Obama’s surrogates smear McCain
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While setting up a phony Web site to deal with the phantom, vast Right-wing conspiracy, Obama supporters have been trashing McCain’s service and mental capacity.
Whether it’s Sen. John Rockefeller, Sen. Tom Harkin, Gen. Wesley Clark, or now Obama foreign policy adviser Rand Beers, impugning McCain’s knowledge of war or his mental capacity to serve as president, the only coordinated smear campaign is coming from the Obama campaign.
Here’s Beer’s quote from Politico:
Beers unfavorably compared McCain’s POW experience with “the members of the Senate who were in the ground forces or who were ashore in Vietnam,” and who “have a very different view of Vietnam and the cost … than John McCain does because he was in isolation essentially for many of those years and did not experience the turmoil here or the challenges that were involved for those of us who served in Vietnam during the Vietnam War.”
First off I voted for Kerry, I was not persuaded by the Swift Boat efforts. I will not be persuaded that John McCain’s military service was not honorable.
However I am amused that some of you will complain about John’s service now being up for debate. You supported the flagellation of John Kerry’s Vietnam wartime service in the face of George Dubyah Bush’s avoidance of service. I will genuflect at John McCain’s combat experience. My judgement is that he is a true American hero. However I question those of you who did not join with me last election in hissing at Dubyah’s avoidance of service.
I believe we’re discussing the election of 2008, not 2004.
But to amuse you, my problem was not with Kerry’s service, it was what he did afterwards.
And, again, to amuse you, why do you and others still degrade the national guard by stating it’s an “avoidance of service”?
That’s as far as I am going with this. The bottom-line is the only campaign in 2008 trying to impugn anyone is Obama’s. If you feel some Republicans did this to Kerry in 2004, fine. But that doesn’t mean two wrongs make a right.
By Obama’s surrogates going after McCain’s service, not only are they walking political thin-ice, but they are also showing how nervous they are about McCain’s strength as an opponent.
To my mind, McCain’s experiences as a POW are more a character indicator than “work experience”. That (i think) is the point that a number of these commenters are (unsuccessfully) trying to make. This piece of his history helps demonstrate his strength of character and resolve, but his daily experiences as a POW certainly don’t show any similarity to the duties of the presidency. Republicans keep hitting Obama on his lack of “experience”, but then point at McCain’s time as a POW as evidence of his. It is this meme that to my mind Obama supporters are trying to counter, that McCain’s time as a POW somehow is more relevant to the office of the president than anything Obama has done.
Yes, his POW history is admirable, and quite relevant mainly as his actions help show what kind of a person he is. But it did not “prepare him” IMHO to be the president any more than Obama’s time as president of the Harvard Law Review prepared him to assume the role of chief executive.
J.R.
While I was not old enough to do so, my oldest brother served in the 101st in Vietnam. He volunteered to serve, and did not wait for his number to come up. Unlike him, while I served in the military long enough to retire, the Vietnam War was over by the time I raised my hand.
However I am old enough to remember back to the days that my oldest brother (now deceased) sought to serve. Getting a National Guard ticket meant you could escape the danger. That was the reality back then.
Nowadays serving in the National Guard, just like in WWII, means front line service. But that is not what such service meant back during Vietnam. Such service meant you avoided real danger and George Dubyah Bush benefitted by never serving even a single day in combat.