John Kerry (centre) stands with other military personnel at an unspecified location circa 1960s. Details of Kerry’s service during the Vietnam War and his subsequent anti-war activities became the focus of veterans groups’ efforts to smear him during his 2004 presidential campaign.
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In questioning Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz’s military record, Republicans are revisiting a political playbook they last used successfully, exactly 20 years ago.
It even has a name: fast rowing.
The word later entered the dictionary to refer to an unfair or untrue political attack. It was named after a smear campaign by Vietnam veterans groups against John Kerry during the 2004 presidential campaign.
Long before Kerry represented Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate, he served as a naval officer during the Vietnam War. He spent four months in Vietnam in 1969, manning a patrol craft called a Clipper, and left with multiple combat medals, including three Purple Hearts.
Back home, Kerry became a leading anti-war campaigner as the war dragged on. In 1971, as a spokesman for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, he spoke critically and vividly about the war in now-famous testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
In April 1971, 27-year-old John Kerry spoke before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on behalf of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW).
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“He was both an anti-war activist and a veteran, and that combination was significant,” said Derek Buckaloo, a professor of American history at the Iowa Academy of Sciences who specializes in the Vietnam War and its aftermath .
Decades later, against the backdrop of the September 11 attacks and the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Kerry’s military heroism became a major selling point of his 2004 presidential campaign. Even his nomination acceptance speech began this way: “I’m John Kerry, and I’m checking in.”
As Buckalew explained, Democrats hope Kerry’s status as a decorated veteran will protect him from Republican accusations that the party is weak on defense.
“Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic leader at the time, famously said that Kerry’s ‘chest full of medals’ would protect him from such attacks,” Buckalew said. “Things didn’t work out that way, in large part because of the activities of a group called Speedboat Veterans Seeking Truth.”
What happened in 2004
Massachusetts Democratic Senator John Kerry speaks at a veterans support Kerry campaign rally in Minneapolis on June 4, 2004 during his presidential campaign.
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Truth Boat Veterans is a 527 political organization formed purely to campaign against Kerry.
As an independent advocacy group, it can raise money and spend without restrictions as long as it is not coordinated with a presidential campaign. In other words, it technically has nothing to do with Kerry’s Republican challenger, current President George W. Bush, although that doesn’t hurt his chances.
“The Bush administration has kept them at arm’s length, but certainly not in their way,” Bakalou said. “They raised tens of millions of dollars and spent those funds on a series of attack ads against Kerry that essentially fit his narrative that being a veteran made him trustworthy, suggesting he was concerned about his record. lied.
The group funded a book (titled “Unfit to Command”) and several television ads in which veterans expressed doubts about Kerry’s heroism in Vietnam and criticized what they considered a betrayal of Kerry to anti-war activists. The schism reflects a larger cultural divide in Americans’ views on the Vietnam War, Buckalew said.
Their accusations are widely believed to be false. Military records (released by the Kerry campaign) back up his claims to fight. While most of the Clipper veterans who have spoken out against Kerry did not directly serve with him, those who have publicly supported his version of events are.
In the fresh air of 2018 In the interview, Kerry said his critics were “just making it up… from the left, the right and the center” and that his campaign presented evidence that didn’t match their “alternative facts.”
“The problem is that the big money behind the right comes from some of the same names that are doing significant right-wing funding in this country today,” Kerry said. “They’re starting to take these alternative facts and put them in the context of … television ads. “
The ads became stories in themselves, which Bakalou describes as an example of pre-social media virality.
The relatively young Sean Hannity of Fox News debuted the first ad the day before it aired in August. Soon after, TV ads originally targeted at a handful of swing states were picked up by national talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and eventually picked up by mainstream media.
Buckalew said the quick row undermined Kerry’s momentum at the Democratic National Convention and turned one of his greatest strengths into a liability.
“[It] It ended up creating a situation where Kerry had to run away from being a veteran and try not to talk about the war, when in fact he was running against George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, two people who were well known because For various reasons, he did not serve in Vietnam,” he added.
The Kerry campaign was relatively slow to respond in the initial stages — a move that Buckalou said may have been an effort to avoid expanded coverage, but is now widely viewed as a misstep — and has largely been stagnant since then. Avoided the topic. The ads became one of the most enduring images of the 2004 election, which Kerry ultimately lost.
What are the similarities and differences this time?
Democratic vice presidential candidate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz speaks at a campaign rally in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, on Wednesday.
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While claims about candidates’ military records (or lack thereof) continue to crop up in politics, until this week, the era of fast boating seemed to be fading into memory.
After Walz talked about carrying “weapons of war” in a speech calling for gun control, Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance publicly questioned whether his new opponent, a 24-year National Guard veteran, Served in the war.
Both vice presidential candidates are veterans who have never seen combat, running under presidential candidates who have never served. Walz has faced questions for years about the timing of his retirement, months after his unit was mobilized to Iraq.
But this week’s “stealing courage” attack goes further, directly echoing the 2004 Clipper approach. Chris LaCivita is chief strategist for Clipper Veterans Pursuit of Truth.
“Birds of a feather flock together,” Lacivita said of Kerry and Walz in a recent interview with RealClearPolitics.
But Buckaloo cautions that it’s unclear whether this line of attack will be as effective in 2024 as it was in 2004 — after all, there are some key differences between the two scenarios.
First: the context is very different. In 2004, Bush and Kerry ran for wartime president, at a time when the United States was reeling from the aftermath of 9/11 and sending hundreds of thousands of troops overseas.
While foreign policy — particularly the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza — remains a key issue in the 2024 election, Bakalou said the volume and nature of U.S. involvement in these conflicts is unmatched.
Second, Walz is not a presidential candidate, so he is unlikely to be subject to the same level of scrutiny as Kerry. Even the Republican presidential candidate and former President Trump himself publicly stated that the vice president “had no impact on the election.”
In addition, there is the issue of source. While the 2004 attack was carried out by a now-defunct independent group, today’s charges against Walz come directly from the Trump campaign.
“It shows that Republicans were involved in this attack, and just like in 2004, they might say, ‘Well, we didn’t do this, we’re not going to do this,'” Bakalou said. “But they will do so in 2024… In a context where many Americans question Trump and Vance as messengers or truth-tellers, that could also cause problems.”
And, Bakalou said, Democrats have been through 2004 before. He thinks the party is unlikely to ignore Vance’s attacks.
“They realize you can’t let these things lie, you have to respond to them and say, ‘This is unfair, this is vulgar. This is, in the words of Tim Walz, ‘weird.’ ,” he added.
Time will tell if this works.
