Back when Bill Clinton was first running for president, it was obvious early on that Arkansas would prove to be a vulnerability. The propagandists of the right intuited -- correctly and rather ingeniously, it must be admitted -- that New York and Washington sophisticates would easily believe that in a hick state like Arkansas, any sleazy thing could happen and probably did. Shady land deals, biracial children fathered out of wedlock, a governor indebted to a savings & loan huckster -- the national media proved willing to follow every (false) lead, because, well, in a backwoods place like that, how could they not be true? Turned out they weren't, but by the time anyone knew that, it was too late. The right wing identified a Clinton weakness -- the fact that he came from a distant, rural state about which any rumor of influence-peddling could be easily spread -- and took full advantage of it.
With that in mind, I approached this campaign season wondering: What can they do to John Kerry? What's his Arkansas?
The answer is, he doesn't have one (or maybe, if he does, it's his lack of legislative achievement as senator, but that's not a shortcoming around which the usual panting conspiracy theories can be spun).
But no one ever accused the hitpersons of the right of not being nimble on their feet, and so, rather than exploit a perceived Kerry weakness, they're going straight after his greatest strength. So far, the mainstream media in general -- and our leading editorial pages in particular -- are letting them get away with it. And more importantly, they're letting the president and his campaign get away with pretending as if they're distancing themselves from this smear while in fact they are happily letting it go on.
A lot of the crucial reporting about Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (SBVT), the group trying to dirty up John Kerry's Vietnam record in order to neutralize a great and obvious advantage he has over the incumbent, has already been done -- by Wayne Slater of the Dallas Morning News, UPI's Thom J. Rose, Salon's Joe Conason, and David Brock's Media Matters For America. So the reporters and editorialists at our major papers should know, for example, that Pat Runyon, who was on Kerry's swift boat, says (to Slater) that an SBVT investigator named Tom Rupprath interviewed him and then distorted what Runyon said to presenting a less flattering portrait of Kerry. They should know also that of the $158,750 the group declared in its latest IRS filing, fully $150,000 came from three men -- two Bush and Republican Party backers in Texas, and longtime Kerry antagonist John O'Neill. Finally, they should know that virtually none of the SBVT members actually served with Kerry on his boat, while 10 of 11 men who did serve with Kerry fully support the record that has been in existence for more than 30 years -- the official Defense Department record that supports Kerry's version of events and claims to heroism.
The story heated up in the middle of last week when the group started running an ad in three swing states questioning Kerry's war record. Shortly thereafter, John McCain denounced the ads (he was the target of a similar smear campaign in 2000, which was partly orchestrated by at least one of the same people -- Merrie Spaeth, who is advising the swift boat group). McCain called on Bush to denounce the ads. But when White House spokesman Scott McClellan was asked to do so, he refused. He said the campaign would not question Kerry's service, and he deplored the activity of soft-money backed groups (no surprise, since the ones with the most money are tied to the other side). But he pointedly did not denounce the ad, as the AP's Ron Fournier noted (although one correspondent for one media outlet did take McClellan's words and, on August 5, interpreted them to their audience as a condemnation -- Brian Wilson of FOX News).
I was not, of course, on the Mekong River, so I don't personally know the truth of the matter. But we do know this much. Kerry's record is official and has been for decades. When it has been challenged in previous campaigns, the challenges have been discredited. Now the challenges arise again -- the seed money to do so put up by big GOP donors from Texas. And one swift boat mate of Kerry's says an investigator twisted his words. There may be no gun here yet, but there's an awful lot of smoke to suggest that SBVT is lying.
And this is where the leading editorial pages come in. It's the duty of editorial pages to at once participate in and referee the dogfight that is a presidential campaign. There are rules here, even in the realm of electoral politics; and one of them should be that a group of people can't knowingly inject outright lies into the dialogue. Whether Bush did enough to fight terror before September 11, or whether Kerry could deliver democracy to Iraq, are matters of interpretation. Kerry's record in Vietnam is a matter of fact. If people are lying about those facts, they need to be called on that and sent away. It is not a matter of these veterans, as The New York Sun wrote in a mendacious editorial last week, deserving "the right we all have to speak." They obviously have a right to speak. They don't have a right to lie (and they, not Kerry, have the burden of proving that what they say is true).
Only the leading editorial pages have the power to enunciate this standard. And so far, neither The New York Times nor The Washington Post has chosen to use that power. Only the Los Angeles Times has editorialized that Kerry's "war record" is not "fair game." The country's two most important papers should follow suit. They should demand that Bush denounce the ad and declare that the standard has to be higher than this. They're not strangers to such practices; on February 5, The Washington Post's editorial page criticized Wesley Clark for not having criticized Michael Moore's use of the word "deserter" to describe President Bush while Moore was speaking at a Clark event.
Early next week, Unfit for Command, a book by John O'Neill, will hit the stores. It's already #1 on Amazon as a result of a Matt Drudge plug and the attendant media flurry. The ads running in the three swing states will no doubt spread to more battleground states. A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth puts its pants on, as the old saying goes. It's time for our civic referees to suit up.
Michael Tomasky is executive editor of The American Prospect.
