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Friday, July 25, 2008
Is military service a campaign asset?
Andrea Cornell Sarvady, a left-leaning columnist, writes the commentary this week and Shaunti Feldhahn, a right-leaning columnist, responds.
Rebuttal
A 2006 Gallup Poll found that John McCain’s 22 years of military service, including his endurance as a prisoner of war, is what people most admired about him. While never a John Kerry supporter, I personally admire that he volunteered for Vietnam. And at the 2004 Democratic convention, Gen. Wesley Clark lauded that as a presidential qualification, adding “members of our armed forces embody the best of America’s values: service, sacrifice, courage, compassion.” Evidently, Kerry’s service prepared him to be commander in chief, but McCain’s didn’t.
In a superlative article, “The McCain Doctrines,” Matt Bai identified one whispered liberal belief behind that distinction: that since McCain spent five of his military years isolated in a prison camp, he “did not share the disillusioning and morally jarring experiences of soldiers like Kerry, Webb and Hagel.” Apparently, five years of torture didn’t qualify.
Most Americans think otherwise. Obama is a likeable candidate, but in a war on terror likeability takes a back seat. Military experience becomes one of McCain’s greatest campaign strengths — and one of Obama’s greatest weaknesses. The June Gallup poll Andy mentioned found that 80 percent of Americans believed McCain can “handle the responsibilities of commander in chief;” only 55 percent believed Obama could.
Obama’s recent Iraq trip was a television bonanza - the basketball clip was a brilliant idea — but also revealed his lack of military acumen. On “Hardball,” Andrea Mitchell explained that, in an unprecedented move, no journalists traveled with Obama, and none of the questions he answered were from the press - she called them “fake interviews.” She explained, “There’s a real press issue here……we’ve not seen a presidential candidate do this…ever before.”
CNN senior analyst David Gergen also criticized Obama for “meddling” with Iraqi policy, saying “We only have one president at a time. He’s the commander in chief and negotiator in chief….I cannot remember a campaign which a rival seeking the presidency has been in a position negotiating a war that’s underway with another party outside the country.”
When choosing the first new commander-in-chief since 9/11, to protect them from very real threats, Americans will look at someone with years of military experience and someone making rookie mistakes, and will likely realize they simply can’t afford the rookie. No matter how likeable he is.
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Commentary
By Andrea Cornell Sarvady
The Republican machine may not love their presumptive nominee, but there’s one area in which John McCain tickles their fancy: his military experience. It’s hard to argue with years in a POW camp for guts that deserve glory. It’s already brought him the title of American Hero. Will it bring him the American presidency as well?
The “GOP-at-any-cost” rightwing media sure hopes so. Gen. Wesley Clark’s recent suggestion that McCain’s wartime experience might not translate into presidential aptitude drew howls of protest from Fox and friends. Funny, this same crew had quite a different take on the issue when Vietnam vet John Kerry was running.
Typical of the view then was conservative columnist Thomas Sowell’s query about Kerry: “Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that he did all the things he said he did…How does that qualify anyone to be President of the United States?” Columnist Kathleen Parker was even more blunt in her assessment of Kerry: “Given that military service neither qualifies nor disqualifies one for political office…it’s time to dismount this jackass.”
In-the-trenches service doesn’t always correlate to White House accomplishment, even on military matters. Polio didn’t hurt Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s ability to contribute to the Allied Victory of World War II. Decades later, “draft-dodger” Bill Clinton fought conventional wisdom in Kosovo by eschewing ground forces, resulting in an air power strike that stopped a genocide in less than three months with only two NATO casualties. On the other hand, Gen. Eisenhower’s application of military strength while in office is still under scrutiny and Kennedy, the heroic commander of PT-109, sowed the seeds for a bloody quagmire in Vietnam.
Our nuanced view of the relationship between military service and the Oval Office was evident in a recent poll: Overwhelmingly, participants saw McCain as more of a “commander in chief.” They then declared that Barack Obama would do an equally good job of turning the situation around in Iraq. A contradiction? Perhaps, but one that shows military service is just one piece of the electability puzzle, even in wartime. McCain may seem more “commander-like” to those being polled. Yet when another type of poll closes in November, we may discover that Obama seems more presidential.