Obviously the Bush campaign and the Republican National Committee has decided that Kerry's Vietnam war record is fair game. There are lots of strategic reasons that they might be doing this, and almost all of them could backfire. The only reason I think they are going after his record is to make it as difficult as possible for him to continue using it on the campaign trail. If they convince the public that Kerry, a war hero, was not heroic, then it would seem strange for Kerry to continue to use his service as an asset, indirectly pointing to Bush's lack of service as a liability.
However, the reason that this could backfire is that the Bush campaign still has many unanswered questions about Bush's National Guard record. All of this new chatter about Kerry's Vietnam has inevitably opened up all the old chatter about Bush's Vietnam, and I'll bet the White House hoped that that story was out of the headlines. Well, Salon has a new article on Bush's service record, and the author, James Moore, asks a perfectly legitimate question:
"If the president truly wanted to end the conjecture about his time in the Guard, he would allow an examination of his pay stubs and any IRS W-2 forms from his Guard years. These can be pieced together to determine when he was paid and whether he earned enough to have met his sworn obligations."
The funny thing about all this is that when this story blew up a couple months ago, the White House dumped a load of Bush's National Guard papers on the press, and considered the story over. Now, every time the story would get brought up, the White House could say, 'We gave you everything that we had.' End of story. Right? Wrong.
It turns out what the Bush administration released were merely portions of the entire microfiche printout that were sent from the National Guard. Salon reports:
"According to two separate sources within the Guard who saw the printout and spoke with me, the microfiche was shipped to the office of Maj. Gen. Danny James, commander of the Air National Guard Bureau in Arlington, Va. James' staff printed out all of the documents on the film and then, according to those same sources, James vetted the material. Subsequent to being scrutinized by James (who commanded the Texas Guard and was promoted to Washington by Bush,) the records were then sent to the White House for further scrutiny prior to release to the news media."
Joshua Marshall had an interesting question after reading the Salon article:
"But why exactly can't the president just release his records the way McCain did?"
John McCain's 2000 campaign released all of his records to the media without going through a vetting process. So, why isn't the Bush administration doing this? Well, that is such an easy question to answer that I won't even waste the words.
Posted by Paul Hina at April 27, 2004 11:22 AM