Someone asked me recently, “Don’t you think that the swift boat veterans’ attack on Kerry is going to backfire on Bush?” My answer was blunt and immediate: “No.” While the anti-Kerry faction has been caught in numerous contradictions, and has been been discredited by many of the documents from the Viet Nam era, they have already succeeded in many ways. They have planted doubts in the minds of many Americans about Kerry’s heroism, they have completely taken the candidate off message, they have forced the Kerry campaign to use precious dollars trying to rebut the attacks, they have placed Kerry, just weeks after the Democratic convention, on the defensive, and have stripped much of the luster from his Viet Nam service. Who would have ever thought that the guy who served in Viet Nam would be scrambling to defend himself, while the guy who avoided service would be off the hook!? All campaigns have remarkable and unforeseen twists and turns (remember all the pundits who wrote off Bill Clinton in 1992), but this is a remarkable development.

George W. Bush has played the situation like a virtuoso, using a good cop-bad cop strategy that would make the NYPD proud: Bush comes out and praises Kerry’s service, while the swift boat veterans beat Kerry about the head and shoulders. Bush manages to stay about the fray, while the slanders about Kerry multiply. Who do we blame for this food fight over whether Kerry bled or not while earning his Bronze Star? Who do we blame for a situation in which swift boat veteran Larry Thornton states that Kerry was not under fire on March 13, 1969--the day that Kerry earned his Bronze Star--while Thurlow himself earned a Bronze Star during the very same incident, with Thurlow’s service records describing “enemy bullets flying about him." Clearly, Thurlow wants to have it both ways. Sadly, the fact that so many of the charges against Kerry do not withstand scrutiny is irrelevant, because most of the specifics are lost on the electorate anyway. What the anti-Kerry Veterans have managed to do is create a “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” attitude among segments of the population, an attitude that is corrosive to the Kerry campaign. Who do I blame for this appalling state of affairs? I blame John Kerry.

There are certain moments in a campaign that test a candidate to the utmost: Clinton during the Gennifer Flowers disclosure, Reagan after the disastrous first debate with Mondale. Far more than questioning Kerry’s conduct on that swift boat in 1969, the challenge by the veterans raises a more important question: Who is John Kerry today, and how will he handle these attacks? It is not enough to let surrogates handle Kerry’s defense, and it is certainly not sufficient to go running to the Federal Elections Commission to ask them to take the ads off the air; that only makes Kerry look weaker. Instead, what Kerry needs to do is what anyone should do when their integrity and honor have been defamed: First, get angry. Second, come out with both guns blazing. Kerry has difficulty doing both of these things. His first instinct, to maintain a patrician distance from the controversy, while letting aides and surrogates handle it, plays into the stereotype of him as aloof, over-reflective, and wishy-washy. Such a response will not serve him here. Indeed, the electorate is waiting to see how much fight, how much “Harry Truman” Kerry has in him; whether, when backed into a corner, Kerry will come out throwing punches.

A political campaign is like a boxing match in many ways: The guy who is pressing the action tends to be given points, even when he is landing no punches. That is, aggression is rewarded for its own sake. Kerry has told us many times that he will not conduct his campaign in the passive manner of Michael Dukakis in 1988. However, the fact that Kerry is back on his heels, reacting weakly to every charge, leaves him closer to Dukakis than most Democrats would care to see. It is instructive to recall the Bush/Dukakis debate in which CNN correspondent Bernard Shaw asked Dukakis what Dukakis would do if his wife Kitty were raped and murdered. The breathtaking inappropriateness of the question was apparent to everyone; everyone, that is, except Dukakis. Rather than take umbrage at Shaw for asking such a stupid question, Dukakis impassively and robotically answered the question. In doing so, he lost the debate before it ever started. If Kerry truly believes, as I do, that the Swift Boat Veterans for truth are an unacknowledged arm of the Bush campaign, it is time for Kerry to go after Bush:

Why is it, he should ask, that so many people seem to remember his service in View Nam, when absolutely nobody remembers George W. Bush showing up for National Guard duty in Alabama? Why is Kerry being asked to prove the severity of his injuries, when the only proof Bush can show that he even completed his National Guard duty are some records that indicate that he got his teeth cleaned once in Alabama? Why is it that Kerry is being taken to task for some intemperate remarks about Viet Nam atrocities that he made 35 years ago, when the only memorable remark George W. Bush made at that time was, “Another drink, bartender?” Instead of merely threatening to compare their records from that era, Kerry should actually do it. Not with surrogates, not through spokesmen, but by Kerry himself, with all the righteous indignation that he should be feeling. Kerry needs to show a willingness to get his hands dirty. If the Republicans want to mud-wrestle, what the electorate wants to know is if Kerry is willing to roll up his sleeves and mud-wrestle. If high-toned discourse alone won elections, the list of American presidents would have names like Stevenson, Humphrey, McGovern, and Mondale.

Beyond the smears, there is one real way in which Kerry’s Viet Nam era activity is hampering his campaign today. Because Kerry, in the 1970’s, made so many unproven charges of atrocities committed by US soldiers, I think he is apparently now gun-shy about addressing the atrocities of Abu Ghraib. Once again, in steering clear of this monumental military and diplomatic debacle, Kerry is making a mistake. We now know that not only were the military brass willfully negligent with respect to the goings-on at Abu Ghraib, military doctors were also accomplices in the torture. In one case, doctors awoke a man who had been beaten unconscious, so his interrogation could continue; in others, genital wounds that could only have been cause by torture went unreported; and shamefully, prisoner homicides were shielded by false death certificates that said “natural causes.” Such medical personnel, bound by the Geneva Conventions as well as the Hippocratic Oath, became facilitators of torture. Just today, we learned of a game that soldiers played with teenage detainees: Soldiers would use unmuzzled dogs to frighten the teenagers, in a sadistic attempt to get the young detainees to urinate on themselves. No, this was not ordered by Bush, or by Rumsfeld, or Sanchez, or Cheney, but it speaks to the extraordinary contempt and disregard with which the Iraqi citizens were viewed. Kerry would do himself a world of good, if he dropped all of his excessive caution, stood up, and in the spirit of Frank Serpico, told the nation, “The whole [expletive] system’s corrupt!”

I’m just back from a well-deserved vacation, and the campaign two weeks later looks about the same as when I left. The tracking polling that I follow, Rasmussen Reports, shows Kerry with a 49-46% lead over Bush, and an electoral edge of 228-197, with 113 electoral votes undecided. Remember that 270 electoral votes are needed to win the election. It is noteworthy that in the Rasmussen tracking poll, Kerry has been at 48 or 49 % for the last week or so, while Bush has been at 45 or 46 % during that time. That suggests at least a temporary hardening of attitudes about the candidates—at least until the time of the Republican convention.

Despite the modest lead that Kerry may show, one still has to ask, is Kerry maximizing his campaign opportunities? I last made a blog entry at the end of the Democratic convention, saluting the Democrats for an impressive well-run convention. In the days after the Boston convention, we saw, however, that Kerry enjoyed only a slight bounce in the polls. While I remain convinced that the convention was quite successful in introducing John Kerry to the American people, it had a failing that still permeates the Kerry campaign: It was too nice. Far too much time was spend guarding against the charge that the Democrats are too negative; not enough time was and is being spent highlighting the negatives of the Bush administration. While attributes like decency, integrity, and optimism are admirable traits, they do not win presidential elections. If they did, Richard Nixon would never have trounced George McGovern in 1972. If decency were the prime selling point in a candidate, Walter Mondale, one of the most decent men on the political landscape, would not have been routed by Ronald Reagan. Decency in and of itself contributes little to a candidate’s effectiveness; rather, it is the image of strength, toughness, and efficacy, not decency, that draws voters. Back in March I wrote a 2000 word essay on “machismo” as the deciding factor in presidential elections over the last half century (“Machismo Theory: The Key to Predicting Presidential Elections”. You can find it in the March archives of my blog.) It is clear from watching the Republicans, that they intuitively understand this principle. The Matt Drudge wing of the party desperately tried to make hay of the picture of Kerry in the space suit, crawling out of the space shuttle at NASA. The attempt flopped. Dick Cheney recently jumped on Kerry’s use of the phrase “sensitive diplomacy,” as if it was some sort of curse word. Cheney’s insinuation was clear, that Kerry is not manly enough to spearhead the war on terrorism. The disgraceful ads from the anti-Kerry “swift boat” veterans are a two pronged assault on Kerry: They question his honesty, while more importantly trying to undermine his image of valor. While so far none of these attacks has gained any traction, they do show a potential vulnerability in the Kerry campaign: Bush has established himself as the attacker, Kerry the counterpuncher. The Kerry campaign, in order to win the election, will have to establish some sustained offense of its own. How should it accomplish this?

First, the convention should have been more aggressive. While the speeches of Gore, Clinton, Obama, Rassman, Cleland, and Kerry were uplifting and inspirational, there was one speech that was conspicuous by its absence: a slash and burn speech, focused directly on the failures of the Bush administration. It would have suited me fine if James Carville, Anne Richards, or any prominent Democrat had been given a prime-time opportunity to list the following failures and deceptions of the Bush camp:

1) The Bushies signed a tax cut of which one-third of the benefits went to the top 1% income bracket. They said that the tax cut would not bust the budget, based on the phony premise that the tax cut would expire after several years. When that expiration date came, they moved to make the tax cuts permanent, leaving a half trillion budget deficit, as far as the eye can see.

2) The Bushies signed a drug prescription bill for the elderly in which they withheld the real cost of the plan from Congress until the vote had been taken. Further, the prescription plan has more holes in it than Swiss cheese, and prevents the government from bargaining with drug companies to secure better prices. The bill was completely inadequate, and a rip-off of the elderly.

3) The Bushies cherry-picked intelligence to build a phony case for the Iraq war. Moreover, after Gen.John Shinseki told a senate committee that “several hundred thousand” troops would be needed to wage a successful operation in Iraq, the Defense Department not only shunned him, but spent the next two years stubbornly trying to prove him wrong by sending an insufficient number of troops to Iraq during the occupation. As a result there were not enough troops to carry out the necessary police functions, nor to secure Iraq’s borders from the influx of new terrorists. One major reason that ordinary Iraqis resent us so much is that they are shocked by our very incompetence. One shopkeeper in Baghdad told the Washington Post about the occupation, “I thought that the Americans had a good army, but they are staggering around here like drunkards!”

4) Finally, there are two words that to my knowledge were never spoken at the Democratic Convention, two words that rarely if ever have passed John Kerry’s lips: Abu Ghraib. The scandal of Abu Ghraib is a metaphor for the fundamental failure of the Bush foreign policy: You cannot export democracy and democratic values to other regions of the world if you do not strongly believe in those values yourself. Documents have now laid bare the administration’s wholesale disdain for the Geneva Conventions, the manner in which prisoners at Guantanamo Bay had their lives and those of their families threatened during interrogations, the manner in which dogs were allowed to intimidate prisoners, and the manner in which the entire military hierarchy winked and nodded after telling the guards to “give the prisoners the treatment” at Abu Ghraib. The issue of the treatment of foreign detainees dovetails with the problems of the Patriot Act and the treatment of American citizens: Individuals who scoff at the provisions of the Geneva Conventions are just as likely to run roughshod over the legitimate rights of American citizens here at home. Finally, Abu Ghraib has severely undermined our image as force for global good and has energized international terrorism. Only a morally bankrupt administration—not to mention a stupid one—could have presided over an Abu Ghraib. John Kerry and his surrogates should be beating this issue like a drum, but so far in the campaign it has gotten nary a mention.

These four critiques of Bush should be staples of the Kerry stump speech. And what of John Edwards, whose traditional role as veep is that of lead attacker? Frankly, in the last several weeks I have not seen or heard of Edwards. While Dick Cheney has appeared on the nightly news with some regularity, Edwards of late has been largely invisible. And while I have always found John Edwards to be both smart and decent, I am now all the more convinced that Joe Biden would have been a stronger vice-presidential choice. (See my blog “My Pick for Vice-President, June 18.) Biden has logged more airtime recently then Edwards, and in my view, speaks with more authority on the Iraq occupation than Bush, Kerry, Cheney, or Rumsfeld! He would have brought some genuine gravitas to the ticket.

Paradoxically, I’m looking forward to the Republican Convention. Indeed, I hope that the Republicans are in full attack mode, because I believe that seeing four days of sustained right wing blasts will serve to wake up John Kerry and get him not only more engaged, but frankly, more angry. He needs to realize that the next president will not be the individual who wins a well-mannered debate; rather, it will be the individual who emerges from a street fight.