PTSD FOLLIES:

In Bush's Shadow (Richard Wolffe and Susannah Meadows, 9/05/04, Newsweek)

John Kerry wanted to hit back. It had been a miserable August as he took incoming fire about his military service from a gang of hostile Vietnam vets. But no, campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill and other staffers argued, the Swift Boat ads would blow over. Finally, Kerry had had enough. For three or four days, as he campaigned across the country, Kerry ripped into Cahill, furious that the mostly baseless attacks on his valor were driving his numbers down. "He was very angry," one old friend says. "The calculation had been made that this wasn't going to hurt him." Kerry's solution was to reach for an old ally. "Get Vallely," he screamed.

Thomas Vallely is the leader of the pack of vets that Kerry calls his dog-hunters, a group that has beaten back the attacks on his Vietnam record since his first Senate race 20 years ago. "He knows that I know the other players," Vallely says of Kerry's Mayday call. "He knows that I also like this stuff."

The return of the old warriors marked a turning point in the Swift Boat controversy, and a rare moment when Kerry stamped his authority on a drifting campaign. "OK, time to break out the fatigues. We've been there, done that. Time to do it again," says David Thorne, Kerry's close friend, of the mood among the senator's inner circle.

And so, even as the balloons were falling at the Republicans' party in Madison Square Garden, Kerry's motorcade pulled into Clark County, Ohio, where Al Gore beat George W. Bush by just 324 votes. There, Kerry finally struck hard at his opponents' record during Vietnam. "I will not have my commitment to defend this country questioned by those who refused to serve when they could have, and who misled America into Iraq," Kerry told a crowd of several thousand supporters at a midnight rally in Springfield. The Bush team, as usual, responded rapidly to Kerry's decidedly unrapid response. Karen Hughes, the president's longtime message maven, accused Kerry of being "consumed" by Vietnam, saying he had "diminished himself" with the attack.

"time to break out the fatigues"? No, they're not consumed by Vietnam at all.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 5, 2004 10:18 PM