... There remain only two basic campaign strategies for any incumbent candidate, whether for county commissioner or for president, seeking reelection. The first option is the High Road: “Here is what we have achieved together and why your family’s life is better; give us another term, and we’ll finish the job.” When there are not successes and improvements to trumpet and to run on, the incumbent must resort to option two, the Low Road: “Look, I may no be a day at the beach, but my opponent is no month in the country, and besides, he has been known to steal a hot stove and go back for the smoke.”
The Bush-Cheney folks, for manifest reasons, have embraced Option Two. They emphasize, you may have noticed, not the economic successes and virtues of their first term, but rather the alleged defects and vices of John Kerry. ...
... The Republicans’ message in March of this election year goes like this: “We can’t really talk about what we’ve done, and we can’t really tell you what we will do, but we will happily tell you just how awful the other guy has been and would be.”
Nowhere is this approach more brazenly employed than in the Bush-Cheney campaign’s assault on the combat record of John Kerry in Vietnam. The campaign has distributed a letter by retired Col. William Campenni, who served with George W. Bush in the Texas Air National Guard from 1970 to 1971. Campennii defends Bush’s service record, which is fine, but then argues that Kerry’s service to the nation (which included his earning three Purple Hearts, a Silver Star and a Bronze Star in Vietnam) was not as valuable to the defense of the nation as was George W. Bush’s winning the Battle of Amarillo. Campenni wrote: “While ... Kerry was playing antiwar games with Hanoi Jane Fonda, we (Campenni and Bush) were answering 3 a.m. scrambles for who knows what inbound threat over ... the shark-filled Gulf of Mexico.”
This is more than a real reach for the Bush-Cheney team. As Mark Russell, the Mark Twain of Our Time, observes, “This is a campaign between two American military heroes: One was wounded three times in combat in Vietnam, and the other was “‘missing in action’ in Alabama.” ...
