The Swift Boat Vets and Kerry -- The Conclusion

Well, at least Kerry's campaign is acknowledging their impact...

The campaign manager for Sen. John Kerry's failed presidential bid said Wednesday she regrets underestimating the impact of an attack advertisement that questioned Kerry's Vietnam War record.

Mary Beth Cahill, who spoke at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government with Ken Mehlman, President Bush's campaign manager, said the Massachusetts senator's campaign initially thought there would be "no reach" to the ad from Swift Vets and POWs for Truth.

Instead, the ad, which initially aired in just three states, became a central issue of the campaign, eventually forcing Kerry to personally deny the group's allegations that he did not deserve his combat medals.

"This is the best $40,000 investment made by any political group, but it was only because of the news coverage that it got where it did," she said.

"In hindsight, maybe we should have put Senator Kerry out earlier, perhaps we could have cut it off earlier."

Well, Kerry did call it "a pack of lies", as Geraghty pointed out. But his bigger problem was one countless folks hammered home -- a failure to actually rebut the specific claims within the book, and to do so with the candidate himself leading the charge. Not every claim made against a candidate has credibility, but the claims of the Swift Boat Vets did have credibility with plenty of people. By only responding with ad hominem attacks against the veterans themselves, and doing so belatedly, the Kerry campaign left the candidate open to the perception that the Swift Boat Vets were the ones telling the truth.

And the eventual response, which failed to acknowledge that Kerry had exaggerated some of his exploits, particularly Christmas in Cambodia, was even more telling. I don't think people would have had a problem if Kerry had acknowledged a few tall tales in his past -- it could easily have been spun as demonstrating the candidate's human side. I also think he left the door open by never issuing an apology for his testimony before Congress in 1971, which was the true motivation for many of the Swifties, who were rightly offended by those statements.

But the part of the AP dispatch that cracked me up was this paragraph:

The Swift Vets and POWs for Truth, a group of Republican-funded Vietnam War veterans who patrolled the same Mekong Delta in Swift boats similar to the ones piloted by Navy Lt. John Kerry, challenged Kerry's accounts of his medal-winning service and anti-war protests.

When is the last time anyone referred to MoveOn or any of the liberal 527s as "Democrat-funded"? Yet the Swift Boat Veterans and their source of funding is important here? Yes, plenty of Republicans contributed to the Swift Boat Vets. But they weren't part and parcel a GOP group, because that would have violated McCain-Feingold -- which is the same reason the massive liberal 527s are a seperate entity from the DNC. Next time someone asks about liberal news bias, you have entry #7,114,962 for the list.