Another Election about Nothing?

Much as we might like it to be otherwise, American presidential campaigns have seldom if ever been high-minded discussions of the critical issues facing the country. But some focus more on triviality than others. With the tons of ink spilled in the last couple of weeks on the allegations against John Kerry by a group of disgruntled veterans, the 2004 campaign risks spiraling far from anything that actually matters to the country. The New York Times now says that the issue "may prove pivotal in determining Mr. Kerry's hopes of victory this fall." Self-fulfilling prophecy alert.

There isn't anything inherently wrong with spending time discussing a candidate's personal qualities, that jumble of experiences, tastes and foibles we put under the broad category of "character." But the question the press usually fails to ask is just how those character questions relate to the challenges and opportunities the next president will face once he actually takes office. This is an epic journalistic failure, and one that gets repeated in campaign after campaign. Four years ago we learned about George Bush that he often mangled his words and didn't seem to know much about foreign countries; Al Gore's alleged propensity to exaggerate was supposed to tell us something critical about what kind of president he would be.

It might be too much to ask for reporters to have predicted that Bush would turn out to be the one with the truth problem, the one who would build a case for a preemptive war on a scaffold of deception. But even in 2000, Bush was already misleading voters about his tax cut plan, telling them that most of the benefits would go to those at the bottom of the income scale. The parallel is that in both cases, Bush had something he fervently wished to do, but the facts weren't enough to convince the public to go along. So he went beyond the truth – well beyond – to get the consent he needed to move forward. Had the public known this was something Bush was prone to do, the 2000 election might have turned out differently.

Now it's four years later, and at least for the moment, reporters are consumed with what John Kerry did or didn't do and say three and a half decades ago. Exactly what this is supposed to reveal about Kerry has yet to be defined, beyond the general charge in the title of the book by longtime Kerry antagonist John O'Neill and creepy bigot Jerome Corsi, "Unfit for Command." Even if we stipulate that many Vietnam veterans were angered by Kerry's anti-war activities, I have yet to hear anyone explain exactly what bearing this has on the kind of president he would be in 2005, thirty-four years later.

Looking Forward to Looking Back

A few months from now, the 2004 presidential race will be over and we'll begin to assess what kind of campaign this was. Something tells me no one will be saying, "It sure was a good thing for the electorate that we spent so much time talking about whether John Kerry deserved all his Vietnam medals. Boy, if we hadn't written hundreds of stories about veterans who were mad about statements Kerry made in 1971, the public would have been much worse off."

After the 1988 election, much of the national political press corps felt that they had failed the citizens they were supposed to serve. They had become consumed with non-issues like the value of the pledge of allegiance and became partners with the Bush campaign in stirring up racist fears. They ignored real issues like the S&L crisis, which will end up costing the American taxpayer well over $300 billion. So reporters pledged to explore issues in more depth, to scrutinize candidate advertising more carefully, and to hold candidates accountable for deception.

It was a nice idea, but with the sporadic exception of scrutiny of advertisements, it didn't happen.

So it's good to keep in mind that all the attention given to the Swift Boat Veterans was hardly inevitable. It is a product of decisions made by journalists. They decided to write story after story after story after story about it, to ask questions about it, to investigate it, to spend day after day ruminating on it in print.

There are two and a half months until the election, and it is possible that the issue of Kerry's Vietnam service and anti-war activism will fade quickly to be replaced by a more substantive discussion that actually has some relationship to the next four years of America's political life. In all likelihood, at some point the press will grow bored with the Swift Boat Veterans. For the moment, though, it has all the elements political reporters gravitate toward like moths to a flame: misleading attack ads, expressions of anger and bitterness, accusations of Machiavellian manipulations, and fertile ground for reporters to play amateur political consultant. (Should Kerry have answered earlier? How should he respond? What do the polls say?)