Ever since John Kerry became the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, the campaign has centered around one issue more than anything else: the Vietnam War.
The right tried to claim that a difference exits between medals and ribbons. In response, the Democrats' four day infomercial in Boston was a parade of Kerry's old combat buddies because someone, somewhere thought that hearing stories from the Mekong Delta was the single most important thing that the American public could hear in July.
Republicans responded with Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a 527 group crassly avoiding the spirit of the law in order to question how many of Sen. Kerry's purple hearts were actually deserved.
In one last twist of fate, someone at CBS is flipping a 1968 quarter right now trying to decide if it is indeed time for anchor Dan Rather to go write his memoirs. It seems that magically producing documents showing that President Bush avoided his military service in the Texas Air Guard, which later turned out to be forgeries, wasn't such a bright idea after all.
To be frank, I don't care about any of this.
I don't care if one of Kerry's purple hearts was self-inflicted because he stupidly blew up a mound of rice, and I don't care if President Bush drank his way through the Air National Guard.
Why don't I care, and why shouldn't you, either? I don't care because the battle over Vietnam should be over. Strategists are trying once again to make this election a referendum on the 1960s. They want to create images of draft dodging, pot smoking, antiwar protesters and stir up resentment in those who hated them.
Here's the problem. This divisive politics is categorically useless. It focuses a presidential election on 10 months during a 30 year-old war of both what has happened in the years since and off of current problems, issues, alternatives and solutions.
Take the War on Terror. Sure, George W. Bush dodged the draft, but that doesn't mean that he hasn't shown leadership, especially in the days after 9/11. In his years in the Senate, John Kerry voted to neuter the defense and intelligence budgets every chance he could, but hey, he served with distinction in Vietnam, so it's all good? Focusing on the records of two twenty year old men doesn't shed enough light on who they are today to justify our wanton preoccupation with their past.
The bigger problem is that this takes the focus off of the issues that do matter. While everyone's getting riled about documents, memos, ribbons and swift boats, no one has bothered to ask why neither candidate has a decent position on what to do with Iraq. Neither candidate talks about a plan to really improve homeland security —and I don't mean hire 10 more INS agents to post at airports.
Sen. Kerry wants to wage a sensitive War on Terror (whatever that means), while Vice-President Cheney is slipping in comments about how a vote for Kerry is a vote for a terrorist attack. No one seems to care about either of these patently ridiculous quotes because we're all too busy remembering which side of the 1960s we were on and re-fighting the battles of Chicago, Kent State, Yale and Main Street, USA, in an attempt to finally anoint a victor.
The 1960s feel about as close to the present as the 1886 unrest at Haymarket does in my mind, and the insanity has finally become too much to bear. Instead of pointing fingers, though, the reality is that we are to blame.
Every time we take a Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ad to heart, we proclaim to the world that we're still on the path back to 1968. In short, we have yet to fully arrive in the modern era.
Isn't it time that we closed the book on the decade-of-discord in modern politics? Turn off and ignore those ads. Demand instead real positions on contemporary issues and evaluate character based on who candidates are and what they do today.
Thinking about the present is the first step toward building that now-famous bridge to the 21st Century.
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