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In the competition for votes from the country’s veterans, which make up some 13% of the electorate, two recent polls show a wide divergence. In a Gallup poll released on Memorial Day, veterans prefer Willard Mitt Romney by a huge 24 point margin. Earlier in the month, a Reuters/Ipsos poll showed Obama the favorite by 7 points. (John McCain beat Obama by 10 percentage points in the 2008 election.)
Romney has gone all uber hawk, having as advisers a number of Bush era neo-cons. He has promised to increase the military budget despite historic budget busting deficits, and has staked out an aggressive position on Syria. All this is being done with with an eye towards diverting attention from his previous remarks that the U.S. was wasting too much time and money hunting down Usama bin Laden, a position that makes him look weak in light of the Obama Administration successful killing of Usama in a daring covert Seal Team raid in Pakistan, applauded by veterans and active duty personnel everywhere.
Because it is still early in the campaign, voters know little about Romney’s own personal history vis a vis the military. Obama is young enough enough to have escaped the draft, so he gets something of a pass there. But not Mittens. Much like The Great Chicken Hawk Dick Cheney before him, who was able to secure five different exemptions from the draft, Romney was able to wrangle four exemptions for himself, using the Mormon’s religion’s exclusive privilege to substitute missionary work for military service.
In other words, while millions of young Americans either volunteered or were drafted in the military to fight the evil communist empire in the sweltering rice paddies of Southeast Asia, Romney was suffering in Paris doing service for God and his religion by recruiting members for what many Christians and others consider a cult.
Mittens the Missionary in France in 1968
On his show Last Word last night, Lawrence O’Donnell did a lot to shape future perceptions of Mittens the Warrior. The Man With No Core has suffered from an ever-changing self-narrative designed to obscure some serious character flaws, like lying through his teeth on policy matters when simple flip-flopping won’t do. How all this plays out among the country’s vets remains to be seen, but we are in that stage of the election when the candidates are doing their best to define each other before they can define themselves. Props to O’Donnell and his team for making an invaluable contribution to showing Romney in his true light.
It’s odd, but it looks like we will never have a President who was a veteran of the Vietnam War. Bob Kerrey, John Kerry, Al Gore and John McCain all were defeated, and other candidates of that era did not serve. Truman and Ike served in WWI, Ike, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ford and Bush the First served in WWII, and Carter was deployed in the Pacific during Korea. But it seems that we’re never going to have a Boomer President who was a Vietnam vet.
Odd but true, SI…
Me. I’d settle for another Ike right about now. They guy knew war and what a waste (opportunity cost) it was and is.
Hell, he be far to the left of Obama on military issues. For instance, I can’t see him tripling down on Afghanistan after nearly a decade of stalemate like O did, or getting involved in any other military adventurism, let alone a civil war.
Of course, if he were alive today, the Teabaggers would primary him to death.