Vance’s Attacks on Walz’s Service Mirror ‘Fast Browsing’ of 2004: NPR

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By questioning the military record of Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz, Republicans are dusting off a political playbook they successfully used exactly 20 years ago.

There is even a name for this phenomenon: “fast surfing.”

The term, which has since entered the dictionaries, refers to an unfair or false political attack. It takes its name from a smear campaign by a group of Vietnam War veterans against John Kerry during his 2004 presidential bid.

Long before Kerry represented Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate, he served as a Navy officer during the Vietnam War. He spent four months in 1969 in Vietnam commanding a type of patrol vessel called a swift boat, returning with numerous combat medals, including three Purple Hearts.

Back home, as the war dragged on, Kerry emerged as a leading anti-war activist. In 1971, as spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War, he spoke graphically and critically about the war in now-famous testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

“He was a peace activist and also a veteran, and that combination was a significant thing,” says Derek Buckaloo, a professor of American history at Coe College in Iowa who specializes in the Vietnam War and its aftermath.

Decades later, against the still-fresh backdrop of the September 11 attacks and the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Kerry’s military heroism was a major selling point of his 2004 presidential campaign. Even his acceptance speech began with the line, “I’m John Kerry, and I report for duty.”

Democrats hoped that Kerry’s decorated veteran status might shield him from Republicans’ accusations that the party was weak on defense, as Buckaloo explains.

“Terry McAuliffe, the head of the Democratic Party at the time, said that Kerry’s ‘chest full of medals’ would protect him from these kinds of attacks,” Buckaloo says. “That didn’t happen, largely because of the activities of a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.”

What happened in 2004

Swift Boat Veterans for Truth was a 527-person political organization formed solely to oppose the Kerry campaign.

As an independent advocacy group, it was legally allowed to raise money and spend without limits, as long as it did not coordinate with a presidential campaign. In other words, it was not technically affiliated with Kerry’s Republican challenger, incumbent President George W. Bush, although that did not hurt its chances.

“The Bush administration kept them at bay, but they certainly didn’t get in their way,” Buckaloo says. “And they raised tens of millions of dollars and spent it on a series of offensive ads against Kerry that basically went straight to his claim that being a veteran made him trustworthy, suggesting that he had lied on his resume.”

The group funded a book (titled Unfit for Command) and several television commercials, in which veterans questioned Kerry’s heroism in Vietnam and criticized what they saw as his betrayal as an antiwar activist. The schism reflected broader cultural divisions in how Americans felt about the Vietnam War, Buckaloo says.

Their allegations are widely believed to be false. Military records (released by the Kerry campaign) have supported his combat claims. And while most of the swift boat veterans who have spoken out against Kerry did not serve directly with him, those who did have publicly supported his version of events.

In a fresh air of 2018 interview, Kerry said that his critics were “making it all up… left, right and center,” and that the evidence offered by his campaign did not measure up to their “alternative facts.”

“The problem is that the right has supported this with huge funding from some of the same people who are funding the right in this country today,” Kerry said. “And they’ve started to take these alternative facts and push them out there in the context of … TV ads.”

The ads themselves became the story, in what Buckaloo describes as an example of pre-social media virality.

Sean Hannity of the relatively young Fox News network launched the first spot the day before it aired in August. Soon, the TV spots originally intended for a handful of swing states were picked up by national talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and eventually picked up by mainstream media.

Buckaloo said his speed of navigation sapped Kerry’s momentum after the Democratic National Convention and turned one of his greatest strengths into a weakness.

“[It] ultimately created a situation where Kerry had to sort of escape his veteran status and try not to talk about the war when, in fact, he was running against George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, two men who, famously, for various reasons, did not serve in Vietnam while he did,” he added.

The Kerry campaign was relatively slow to respond in that initial period, a move that Buckaloo says was likely intended to avoid amplifying the story but is now widely seen as a misstep, and it has largely avoided the topic since. The ads became one of the most enduring images of the 2004 election, which Kerry ultimately lost.

What’s similar and different this time?

While claims about a candidate’s military record, or lack thereof, continue to be a part of politics, the era of fast-track shipping seemed to have faded into memory until this week.

After Walz spoke of carrying “weapons of war” in a speech calling for gun control, Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance publicly questioned whether his new opponent, a 24-year National Guard veteran, had ever been to war.

Both vice presidential candidates are military veterans who never served, and they ran under presidential candidates who never served. Walz has faced questions over the years about the timing of his retirement, months before his unit was scheduled to deploy to Iraq.

But this week’s attack on “stolen valor” goes much further, and directly echoes the 2004 Swift Boat approach. In fact, the same Republican operative had a hand in both: Trump campaign co-manager Chris LaCivita was the chief strategist for Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

“Whoever has the same feather will be put together,” LaCivita said of Kerry and Walz in a recent interview with RealClearPolitics.

But Buckaloo cautions that it’s unclear whether the line of attack will work as well in 2024 as it did in 2004: after all, there are some fundamental differences between the two cases.

First, the context is very different. In 2004, Bush and Kerry ran to be presidents in a time of war, at a time when the nation was reeling from 9/11 and sending hundreds of thousands of troops overseas.

While foreign policy, particularly the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza, remain a key issue in the 2024 election, Buckaloo says the scale and nature of U.S. involvement in those conflicts is not comparable.

Second, Walz is not the presidential nominee, so he is unlikely to attract the same level of scrutiny as Kerry. Even former President Donald Trump himself, the Republican presidential nominee, has publicly stated that the vice president “in terms of the election, has no impact.”

Then there’s the question of source. While the 2004 attacks were launched by a now-defunct independent organization, today’s allegations against Walz come directly from the Trump campaign.

“It implicates Republicans in the attack in a way that in 2004 they might have said, ‘Well, that’s not us and we’re not going to do that,'” Buckaloo says. “But they’re doing it in 2024 … in a context where a lot of Americans have questions about Trump and Vance as messengers or truth tellers that could also problematize this.”

And, Buckaloo says, Democrats have already been through 2004 once. He doesn’t think the party can ignore Vance’s attacks.

“They realize that you can’t just let these things go, that you have to respond and say, ‘This is unfair, this is vulgar. This is, to use a word Tim Walz uses, weird,'” she adds.

Only time will tell if it will work.