OPINION:Hilarious headline in the Melbourne Age of Australia: "Anti-Kerry Ad Mars Presidential Campaign." "Mars" it? Reminds me of the old war song - the first World War, that is, in case you're a Kerry campaigner unaware that there were any wars other than Vietnam - If You Were The Only Girl In The World: "A garden of Eden just made for two, With nothing to mar our joy." writes Mark Steyn.
That's what the Democrats and their media cheerleaders wanted for John Kerry: a jungle of south-east Asian Eden, with nothing to mar his joy. All the Senator had to do was talk about his four months in Vietnam for two years and he could somehow tootle along to victory, untroubled and untouchable. Now some guy's marred it, by declaring in this ad that "John Kerry has not been honest" about his time in Vietnam.
Oh, yeah? Sez who? Some neo-con chickenhawk dilettante National Guardsman? Er, no. It's an admiral. He was also on a Swift boat in Vietnam, and so were the other fellows in the ad, and they're all saying things like "John Kerry betrayed the men and women he served with." Look, I'd rather talk about the war.
The current one, I mean - not the one that ended three decades ago. But, insofar as I understand the rules of Campaign 2004, every time any member of the Administration says anything about the present conflict, he's accused by Democrats of shamelessly "politicising" it.
Whereas every time John Kerry waxes nostalgic about those fragrant memories of the Mekong Delta, he should be allowed to take his unending stroll down memory lane unmolested.
After all, as everyone from John Edwards to Bill Clinton has assured us, being a Swift boat commander for four months is the indispensable qualification for being president.
When Hillary runs in 2008, no doubt she'll be leaning heavily on her four months running a Swift boat up and down the Shatt al-Arab during the Iraq war.
But hang on, most of these fellows in the anti-Kerry ad - the ones talking about how he can't be trusted, etc - are also Swift boat commanders? If being a Swiftee is the most important thing in American life, why are all these "Swift Boat Veterans For Truth" any less entitled to be heard than John Kerry? Well, because they're part of the "Republican smear machine". Apparently, it's the Republicans' fault that of the 22 surviving Swift boat officers who served with Kerry only one is willing to support him, and that a big bunch of the remaining Swiftees feel strongly enough about the lieutenant's conduct 35 years ago to appear in one of the most remarkable political ads ever seen.
Had enough of Vietnam yet? Most Americans had enough of it at the time.
Which the clever clogs at the Democratic Party should have figured out before they decided to re-launch John Kerry and John Edwards as Bob Hope and Jill St John on their USO tour for the presidency.
The Dems should never have signed on to this vanity candidacy, even before the multiplying barnacles began encrusting to the hull of the campaign boat.
The one thing the Democratic Party owed America this campaign season was a candidate who was credible on the current war. The Dems needed their own Tony Blair, a bloke who's a big socialist pantywaist when it comes to health and education and all the other nanny-state hooey but who believes in the robust projection of military force in the national interest.
John Kerry fails that test. If you wanted to pick a candidate on the wrong side of every major defence and foreign policy question of the last two decades, you'd be hard put to find anyone with as comprehensively poor judgment as Kerry: tot up his votes and statements on everything from Grenada to the Gulf War, Saddam to the Sandinistas, the Cold War to missile defence to every major weapons system of the Eighties and Nineties. He called them all wrong.
But that's not how the Democratic Party muscle saw John Kerry. Because the notion of a credible war president wasn't important to them, they looked at the war on terror merely as a Bush wedge issue that needed to be neutralised. And they figured that their best shot at neutralising it was Lieut Kerry on a Swift boat.
In certain circumstances it might even have worked, but the Dems let their contempt for Bush run away with them. It wasn't enough to argue that Kerry's four months in the Mekong Delta gave him authority on national security issues; instead, they saw an opening to diminish Bush, to reduce him from the 21st century commander-in-chief who'd toppled two enemy regimes to the 1970s pampered frat boy with the spotty National Guard record.
And so they made the strategic error of hammering on about what their man was doing during the Vietnam war versus what the Republicans' guy was doing during the Vietnam war.
And they were having such fun at Bush's expense and getting so high on those four months from the Sixties that they gave not a thought to the great wasteland of John Kerry's 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.
That's one of the defects of living in the media-political echo chamber, where you're so hep to the spin and counter-spin and counter-counter-spin you forget that back on Planet Earth folks don't look at things that way.
On the big speech night in Boston, with Kerry's crewmates and war amputee Max Cleland and "I'm John Kerry and I'm reporting for duty", the Dems and the media saw it as an ingenious way of screwing Bush, but every normal person viewing that night saw only a strange man with nothing to say about anything that's happened since the early 1970s. And the reality is that most Americans don't want a Vietnam candidate. Vietnam veterans mostly loathe Kerry for riding the war-what-is-it-good-for-absolutely-nothing movement to celebrity status and, just as they thought they couldn't despise him any more, here comes the old opportunist riding the I-was-proud-to-do-my-patriotic-duty shtick to the presidency. Older veterans think the endless exhibitionist preening about your war record is cheap and vulgar.
And to everybody else the Vietnam act is just a bummer, a reminder of a bad time in the national story. Doesn't matter whether it's John Kerry in the Green Berets or John Kerry in Apocalypse Now.
The Bush-haters outsmarted themselves: nobody wants to hear about Vietnam. And Kerry hasn't anything else to run on. Or as Country Joe and the Fish would put it: And it's one, two, three, what is he fighting for?