Obama and the Swift-Boaters

Andrew Sullivan complains that Obama is being “swift boated.”

Swift Boating

=

Truthful recitation of facts and reasonable inferences from the same that a candidate’s supporters would prefer no one knew about, e.g., racist church memberships, defamatory rhetoric about one’s fellow Vietnam veterans.

The stupid verb “swift-boating” ignores something important.  The Swift Boat Veterans’ rhetorical strength came from undisputed facts and also from who they were:  these were guys who served in the same unit as Kerry that felt hurt and betrayed by exagerrated account of atrocities in Vietnam when he returned home and joined the anti-war movement.  There is no factual dispute that Kerry did these things; we’ve all seen the “Jenjis Kahn” video.  Kerry emphasized his anti-war activism in the 80s in Massachusetts, but he wanted to forget that part of his past during the national campaign, because his earlier anti-war and anti-American activities undermined Kerry’s claim that he had national security “street cred” because of his Vietnam service. 

Some other Swift Boat ads were less effective, including those that questioned the length of Kerry’s Vietnam Service and whether he deserved all of the medals he was awarded.  But the most powerful ads were truthful, or at least reasonable, and Kerry did little to clear the air because he never released all of his Vietnam records.

While the tongue-tied Kerry wanted his biography to do the talking, Obama’s strenth is his rhetoric.  He would be happy if his words today stood alone, apart from his record, or lack of it.   For example, he never wrote a scholarly paper as a law professor at the University of Chicago.  He accomplished little of legislative merit in Illinois or the U.S. Senate.  He has cowardly voted “present” on controversial legislative matters.  He has never managed a business or a platoon or a large project.

He was propelled to national attention by a speech in 2004 that said something very different and more generous about America than his recent race speech.  And that’s it.  That’s all he’s done.  He wants us to let him frame every issue, ignore his record of mediocrity and bad judgment–Rezko and Wright–and he wants his words today to distract us from the negative implications of 20 years of close friendship with a black Joseph Goebbels figure in African garb.