POLITICS-US: War Hero Moves Steadily Toward Democratic Nomination

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Analysis - By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Feb 11 2004 (IPS) - After key wins in primary elections in two southern states 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 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 Sen John Edwards, who defeated Kerry last week in the South Carolina primary.

If Kerry wins again next Tuesday in Wisconsin, where former front-runner, Governor Howard Dean, has been concentrating his campaign efforts, most analysts believe he will have effectively 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 Wednesday.

The reasons for the renewed attention to Bush’s service are clear and, if not addressed adequately, 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 minimise their chances of going to Vietnam – works strongly in favour 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’ 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 hard-liner said it was because he ”had better things to do”.)

The renewed questions about Bush’s National Guard service might also be serious 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”, according to 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 newsweekly, 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, neoliberal globalisation, ghetto poverty and prison and the importance of worker and community organisation 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 believe Edwards might be too inexperienced, and that it makes little sense for Democrats to even 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 former majority leader, Missouri Representative Dick Gephardt, who bowed out of the presidential race after the Iowa caucuses and immediately endorsed Kerry.