Republicans have a big problem this year. They want to run a presidential campaign that emphasizes national security. Their argument to voters is: "Don't change horses in the middle of two wars." But they're running against a certified war hero whose long and distinguished record on foreign affairs makes him a formidable opponent. What to do?
The obvious answer is to go rummaging through his congressional voting record to find old votes that can be twisted out of their original context. The Bush-Cheney campaign has already spent millions of dollars this year doing just that. It has been trying to convince voters that Sen. John Kerry would be a weak, wavering commander-in-chief, by bombarding key battleground states with deceptive TV ads implying that the senator has voted against every major weapons system vital to winning the war on terror.
The attacks on Kerry have focused on votes he cast during the 1980s and
1990s, a transitional time when the Cold War was ending and budget deficits threatened the U.S. economy. At that time, many in both parties -- including a number of defense hawks -- felt it was time to pare back the military and start saving money.
But now the Bush-Cheney campaign is trying to rewrite history with a misinformation operation. The effort began in February with an opposition research report released by the Republican National Committee that listed 13 weapons systems affected by Kerry's old Senate votes. The weapons included Patriot air-defense missiles, B-2 bombers, Tomahawk cruise missiles, and Apache helicopters. Never mind the fact that the entire laundry list was teased out of just three votes (one opposing the fiscal 1991 omnibus defense appropriations bill, and the others on a pair of conference committee reports for defense appropriations bills in 1990 and 1995). The Bush-Cheney campaign has extrapolated to conclude that Kerry intentionally voted to weaken our national defense by opposing a dozen specific weapons systems.
The funny thing is that President George H.W. Bush and then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney were pushing for even deeper cuts in the early 1990s. Cheney berated Congress for not approving more cuts. "You've squabbled and sometimes bickered and horse-traded and ended up forcing me to spend more money on weapons that don't fill a vital need in these times of tight budgets and new requirements," he said then. "You've directed me to buy more M-1s and F-14s and F-16s -- all great systems, but we have enough of them."
Now the Bush-Cheney campaign is making great hay of those same M-1 tanks and F-14 and F-16 fighters.
The truth is that Kerry's voting record was actually closely aligned with defense program cuts that Bush Sr. proposed in his 1992 State of the Union address after the first Gulf War ended. Those proposed cuts included the B-2 bomber, the small ICBM program, sea-based ballistic missiles, the Peacekeeper missile, and advanced cruise missiles. Bush Sr. bragged: "By 1997, we will have cut defense by 30 percent since I took office."
Three days later, before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Cheney banged the same drum: "Overall, since I've been secretary, we will have taken the five-year defense program down by well over $300 billion. That's the peace dividend." During the same hearings, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell detailed plans to cut Army divisions by one-third, Navy aircraft carriers by one-fifth, active armed forces by about one-half a million men and women, and to make major reductions in fighter wings and strategic bombers.
Those appear to be inconvenient facts now. But the Bush-Cheney campaign will not let them stand in their way. Expect more misleading attacks between now and November. Just take them with grain of salt.
