Lately, Bush’s line of attack has been that Kerry just hasn’t done that much during his time in the Senate — a charge that, unfortunately, is being blindly accepted and parroted until it’s accepted as “truth”. I had a conversation with a gentleman yesterday during my lunch break where he delighted in pointing out Kerry’s supposed lack of real experience.
Now, being relatively new to trying to keep track of all this political fun and games, and occasionally being a bear of very little brain, I couldn’t do much yesterday to turn this man’s opinion around, not being able to call much evidence to the contrary to the table off the top of my head. Two posts popped into my reading today, though, that’d give me a good place to start should the topic come up again.
From Matt Deatherage: Bush Criticizes Kerry’s Achievements
Before he was 40, John Kerry graduated Yale with higher than Bush’s 2.0 GPA, and volunteered for service in Vietnam. After earning all those medals, he returned to the US, testified before Congress about the War, and founded Vietnam Veterans for America. He was then accepted to Boston College Law School, graduated, and became a prosecutor in Boston. He ran for the US House of Representatives once and lost, but in 1982, he ran for Lt. Governor of Massachusetts and won. In 1984, at age 40, he was elected to the US Senate, where he’s served for 20 years.
Before he was 40, George W. Bush was accepted as a “legacy” student at Yale University, where he blew off classes and graduated with a GPA variously described as 1.68 or 2.0. His family’s friends pulled connections to get him into the Texas Air National Guard, and to get him accepted for flight training despite the lowest acceptable score on the test. In both cases, he magically jumped ahead of hundreds of other people on waiting lists for those positions through absolutely no merit or achievement of his own.
And, of course, he goes on from there. At the end of his post, Matt points to Josh Marshall’s take on the situation…
“My opponent has good intentions,” the president said today. “But intentions don’t always translate into results. After 19 years in the United States Senate, my opponent has had thousands of votes but very few signature achievements.”
This might be a plausible line of attack coming from another opponent. Unlike, say, Russ Feingold or Ted Kennedy, there’s no prominent piece of legislation with Kerry’s name on it, though admirers of Kerry point to his critical role in a series of high-profile Senate investigations.
But coming from George W. Bush? A guy whose handlers had to get some of the more gullible run of journalists to refer to his life before he turned forty as his ‘lost years’?
But will the media actually look into any of this and make the comparisons? Unlikely, and it’s the “swing voters” and the voters who don’t have or take the time to investigate on their own, who rely on the major news sources in print and on the television, that will suffer when it’s time to decide which way they’re going to vote.
And if the charges stick, it’ll be the entire country that suffers if Bush is elected.
(via Lane)
iTunes: “World Outside Your Window” by Tikaram, Tanita from the album Best of Tanita Tikaram, The (1988, 4:52).