GLOBE EDITORIAL
Scorched-Earth politicsVICE PRESIDENT Dick Cheney's latest attack on John Kerry's fitness as commander in chief is a low tactic designed to take the luster off a Kerry asset: his record as a war hero. The campaign needs to get back to a more principled plane or risk alienating voters and driving down civic participation.
The Bush campaign spent more than $50 million this month on television ads in the battleground states, including New Hampshire, claiming that Kerry voted against weapons systems that would have brought lucrative defense contracts to those states. A suddenly ubiquitous Cheney has complemented the air war with a ground offensive, slamming Kerry's record in Congress and ominously raising doubts about "the judgment and attitude he brings to bear on vital issues of national security." Conservative websites foment speculation about whether the wounds that earned Kerry three Purple Hearts were all that serious -- and it's still only April.
The excellent nonpartisan website factcheck.org -- a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania -- called the ads "distortions" of Kerry's record. The ads decry Kerry for voting against weapons like the Bradley Fighting Vehicle and the First, the ads focus only on the three annual Pentagon appropriation bills Kerry voted against, not the 16 he voted for. Next, they isolate small items in the massive omnibus bills as if Kerry's votes applied only to them. For example, the ads say Kerry voted against "body armor for our troops" when that represented less than half of 1 percent of the $87 billion Iraq appropriation Kerry opposed. Some of the disputed votes came at a time of transition for the military, when it was working to phase out old or obsolete weapons systems. Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld have both called for a retooling of the military to meet the challenges of the 21st century. Indeed, Cheney himself as secretary of defense proposed the elimination of the Apache helicopter and Bradley vehicles -- positions the campaign calls "troubling" when taken by Kerry. No doubt the Bush campaign wants to divert attention from the fact that April was the deadliest month in the Iraq conflict, especially with the May 1 anniversary of the president's ill-considered "Mission Accomplished" speech approaching. But it is misleading voters to twist a candidate's record to place it in the worst possible light. Cheney and Rumsfeld both served in Congress; it is almost certain that their votes, too, helped kill beloved programs and advance wasteful boondoggles. Both campaigns are better off explaining their plans for the future instead of distorting the past.
Let's call a truce to below-the-belt politics -- even if the Bush team threw the first punch. © Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
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