratic National Committee in testing that theory). If Republicans win more than ten
percent of the black vote or voter fraud becomes unusable as a
story frame because it looks predominantly Democratic, columnists
will pin Kerry’s loss on Bush’s stubbornness, Rove’s genius, and
the street-fighting skills of the Swift Boat Veterans and POWs for Truth.
I’m hoping to see this kind of analysis because it will only
surface if Bush wins. On the other hand, it’s superficial at best.
And here I must confess that I’ve buried the lead. If the Democrats
lose badly enough to create more blame or thanksgiving than Kerry
deserves to shoulder by himself, a case can be made for ignoring
the usual suspects to salute the inadvertent contributions of
Douglas Brinkley, Mary Mapes, and the U.S. military, in that
order.
THE JANUARY 2004 RELEASE of Douglas Brinkley’s sanitized biography,
Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War, reinforced
the Senator’s habit of emphasizing Vietnam service to the exclusion
of almost everything he’s done since then. Brinkley underscored the
image that Kerry meant to project by launching his formal campaign
with a press conference next to the WWII aircraft carrier USS
Yorktown. The site of that announcement looks in
retrospect like a metaphor for the entire Kerry campaign. As a
vintage carrier, and in contrast to ships of its type still far
from retirement, the Yorktown’s symbolic strength is
leavened by a dose of nostalgia.
The same could be said about Brinkley’s book, which triggered
public questions about Kerry’s old diary and medical records. Most
importantly, the Brinkley book galvanized the Swift Boat Veterans
for Truth into escalating their longstanding fight with the warrior
who slandered his brothers-in-arms while testifying in front of the
legislative body to which he would later be elected. Without
Tour of Duty, there would not have been a bestselling
rebuttal called Unfit for Command.
Those veterans angry with John Kerry didn’t want the grief of
organizing when he was a junior Senator whose policy views impacted
only one state. Brinkley’s book changed that dynamic by giving
Kerry a platform from which to become a problem for the whole
country. Without meaning to, Brinkley proved to many Swiftees and
POWs that Kerry had flunked the national test. More than 200 of
these warriors figured he did not therefore deserve election to an
office from which he could flunk global tests. The global test that
wandered into Republican talking points after the first
presidential debate was only able to do so because Kerry missed
this irony.
In a higher-profile mistake, CBS producer Mary Mapes beached
John Kerry’s Swift Boat while trying to steer it into a collision
with the F-102 jet fighter once flown by George Bush. When alleged
National Guard documents on which Mapes built a televised report
were exposed as fakes, the credibility of the mainstream media
suffered a blow from which it never recovered. Worse, her history
and conduct left no room for other people to defend what she had
done as an honest mistake. Howard Fineman of Newsweek told
radio host Don Imus that Mapes was “obsessed” with trying to prove
that George Bush got special treatment. She was, he said, trying to “save the world from a George Bush
presidency.” Instead she proved that ideology has no regard for
truth.
Mapes effectively neutered a Kerry ally that one magazine
editor had previously said was capable of giving the
Democrats perhaps fifteen points in polls. Her position at CBS
makes Kerry and Edwards seem especially clueless when they
repeatedly invoke “what you see on TV with your own eyes” as
evidence for thinking that everything in Iraq has curdled. Now we
hear of a leaked memo from ABC honcho Mark Halperin advising
reporters to look harder at Bush than at Kerry. Is anyone surprised? Didn’t think so. That lack of public
shock at obvious bias is and was a gift to Bush from Mary
Mapes.
UNLIKE BRINKLEY AND MAPES, the military damaged Kerry without being
self-consciously partisan, simply because in a wartime election,
military families become fact-checkers. Active and retired military
people are the ones explaining that Kerry’s plan to double Special
Forces would blunt their effectiveness by making them less elite.
Soldiers in Afghanistan dispute the Kerry claim that George Bush “outsourced”
fighting at Tora Bora. Troops also point out that they’d rather serve with other
volunteers than with draftees, and that recruiting goals are still
being met. Stateside relatives of active duty Army and Marine Corps
personnel called radio talk shows to tell fellow citizens
about the big difference between deploying with obsolete body armor
(which some units did), and deploying with no body armor at all
(which Kerry claimed they had done).
As Democrats name-drop about the handful of retired generals in
their camp, Bush basks in polls showing that military families give him a three
to one edge over Kerry when asked which of the two candidates they
trust more. Gaps like that matter.
The sunrise side of the mountain is worth looking at, as the
president said in the third debate while talking about a painting,
but also perhaps because he believes that Romans 8:28 and similar
verses describe the ultimate in root causes. If that’s the case,
I’m right there with him. Come November 3, I’ll either be asking
God to bestow newfound wisdom on John Kerry, or thanking Him for
Douglas Brinkley, Mary Mapes, and many people in uniform. Call it
Christmas Eve in Cambodia, or Thanksgiving in America.
