On a steamy night in Zaire 30 years ago, 60,000 boxing fans gathered in a stadium, and millions more on television, to watch heavyweight champion George (before the grill) Foreman fight Muhammad Ali, the 32-year-old deposed champ seeking to regain his title.
The stronger, younger Foremen spent most of the fight pummeling Ali, who drew his arms high to protect his pretty face and laid back against the ropes while Foreman pounded Ali’s body and arms. In the process, Foreman wore himself out, lowered his guard, and by the eighth round, it was Ali delivering the knockout punch.
Ali famously labeled his strategy “rope-a-dope.”
We don’t know precisely where George W. Bush was on that day, but we know that his campaign understands the lesson of that fight. Throughout August, supporters of the president taunted his Democratic challenger, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, in a most audacious way: suggesting that Kerry had not justly earned his combat medals in Vietnam.
Taking the bait, Democrats counterpunched, in the process dignifying the charges. Then Kerry’s opponents questioned his protesting of the war when he returned from Vietnam. Again, Democrats shot back. They were following the standard playbook of modern campaigns–that assertion by the opposing campaign must be throttled with the force of a Foreman right cross.
Now the scrutiny has turned to Bush’s service, or lack thereof, in the National Guard. It is the kind of story that has the whiff of scandal, and at just the wrong moment for the president.
Not likely.
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Instead, Kerry’s supporters again find themselves talking about something that happened a lifetime ago for most Americans. And the substance of the allegations against Bush–even if true–is not of a different kind than those that were raised in his run for the White House in 2000.
Asked and answered, as the lawyers say.
As if to underscore the futility of dwelling on the past came reports that the records that purported to confirm Bush’s dereliction of duty might be suspect themselves. That set off a new round of arguments and muddied the issue sufficiently so that it is even less likely to hurt the president.
Every day that Kerry and his campaign spend talking about something other than the president’s record is a day that they lose, and there are only about 50 of those days left. Yet they seem so conditioned to the notion of overwhelming response that they have failed to adapt to this different reality.
From his bedside before heart surgery last week, former President Bill Clinton reportedly told Kerry not to mention the word Vietnam again. Kerry’s surrogates need to hear a replay of the tape.
Most voters have made their judgment about Bush’s character. His biography of misspent youth, mediocre business success, then stunning turnaround about the age of 40, is well-traveled. And many Baby Boomers nod knowingly and approvingly. Most care less about what he did when he was in his 20s than they do about what he has done in the Oval Office in his middle 50s.
At the Republican National Convention in New York, Bush acknowledged this in his acceptance speech when he laid bare the most obvious things that bother people: his certitude (thanks, mom) and his swagger (in Texas, it’s called “walking”). The broader message he was sending voters was: “I have my flaws, but you know what they are. Please accept them . . . again.”
Vietnam, the long-ago war that lives on in the national psyche, has very little to do with whether people can afford health care, have a safe pension, or are on one side or the other over the war in Iraq. But that is the ground on which the campaign has been fought for the past month.
And the effect has been a downward trend for Kerry in every national and, more important, every battleground-state poll released in the past week.
All the geniuses who are advising Kerry, a cluster that now includes many who made their reputations while working for Clinton, cannot persuade him to resist the obvious reflex to punch back.
Kerry has been talking about issues, but he isn’t being heard. The speech he hasn’t given would say that he is proud of his own service, his time as a protester and he really doesn’t care about the George W. Bush of more than 30 years ago.
It would say that he cares about what is happening in people’s lives today and what might happen in the future. It would focus on the George W. Bush who works in the Oval Office, and his policies that have brought the nation into a long and costly war, driven up the number of uninsured, increased the disparity between rich and poor and saddled the next generation with record deficits.
Instead, his campaign is punching itself out over Vietnam. It doesn’t have to be fair that Kerry’s heroic service has been undermined. That’s the beauty of the “rope-a-dope.” It works.