Wesley Clark Attacks John McCain's Military Service

Former General Wesley Clark, an Obama supporter who is often mentioned as a potential Vice President, stunned the world recently when he attacked John McCain's military service on Face the Nation. Wesley Clark actually said that McCain was "untested and untried."

A stunned Bob Schieffer asked that Wesley Clark elaborate. Wesley Clark was only too happy to do so.

"Because in the matters of national security policy making, it's a matter of understanding risk, it's a matter of gauging your opponents and it's a matter of being held accountable. John McCain's never done any of that in his official positions. I certainly honor his service as a prisoner of war. He was a hero to me and to hundreds of thousands of millions of others in the armed forces as a prisoner of war. He has been a voice on the Senate Armed Services Committee and he has traveled all over the world. But he hasn't held executive responsibility. That large squadron in the Navy that he commanded wasn't a wartime squadron. He hasn't been there and ordered the bombs to fall. He hasn't seen what it's like when diplomats come in and say, `I don't know whether we're going to be able to get this point through or not. Do you want to take the risk? What about your reputation? How do we handle it publicly?"

A liberal blogger named John Aravosis was even more direct. "A lot of people don't know, however, that McCain made a propaganda tape for the enemy while he was in captivity. Putting that bit of disloyalty aside, what exactly is McCain's military experience that prepares him for being commander in chief? It's not like McCain rose to the level of general or something. He's a vet. We get it. But simply being a vet, as laudable as it is, doesn't really tell you much about someone's qualifications for being commander in chief. If McCain is going to play the 'I was tortured' card every five minutes as a justification for electing him president, then he shouldn't throw a hissy fit any time anyone asks to know more about his military experience. Getting shot down, tortured, and then doing propaganda for the enemy is not command experience."

Propaganda for the enemy? An attempt to morph John McCain into Jane Fonda is a bit rich, even coming from the far left blogosphere.

An Obama advisor, Rand Beers, suggested that John McCain's experience as a POW "limited" his ability to understand national security issues.

A pattern is obviously emerging.

The howls of indignation from John McCain's supporters and even some Obama supporters were instant and loud. Vets for Freedom, an organization of Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans, issued a point by point refutation of Clark's statements. McCain himself decided to take a more sorrow than anger tact, "The important thing is that if that's the kind of campaign that Sen. Obama and his surrogates and his supporters want to engage in I understand that. But it doesn't reduce the price of a gallon of gas by one penny. It doesn't achieve our energy independence or make it come any closer ... and it certainly doesn't do anything to address the challenges that Americans have in keeping their jobs, their homes and supporting their families."

Even Barack Obama, trying to buttress his plausible deniability, obliquely took Wesley Clark to task. "No one should ever devalue that service, especially for the sake of a political campaign, and that goes for supporters of both sides." Of course no one in McCain's camp is questioning McCain's military service, even conservatives who have doubts about McCain on policy.

So why is the Obama Campaign attacking McCain's military service, what would seem to be his unassailable strength? The answer goes back to the 2004 Campaign and another Vietnam veteran running for President named John Kerry.

Senator John Kerry knew that he had a problem convincing fifty percent plus one of the voters that he was fit to be President. His record as a Senator from Massachusetts was, to say the least, on the far left. His policy prescriptions were the usual warmed over liberal agenda of appeasement abroad and socialism at home. Neither was going to be a selling point to most voters.

John Kerry hit upon the war veteran card. Vote for me, he suggested, because I served in Vietnam. Kerry had even acquired some medals during his brief career as the skipper of a Swift Boat, a river craft whose mission was to interdict enemy supply lines along the Mekong River and to provide a combat presence along the banks of that river.

The gambit might have worked too, if it had not been for most of Kerry's fellow Swift Boat veterans. They remembered a different John Kerry, a somewhat inglorious officer who lied about being in Cambodia during Christmas of the year he served and who may have benefited from "medal inflation", a phenomenon in which the military handed our Purple Hearts and other medals by the fistful to people who may not have deserved them.

The group of men, who soon became known as the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth", certainly remember John Kerry after he came home from Vietnam when he became an anti war activist. They remembered how he had thrown his medals (or maybe someone else's medals; accounts differ) over the Pentagon wall. They remember his unctuous voice from a recording of his testimony before a Senate committee, which was played many times in 2004, comparing the American Army in Vietnam to that of Geingas Khan and suggesting that all Vietnam vets were war criminals.

For such a man to now suddenly be proud of his military service seemed, mildly speaking, to be audacious. So John Kerry's brother officers published a book, took out ads, and appeared on talk show after talk show to denounce John Kerry as a fraud.

It apparently worked, because John Kerry was not elected President. And this has stuck in the Left's crawl ever since. "Swift Boating" has become a verb, meaning to the liberals unfair political attacks. Thus, if one attacks a liberal candidate, one is "Swift Boating him."

That this must have been in the mind of Obama's campaign strategists soon became evident as Obama surrogates began to hit the talk show circuit. The narrative was the same and well rehearsed. It went like that, "Well, maybe Wesley Clark's words were a little inartful, but, really, you right wingers are a little hypocritical for complaining. Were you not silent when the evil Swift Boaters attacked John Kerry four years ago?"

The spin is a little breathtaking in its audaciousness. It is also wrong.

For the attacks on John McCain to be the moral equivalent of the attacks on John Kerry, several things would have to be true. First, McCain's fellow POWs would have had to band together into something like "POWs for Truth" and denounced John McCain. In fact, they have rallied to him to the man. Second, McCain would have had to return to the United States bitter and angry at his own country and the military in which he served. In fact McCain served in the Navy for several years after his release from the Hanoi Hilton. And the only anger he ever expressed is at himself for not resisting the torture more.

The mistake that the Obama Campaign has made is thinking that the same strategy that worked so well against John Kerry would work against John McCain. It can't because the two men have different experiences and certainly different characters.

So the strategy of trying to "Swift Boat" John McCain is likely to backfire. The campaign that so adroitly put away Hillary Clinton may have come upon an opponent it not only cannot beat, but cannot even understand. And that may be why ultimately Obama will lose.

Sources: Face the Nation, June 29th, 2008
Honestly, besides being tortured, what did McCain do to excel in the military?, John Aravosis, Americablog, June 29th, 2008
Dem Guru: McCain 'Limited' by POW Years, ABC News, June 30tyh, 2008
McCain Campaign: Clark's Comments "Sad", CNN, June 30th, 2008
Vets for Freedom vs Clark, Kathryn Jean Lopez, Natuonal Review Online, June 30th, 2008