I swore in something I wrote elsewhere last week that I wasn't going to get angry about George W. Bush's jumpsuit caper, and I'm not. My gut is still telling me that most middle-American swing voters saw the stunt for what it was, and that not a few soccer moms came away vaguely put off by Bush as flyboy. A (that is, yet another) media swoon is not to be confused with public reaction; if it were, Ken Starr would have had Bill Clinton's scalp by late spring of 1998 at the latest.
But here's what I am mad about, thinking back over the whole pathetic arc of the Bush-as-virile-commander propaganda assault: the completely dishonest trashing during the last presidential campaign of Al Gore's military record, a record that was entirely honorable but that the right-wing howlers had to tear to shreds and create questions about precisely because they knew their man was so deficient in this very area. And it's worth being mad about because they'll do a version of it all over again to whomever the Democrats put up next year.
As to Gore, let's recap. He graduated from Harvard University in May 1969. He and Tipper, not yet married, decided to drive from Cambridge, Mass., down to Carthage, Tenn., to give Tipper her first extended look at the old homestead. On the way, they stopped off at an army recruiting station in Newark, N.J., so that Gore could enlist in the U.S. Army.
Let's stop for a second right there and ask ourselves: How many young men with Harvard degrees were doing that in the summer of 1969, foregoing the era's many tempting allures? I'm guessing not too many. There is even some admirable symbolism in the fact that he enlisted in Newark, then one of America's most bombed-out cities and undoubtedly a place that was sending more than its share of (poor, black) men to Vietnam. Narrow the subset of those who enlisted to young men with a) Harvard degrees and b) famous and politically influential parents capable of pulling strings and keeping their sons hidden away in risk-free sinecures such as, say, the Air National Guard. I would imagine that's a universe of one.
Gore behaved, in other words, in a completely honorable way, and no one who doesn't have an ideological ax to grind, or who wasn't trying to smear his name in 2000, has ever proved otherwise.
But it doesn't stop there. Gore insisted that he be sent to Vietnam. So now we narrow the subset again: How many young men with Harvard degrees and famous-senator fathers, having enlisted, demanded of their superior officers that they not be kept stateside but sent to the theater of action? When John Fogerty sang, "It ain't me / I ain't no senator's son" in 1969, he was inveighing against exactly the sort of privilege that Al Gore was born into. But Gore eschewed that privilege every step of the way.
Now come the Achilles' heels on which the right wing pounced. First, Gore's departure date was delayed several months, from the summer of 1970 to that December, meaning that his tour of duty was not the standard year but five months. And second, he was not an infantryman but an army journalist, covering the work of an engineering brigade that built roads and bridges and so forth.
The first matter was most thoroughly investigated by Newsweek journalist Bill Turque in his biography, Inventing Al Gore. Turque found no smoking gun one way or the other, but everything he did unearth steered him to the conclusion that it wasn't Gore and his father who got the date delayed but Richard Nixon's White House. Why? Because Sen. Al Gore Sr. (D-Tenn.) was locked in a tough re-election campaign, which he ultimately lost, and the GOP, hoping to use Gore Sr.'s opposition to the war against him, didn't want the senator to be able to traverse the length of the Volunteer State bragging about having a son in Vietnam. As for the second matter, the decision was not Gore's. What sort of military leader is going to take any Harvard graduate, let alone one named Gore, and make cannon fodder of him? That would be absurd from the perspective of wise use of personnel. And even if one does consider this a "favor," there's no evidence anywhere that it's one Gore asked for.
And finally: Gore could have re-upped after the five-month hitch; he did not. But he didn't seek a discharge so he could go set up a commune in the east Tennessee hills, or follow the Grateful Dead around on tour. He sought a discharge . . . to enroll in divinity school at Vanderbilt University!
And this is the man the major media, following the crumbs laid before their path by right-wing propagandists, labeled a fraud and liar. In venues from FOX to Hardball to some respectable journals, Gore was hauled before the magistrates with allegations and insinuations that he and his father had pulled strings and that he'd weaseled out of his full tour. All lies, but they did the job.
In today's America, we endure the phony spectacles of Fogerty's anti-war anthem being used to celebrate patriotism in a blue-jeans commercial, and of the guy who, by all accounts, cut out of his "military" service a year early being hailed by the media as a martial hero on a par with Hannibal because of a silly and extravagant photo-op.
And in tomorrow's America -- that is, next year, during the thick of the presidential race? The smearing of Gore on his military service (and many other matters) is relevant because it set the template for what will happen this time. If the candidate is Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), a whisper campaign that has begun with "aloofness" and "doesn't know his true self" will be expanded to include his opposition to the Gulf War and his equivocations on this Iraq War, for the express purpose of neutralizing his unassailable record of service in Vietnam. If it should happen to be retired Gen. Wesley Clark (if he runs, of course), the argument will be that the war he won, in Kosovo, was not a "real" war in the post-September 11 sense. And how about if it's Rep. Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.)? He served -- wouldn't you know it! -- in the Missouri Air National Guard from 1965 to 1971. Would Republicans really have the gall to offer up critiques of that record?
The Democratic Party, meanwhile, needs to learn from the Gore experience that we are not dealing with people who play by any known rules. Such smear campaigns can't be ignored or wished away but have to be countered -- quickly, and on many fronts, from the cable shows to the major media to local newspapers and television stations across the country. Democrats already have one would-be president who was clearly the more honorable and qualified man but who's sitting at home in retirement. They can't afford to make it two.
Michael Tomasky's column appears every Wednesday at TAP Online.
