Charles Krauthammer disagrees with me on the impact of war hero status:
With John Kerry as their presumptive candidate, the Democrats may have won the war issue.
True, President Bush will make the case that his post-Sept. 11 policies are infinitely tougher. And Kerry certainly has given him an opening, saying that the war on terrorism is “primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation.”
This is a hopelessly retrograde invocation of the anti-terrorism policies that brought us Sept. 11 — finding, arresting and putting on trial individual miscreants, as we did the World Trade Center bombers of 1993 — but it does not matter. War is more a visceral than an intellectual issue. Kerry holds the trump card. He’s fought in battle. And acted heroically.
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However much Democrats want to deny it — and insist on talking about health care and budgets and tax cuts — this is a war election, our first war election in more than a decade. Ironically, they may win because of it.
For 21/2 years it looked as if the political beneficiary of Sept. 11, 2001, was George W. Bush. But Bush, never a believer in hoarding political capital, spent his post-Sept. 11 and post-Afghanistan popularity on Iraq. The big political beneficiary of Sept. 11 turns out to be Kerry.
Sept. 11 changed the rules of presidential electoral politics. Or, more accurately, it returned us to an earlier set of rules that prevailed in Cold War days. Every single president elected during the Cold War had served in some capacity in the military.
It is no accident that Bill Clinton, who never served, was the first post-Cold War president. It is no accident that Bob Dole, who ran in the second post-Cold War presidential election, got absolutely no political traction out of his background as a genuine war hero. During the end-of-history ’90s, military service seemed an irrelevance.
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The reason is deeply visceral. It is not just that you think a veteran — or, even better, a hero — has a better understanding of war, its strategy and its costs. It is that when the bad guys are after you — say, after they kill 3,000 of your countrymen in one day — you like the idea of a national leader who has no compunction about killing.
Kerry makes the point with extra emphasis by noting that he hunts. And plays hockey. Post-Sept. 11, that’s the kind of guy even Democrats want wearing the sheriff’s badge.
I agree that Kerry’s Silver Star and Purple Heart innoculate him from much of the “weak on defense” charge that the Democrats suffer from. But Krauthammer over-reads history. Richard Nixon was a Quaker; his WWII service paled in comparison to that of B-24 pilot George McGovern, whom he trounced in 1972. And Ronald Reagan served his country as a uniformed actor.
