Much like Swift Boat exposed the key weakness of the Kerry Campaign, this has the capacity to do the same to Romney if they aren't careful.
The key problem for Kerry was that he didn't respond quickly enough the allegations, clearly he hoped it would all go away. Like many Rovian tactics, this relied on a lot of luck and the ineptness of the Kerry people on this certainly provided that.
I do have a problem with this line of questioning being referred to as Swift boating, the SB movement was a creation of the Rove machine and paid for by Bush supporters.
I truncated your comment because I just want to deal with these parts.
1. I recall John Kerry strolling to the podium to accept his nomination in 2004 and the first thing he did was give a military salute and say something like "John Kerry reporting for duty!", and as a military veteran myself, I sat agog thinking
"Oh no he didn't, oh no he didn't just do that!"You see, no military veteran forgets that in 1971 John Kerry went
on national TV and, under oath, swore that his fellow veterans were war criminals! (And he threw his (or, he later claimed, someone else's) medals away, also on national TV.) Thus, in our eyes, he gave himself a
permanent, political discharge from the U.S. military. And we could live with that: If you
don't have pride in the team, you
should get off it. Fine. Then here comes 2004: Kerry saw that, unlike 1971, now soldiers -- even Vietnam vets -- are popular; and that unlike Kerry, Bush and Cheney did not serve in Vietnam.
So Kerry decides it's to his political advantage to re-enlist!!"Oh no you don't!" I wasn't a bit surprised when men who'd serve with Kerry -- the men he called war criminals in 1971 -- decided to speak up.
Of course, a lot of these guys were former officers -- that means they're college graduates, pretty smart. So they don't just "speak up", they
get organized. They organized as one of those 501(c) groups that are allowed to be political but aren't part of any candidate's campaign. This allowed Bush, whenever he was asked to condemn them, to say that (1) he "honored Sen. Kerry's service" and then (2) he would condemn "
all the 501(c) groups". In other words, Bush remained above the fray.
2. Kerry's mistake: Because it was not the Bush campaign doing the hits, but an independent group of veterans,
Kerry erred by responding directly and personally. He should have let his surrogates do it (and he did to some extent, but he also waded deep into it himself).
3. That's one of the key difference between the Swift Boaters and the Bainers:
Bush did not put his own personal credibility on the line to back the Swift Boaters. Bush didn't say, "Kerry absolutely needs to answer these questions" or anything remotely like that. Bush kept his distance and even condemned the Swift Boaters (along with all the other 501(c) orgs). In the case of the Bainers, on the other hand,
Obama has put his personal credibility on the line. (That's also why it's fine for
Romney to respond personally even where it was
not fine for
Kerry to --
because it's not an independent group making the charges but the president's campaign and the president himself who're making the charges.)4. In the case of the Swift Boaters, Kerry's credibility was at stake, but Bush's was not. In the case of the Bainers, Romney's credibility is at stake,
but so is Obama's. If, as now appears likely, even the media is portraying Obama's attacks as false, it will be a blow to his credibility as much as -- if the Bainer claims prove true -- it would be a blow to Romney.
