“They will split the party and we will lose anyway.”
“Then the party becomes irrelevant for another generation, until the crackers die off. We can be a regional party, and a spoiler party, but we won’t be a national party with a chance to win the Presidency or the Senate. We need an outreach program to immigrants. Look at the list of speakers they have! We’ll never get the blacks back, but there is no reason to lose immigrants, too!”
Brewster piped up at that point, “Ed, I don’t like it either, but the numbers don’t lie. It is very easy to run a primary to the base, but beyond that, it doesn’t work. You want to win the base, you just ramp up Limbaugh and Hannity and the rest of the bunch and turn them loose, but with anybody with an IQ above room temperature it will go over like a lead balloon. If this is the way the nation is trending, and the numbers don’t lie, we need to be out in front of it, or we will never catch up from behind.”
“We will be slitting our throats.”
“Ed, right now Texas is a solid Republican state, but if the Hispanics vote Democratic, in ten years Texas becomes a battleground state, and in twenty years it becomes solid Democratic. Ditto Arizona. Ditto ditto New Mexico. Wait until it’s Colorado or Florida or Kansas. It’s already happening, Ed.” I replied. “On the other hand, we show some respect and support, we have a chance. Latinos aren’t just a single voting bloc. Some are liberal, some are conservative. We have as much of a chance as the next guy.”
We argued it back and forth, and I don’t know whether we would win or lose this particular debate. Ultimately, I made the final decision. Brewster was ordered to ramp up Hispanic language advertising in all the various high Latino population states — even places like California, which we had no chance in hell of winning! The Kerry campaign would have to match us in a countermove, and they had more limited funds than we did. Furthermore, the campaign spots were to be tailored to what the focus groups were determining to be important to Latinos, not simply Spanish translations and voiceovers of our regular ads.
John and I simply had to keep our A game going. For all of 2004 we were planning a schedule of trips around the country. Every week or two one or the other of us would fly somewhere and visit a factory or infrastructure project, meet with workers, give a speech, and do a fundraiser with the local political bigwigs. We would always be stressing something that we had gotten passed. It might be a defense plant building ships or planes, it might be a lock on the Mississippi that was being rebuilt, or a highway in Minnesota that was getting repaved. We made sure to attend a few citizenship ceremonies, especially if it was a minority that we had a chance of swinging into the Republican column. We definitely focused on Latinos, regardless of what the base thought. We needed to keep them Republican, and not let the Democrats grab them. Marilyn called it cynical, and I called it realistic. It was one of those differences in our world views, I guess.
A lot of this is basic Campaign Politics 101, what I had done in northern Baltimore and Carroll Counties for years, only now across the entire nation. Thank God John had done this before, because he actually knew what he was doing. I could give a good speech, but after every trip he took to giving me a critique. It wasn’t enjoyable, but it needed to be done, and it’s the only way I would learn. By the summer I was able to critique him as well.
Politics got very ugly that summer. As the old saying goes, protect me from my friends, because I can take care of my enemies all on my own. On August 14 a television ad ran, from an outfit calling itself the ‘Swift Boat Veterans For Truth’, claiming that John Kerry was dishonest and lied about his service in the Navy, and hadn’t been fit to command a ‘Swift Boat’, one of the small river patrol craft in Viet Nam, and was unfit to command as the President. It was run in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida, all states with a close race. The group claimed that they had served with Kerry, on his boat, in combat, and that he had never actually earned the medals he had received.
John McCain looked me up in my office the next day and asked, “Have you seen the ad?” He didn’t have to specify which ad. It was the only one being talked about in Washington that day.
I grimaced. I remembered the controversy from my first go through. “Ari had it cued up for me this morning. It’s not technically something the President has to do anything about, since it is campaign related, but he figured that there would be questions.”
“What’d you tell him to say?”
“What’s your take, John? You were Navy, even if you flew off the boats instead of sailing around on them.”
He flopped down in a chair across from me. “I think it’s disgusting. A bunch of armchair admirals, probably none of whom were anywhere near the war, telling us how it should have been fought. You?”
I nodded. “I’m just glad I was young enough to miss out on the whole thing. I can’t say anything bad about you fellows who served, but that was one screwed up war, and you know it.”
“So, what did you tell Ari?” he asked.
“I told him to say that while I had no knowledge of the ad or of the group that paid for it, I trusted the officers who commanded Lieutenant J.G. Kerry and recommended him for his medals. I figured that sounded both statesmanlike and neutral.”
“That won’t end it, Carl. This is going to keep going, and then Kerry is going to go after your service history and mine, tit for tat. I didn’t spend seven years in Hanoi so that it could be run down in a campaign ad. You have your own skeletons to keep buried, too.”
I snorted at that and agreed. “Do me a favor. Call Ed Gillespie and find out who this Swift Boat bunch is, and what their plans are.”
He stood and said, “And you figure out what you are going to do about it if they keep going.” I nodded agreement.
By that night I got the word from Brewster that the Swift Boat Vets were a 527 Group, so named for a section of the Internal Revenue Code that allowed political organizations to qualify for tax exempt status while raising money, as long as they didn’t advocate for somebody and spent the money on issue education. As long as they didn’t say ‘Vote for Buckman’ they could say any damn thing they wanted about Kerry and claim it was legal and protected tax exempt free speech.
John was right about this, in that if I couldn’t shut this down, it was going to bite us all on the ass. John’s service before he got shot down was not the stuff of legend. He had been a rebellious son and grandson of admirals and had graduated from the Naval Academy ranked 894 out of 899. As for me, I had already enjoyed the press pawing over my Nicaraguan adventure, and I had no interest in reliving it. I asked Brew and Ed to shut this thing down as soon as possible.
I was informed the next afternoon that the Swift Boat Vets did not plan to stop. They considered what they were up to a good idea and planned several more advertisements, along with books and interviews. Ed got the plans from some of the group’s leaders, and when he suggested this might backfire by bringing back my problems, they didn’t care. They figured the damage to Kerry would be worse than any collateral damage I might see, so I should tough it out. Brewster talked to several of the members. Most of them actually had no personal knowledge of Senator Kerry’s actions in the war, but thought his actions afterwards, testifying about the war before Congress and such, were bad.
A second ad was scheduled for Friday, August 20, although for legal reasons the group couldn’t directly reveal the ad’s contents. Brewster managed a different tactic. If the 527 group wouldn’t talk to us, maybe the production company that created the ad would. Brewster tracked them down and discovered the ad would include some rather questionable ‘true statements’ from supposed members of Kerry’s crew. Fact checking was decidedly not part of the production company’s mandate. Great!