Lakhota
Diamond Member
By Sam Stein
WASHINGTON -- For veterans of John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign, the past week of debate over the fairness of making political attacks out of national security issues has brought about a bit of nostalgia and, in many cases, the chance to sit back and smirk.
The Massachusetts senator was famously submarined by attacks over his own personal service and his capacity to handle modern terrorist threats. At the time, aides to Kerry cried foul, arguing that former President George W. Bush's re-election campaign and allied groups were playing on people's fears for electoral gains. With the shoe now firmly on the other foot -- and Republicans griping over an Obama campaign web ad suggesting that Mitt Romney wouldn't have approved the raid that killed Osama bin Laden -- the collective response from the Kerry crowd is something akin to: "tough shit."
"That was then, this is now," said Steve Elmendorf, Kerry's 2004 deputy campaign manager. "This is what people do with challengers. One of the advantages of incumbency is you get to do the job and make the tough decisions and you get to make suggestions about whether the challenger is up to the job."
There is a lengthy history of presidential campaigns using the threat of terrorism, war or even nuclear annihilation to raise questions about their opponent. The most infamous remains the Daisy Ad, run just once by President Lyndon Johnson against Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964, but forever memorialized as the dawn of airwave campaigns.
Bush's re-election team brought the practice to a heightened level. The president's advisers produced the infamous Wolves ad, warning voters about the nebulous threats on the horizon. His campaign attacked Kerry as un-appreciative of the troops and unwilling to make tough wartime decisions. Allied groups openly wondered if Kerry could have shown the leadership needed to respond to 9/11. The genre turned into outright character assassination when the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth began raising doubts about the senator's record from Vietnam.
It is that latter attack that serves as a line of demarcation for the Obama campaign, which has argued that it's not engaging in the same tactics that Democrats once decried.
"The difference here is that we won't be swift boating Mitt Romney," Stephanie Cutter, Obama's campaign manager said in an email. "We are sticking to actual facts, not dishonest attacks and distortions. Romney said he wouldn't go into Pakistan to get Bin Laden, and then hit one of his opponents Mike Huckabee when he said that he would. That's important information to voters, because it shows a lack of judgment and a lack of strength, particularly if Romney is now saying that he would have given the same order the President did to get Bin Laden. He had a chance to get it right, without the enormous pressure of being the Commander in Chief, and he got it wrong."
More: Kerry Campaign Veterans Dismiss Complaints Over Obama's Bin Laden Ad