Chapter 156: Swift Boats

Monday morning, I declared myself healed enough to go back to work. I was still sore, and still had some bandages over the sutures, but I was healing a whole lot faster than if I had gotten the big zipper. Monday morning, I fronted the Daily Press Briefing. This proved an exercise in silliness.

For one thing, various assorted conspiracy theorists and websites were reporting that I was now dead, after suffering an aneurysm, and that the CIA had managed to clone me and were controlling me. At the same time, several of the cable channels played the movie Dave, where Kevin Kline played both a ruthless and corrupt President and his doppelganger, a mild-mannered owner of a temp agency who moonlighted doing impersonations for local ad agencies and TV stations and was hired by the Chief of Staff to fill in for the President when he suffered a stroke. Hilarity and drama ensue, and Dave Kovic, the impersonator, ends up making out with Sigourney Weaver, which isn’t all that bad a deal when you think about it.

I simply went out to the podium, thanked everybody for their concern and prayers, and repeated Mark Twain’s line about ‘the reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.’ I also told them that my name really was Carl Buckman, and not Dave Kovic, and that I hadn’t been cloned, both of which got some more laughs. There were a few questions about my general health, but I had already had several doctors report my overall health was excellent, and that aside from my bum knee I was in excellent health for a man of my age. It would be a couple of weeks before I would be able to begin my workouts again, and another couple of weeks after that before I would be able to get back to martial arts. As for my work schedule, I would take it a little easy for a couple of days, but it was expected I would be back in my regular schedule by the end of the week.

Meanwhile, while I spent my time recovering, most of the Democrats running for President were gone by the end of February, when it became painfully obvious that they had even less of a chance with the Democratic Party than I did! In theory, this is the time when the populace learns about the candidates and how they react to the stress and strain of a high-pressure situation. You watch this, and you just know there has to be a better way! In a very short time, it was down to a few front runners. John Kerry was the favorite, with the most money and the most backers. John Edwards was a strong second, with good looks, a winning smile, and a wife who was bravely battling cancer but standing by his side. For the life of me, I couldn’t remember whether he was going to have zipper problems in 2004 or 2008 and totally self-destruct in the process. Joe Lieberman was going nowhere but was hanging in there for the moment. Howard Dean was another strong contender, with some interesting ideas and a huge youth turnout and Internet presence.

The Internet was one of our strong points. For years I had been pushing high tech and computerization on the Republican Party. We had massive databases of names of donors, and the ability to dun them for money relentlessly. What had changed was that the Internet was becoming more and more powerful. Some of the old fogies in the party couldn’t understand it (hell, I couldn’t half the time, and I was the guy supposed to know this stuff!) and thought it was a passing fad or trend. I set up a parallel fundraising group in Austin, composed of a bunch of young and tech savvy Republicans, some still in college, and with some funding through ARI and Marty Adrianopolis. They had a simple job - figure out how to use the Internet and the still-in-the-dream-stage idea of social networking, to get people to commit time and money. Marty and I, a couple of old RPI grads, were going to show the other oldsters what the future looked like, and Austin was going to be our showcase.

We had already seen John Kerry, John Edwards, and Howard Dean split the vote in the Iowa Caucuses in January, with them finishing a close 1, 2, and 3. They went 1, 3, and 2 in New Hampshire later that month. February was a mishmash, with everybody but those three dropping out over the month, and each of them winning a few and losing a few. The strongest was Kerry, and Edwards and Dean were in a much lower tie for second place.

After Super Tuesday, March 2, it was all over except for the convention. John Kerry had managed to win all but one of those primaries, and John Edwards managed to win Georgia. Howard Dean didn’t win anything. Both Dean and Edwards withdrew the next day, though Edwards was making all sorts of noises about landing a spot on the ticket as the Veep.

There were still a few primaries to finish the spring with, but with almost everybody else dropped out, John Kerry only needed to spend enough money to keep his name out front and win the last few states. He hoarded his cash, and what money he spent was on ads attacking me, not any other Democrats. He was beginning his general election campaign early, though not with a lot of spending. That would come later.

That doesn’t always work, though. Presidential calculus has a strange mathematical basis, as I well knew. Kerry was a Northeastern liberal, with a patrician air about him. Edwards brought in a Southerner with strong blue collar and union support, and a scrappy personal history. Lieberman, however, was so conservative that half the time he voted with the Republicans and was one of the strongest Dems on national security and the military. His downside? He was Jewish, and Orthodox, to boot. Was the nation ready for that? Dean was also young and scrappy, and quite liberal. Both Dean and Lieberman were from the Northeast, which did not do well for spreading the vote around. In the White House, and at campaign headquarters (located in an office building next door to the RNC on First Street in D.C.), it made for an amusing guessing game. I didn’t think we would learn until the convention.

On June 5 President Reagan died, and politics went on hold for a few days while we buried him. You never really have a whole lot of ex-Presidents hanging around, since we are generally in our 50s and 60s when we get the job. I was a definite aberration in that regard. All of us who were alive attended, of course. Jerry Ford was there, the oldest of us, along with Jimmy Carter, Bush 41 and Bill Clinton. It was pretty much the same bunch that had been present for Bush 43’s state funeral, and if anything, this was even bigger. I made an appropriate speech, as did most of the others. After it was over, however, we went back to the blood sport that was the 2004 election.

The Democratic Convention was about a month before ours, at the end of July, in Boston. That worked well for Kerry, since his power base was Massachusetts. From everything they were spouting and saying to each other, their focus was going to be that they could obviously do things better. We would be safer, have fewer wars, kill more bad guys, have more jobs, lower pollution, more savings, yadda yadda yadda! Not only was there going to be a chicken in every pot, it would be a bigger chicken, and there would be two of them!

Would they be able to pull it off? That was the big question. That was why they held elections, to see who would win. In practical terms, the election was mine to lose. The economy was relatively strong, and unemployment was low. By every historical measure, that was a major benefit to the ruling party in a Presidential election. I still had ample opportunity to step on my crank. We had not had a major terrorist event since 9-11, but there were still lots of asshole ragheads who wanted Death To America! All it would take was for us to screw things up and take our eye off the ball. One bad event could undo years of rebuilding. A bad scandal would hurt, and in an operation as big as the Federal government, there was always something you could call a scandal. A sudden downturn in the economy would be very difficult to deal with, even if it started overseas and then slopped onto our shores.

Will Rogers once said that he wasn’t a member of any organized political party, but that he was a Democrat. They managed to prove it once again at their convention in Boston. They went absolutely bonkers on security, even to the point of creating a designated ‘Free Speech Area’ for the inevitable protesters - who were not allowed anywhere else! The ACLU took them to court over that and lost. Meanwhile every whack job in Boston showed up to protest, including the local police union, which was protesting their contract! They even threatened to withhold protective services from the delegates! Inside the Fleet Center things went considerably smoother. The Democrats promised to keep America strong, fight terrorism, strengthen the military, make us independent of foreign oil, and otherwise slavishly copy the Republican playbook.

The real message to the audience was quite a bit different! “If you’re not a white male, we love you!” The keynote speaker was a new fellow, the biracial junior senator from Chicago with divorced parents who had lived overseas and had an Arab name. Yes, Barack Hussein Obama was introduced to America that week, with an electrifying speech. Otherwise, it seemed like the only white male speakers were going to be John Kerry and his Vice-Presidential selection, John Edwards. Everybody else was a woman, or a person of color, or gay/lesbian/something-even-weirder. They were trying out a strategy that might just well work! Let the Republicans keep the white male voters, and they would take everything else and beat our pants off.

I watched a fair bit of it in the evenings, with Brewster, Ed Gillespie, the Chairman of the RNC, and Marty Adrianopolis coming up to the Residence. The one thing I did was point this out to them, and in no uncertain terms! “You want to know why we needed the DREAM Act? There it is! If they get all the women and blacks and immigrants and gays, guess what? They win!”

Marty had read my book, and Brewster didn’t care in many ways (a true mercenary), but Ed wasn’t buying it. He had seen the Republicans win a lot of elections when they appealed to the party base - white, male, Christian, rural, and Southern. “I am not buying it! You push for those groups; the party loses our core.”

“Where are they going to go, Ed? A third party? That just means we lose for sure! This country has never had a third party that was viable since the Republican Party was invented! They can bitch all they want, but if we want this party to be viable in the future, we have to appeal to somebody other than a bunch of crackers, and I say that with the full knowledge that most people think I’m a cracker!”

“They will split the party and we will lose anyway.”

“Then the party becomes irrelevant for another generation, until the crackers die off. We can be a regional party, and a spoiler party, but we won’t be a national party with a chance to win the Presidency or the Senate. We need an outreach program to immigrants. Look at the list of speakers they have! We’ll never get the blacks back, but there is no reason to lose immigrants, too!”

Brewster piped up at that point, “Ed, I don’t like it either, but the numbers don’t lie. It is very easy to run a primary to the base, but beyond that, it doesn’t work. You want to win the base, you just ramp up Limbaugh and Hannity and the rest of the bunch and turn them loose, but with anybody with an IQ above room temperature it will go over like a lead balloon. If this is the way the nation is trending, and the numbers don’t lie, we need to be out in front of it, or we will never catch up from behind.”

“We will be slitting our throats.”

“Ed, right now Texas is a solid Republican state, but if the Hispanics vote Democratic, in ten years Texas becomes a battleground state, and in twenty years it becomes solid Democratic. Ditto Arizona. Ditto ditto New Mexico. Wait until it’s Colorado or Florida or Kansas. It’s already happening, Ed,” I replied. “On the other hand, we show some respect and support, we have a chance. Latinos aren’t just a single voting bloc. Some are liberal, some are conservative. We have as much of a chance as the next guy.”

We argued it back and forth, and I don’t know whether we would win or lose this debate. Ultimately, I made the final decision. Brewster was ordered to ramp up Hispanic language advertising in all the various high Latino population states - even places like California, which we had no chance in hell of winning! The Kerry campaign would have to match us in a countermove, and they had more limited funds than we did. Furthermore, the campaign spots were to be tailored to what the focus groups were determining to be important to Latinos, not simply Spanish translations and voiceovers of our regular ads.

John and I simply had to keep our A game going. For all of 2004 we were planning a schedule of trips around the country. Every week or two one or the other of us would fly somewhere and visit a factory or infrastructure project, meet with workers, give a speech, and do a fundraiser with the local political bigwigs. We would always be stressing something that we had gotten passed. It might be a defense plant building ships or planes, it might be a lock on the Mississippi that was being rebuilt, or a highway in Minnesota that was getting repaved. We made sure to attend a few citizenship ceremonies, especially if it was a minority that we had a chance of swinging into the Republican column. We focused on Latinos, regardless of what the base thought. We needed to keep them Republican, and not let the Democrats grab them. Marilyn called it cynical, and I called it realistic. It was one of those differences in our world views, I guess.

A lot of this is basic Campaign Politics 101, what I had done in northern Baltimore and Carroll Counties for years, only now across the entire nation. Thank God John had done this before because he knew what he was doing. I could give a good speech, but after every trip he took to giving me a critique. It wasn’t enjoyable, but it needed to be done, and it’s the only way I would learn. By the summer I was able to critique him as well.

Politics got very ugly that summer. As the old saying goes, protect me from my friends, because I can take care of my enemies all on my own. On August 14 a television ad ran, from an outfit calling itself the ‘Swift Boat Veterans For Truth’, claiming that John Kerry was dishonest and lied about his service in the Navy, and hadn’t been fit to command a ‘Swift Boat’, one of the small river patrol craft in Viet Nam, and was unfit to command as the President. It was run in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida, all states with a close race. The group claimed that they had served with Kerry, on his boat, in combat, and that he had never actually earned the medals he had received.

John McCain looked me up in my office the next day and asked, “Have you seen the ad?” He didn’t have to specify which ad. It was the only one being talked about in Washington that day.

I grimaced. I remembered the controversy from my first go through. “Ari had it cued up for me this morning. It’s not technically something the President has to do anything about, since it is campaign related, but he figured that there would be questions.”

“What’d you tell him to say?”

“What’s your take, John? You were Navy, even if you were flying off the boats instead of sailing around on them.”

He flopped down in a chair across from me. “I think it’s disgusting. A bunch of armchair admirals, probably none of whom were anywhere near the war, telling us how it should have been fought. You?”

I nodded. “I’m just glad I was young enough to miss out on the whole thing. I can’t say anything bad about you fellows who served, but that was one screwed up war, and you know it.”

“So, what did you tell Ari?” he asked.

“I told him to say that while I had no knowledge of the ad or of the group that paid for it, I trusted the officers who commanded Lieutenant J.G. Kerry and recommended him for his medals. I figured that sounded both statesmanlike and neutral.”

“That won’t end it, Carl. This is going to keep going, and then Kerry is going to go after your service history and mine, tit for tat. I didn’t spend seven years in Hanoi so that it could be run down in a campaign ad. You have your own skeletons to keep buried, too.”

I snorted at that and agreed. “Do me a favor. Call Ed Gillespie and find out who this Swift Boat bunch is, and what their plans are.”

He stood and said, “And you figure out what you are going to do about it if they keep going.” I nodded agreement.

By that night I got the word from Brewster that the Swift Boat Vets were a 527 Group, so named for a section of the Internal Revenue Code that allowed political organizations to qualify for tax exempt status while raising money, if they didn’t advocate for somebody and spent the money on issue education. So long as they didn’t say ‘Vote for Buckman’ they could say any damn thing they wanted about Kerry and claim it was legal and protected tax-exempt free speech.

John was right about this, in that if I couldn’t shut this down, it was going to bite us all on the ass. John’s service before he got shot down was not the stuff of legend. He had been a rebellious son and grandson of admirals and had graduated from the Naval Academy ranked 894 out of 899. As for me, I had already enjoyed the press pawing over my Nicaraguan adventure, and I had no interest in reliving it. I asked Brew and Ed to shut this thing down as soon as possible.

I was informed the next afternoon that the Swift Boat Vets did not plan to stop. They considered what they were up to a good idea and planned several more advertisements, along with books and interviews. Ed got the plans from some of the group’s leaders, and when he suggested this might backfire by bringing back my problems, they didn’t care. They figured the damage to Kerry would be worse than any collateral damage I might see, so I should tough it out. Brewster talked to several of the members. Most of them had no personal knowledge of Senator Kerry’s actions in the war, but thought his actions afterwards, testifying about the war before Congress and such, were bad.

A second ad was scheduled for Friday, August 20, although for legal reasons the group couldn’t directly reveal the ad’s contents. Brewster managed a different tactic. If the 527 group wouldn’t talk to us, maybe the production company that created the ad would. Brewster tracked them down and discovered the ad would include some rather questionable ‘true statements’ from supposed members of Kerry’s crew. Fact checking was decidedly not part of the production company’s mandate. Great!

John McCain was as disgusted with this as I was, and an informal poll I had among some of the other Cabinet level vets pretty much agreed with me. As far as the various campaigns were concerned, everybody had predictable reactions. The Kerry campaign was complaining about how the Buckman campaign was playing fast and loose with the truth, and how this was not something that should be expected of a President or decorated veteran. Meanwhile, the Buckman campaign was saying that they had nothing to do with the Swift Boat Vets, and they couldn’t control what dedicated veterans were saying.

I decided I had to nip this in the bud before it got any bigger. I picked up the phone and asked to be connected to John Kerry. The White House switchboard didn’t seem fazed by the request, but there was considerable surprise at the receiving end of the call. I didn’t get to the Senator, but it was reported back that he was in a meeting and asked if he could return the call. I requested a private call that evening. He called me shortly after 8:00 that evening.

“Thank you for calling me, Senator Kerry. I appreciate it.”

“It’s my pleasure, Mister President. How can I help you?”

“First, let me say that I am personally quite distressed by the ad about your naval service. I want to assure you that I find these ads as distressing as I am sure you do, and that I have nothing to do with them. I apologize for any pain they may be causing you or your family.”

Kerry answered, “Thank you, Mister President. I appreciate that, but I think that the best apology would be to arrange for the ads to stop. You may not have personally ordered them, but it is you now who seems to be benefiting from them.”

I sighed. “I am afraid that may be true, unfortunately I am in no position to order the ads to be pulled. As you are certainly aware, I have no contact with groups like this, and can only request they end them by way of a liaison. I have made the request, but it seems likely the ads will continue.”

“Mister President, I appreciate your personal apology, but that isn’t going to be much help otherwise.”

“I agree, sir. My understanding is that you will be speaking in Philadelphia tomorrow.”

That seemed to surprise him. “Yes, at a regional meeting of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.”

“John, with your permission I wish to join you tomorrow. I will issue a statement disavowing these ads and repudiating them. I would appreciate you standing by my side. Afterwards I will leave, and you can continue with your meeting. I think this is the only way we can put this behind us,” I told him.

I could pretty much imagine the look on his face at hearing this, and I could also see the wheels turning in his head. In speaking to a veterans’ group, he was attempting to shore up his military credentials and foreign policy experience with a group that historically voted Republican. Did he allow me to speak, and possibly turn them against him, or say no and risk being rude to a sitting President in front of an unfriendly audience? After a silent minute he responded, “Of course, Mister President, if you feel that would be helpful.”