Tuesday, September 14, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

JOHN L. SMITH: Kerry should take cue from Cleland's passionate indictment of Bush

It was Saturday morning at the MGM Grand, and Max Cleland was itching for a fight.

The triple amputee braced himself with his left arm and swung from his wheelchair to a chair at a Starbucks on the casino floor. He displayed more fire and focus in the next 30 minutes than John Kerry's presidential campaign has been able to drum up in six weeks.

There's no substitute for passionate discourse and political pugnacity, and few rival Cleland in those departments. The Vietnam veteran, former U.S. senator from Georgia and 9-11 Commission member until December 2003 was the ideal tough-talking advance man for Kerry, who frankly could use a little of Cleland's energy.

As he spoke, I better understood that this election is more for him than being a good political soldier. Cleland was savaged by a GOP attack on his patriotism in 2002 and lost his Senate seat. He hasn't forgotten.

Kerry could sure use some of Cleland's anger. I wasn't expecting him to read from the Marquess of Queensberry Rules and wasn't disappointed. He was hot for a street brawl.

"You finally realize you're dealing with pure evil," he said of his 2002 mugging. "It's evil in its purest form, because George Bush and Karl Rove and Dick Cheney do not care who they go after, whose character they assassinate. If you stand in their way and disagree with them, they will try to kill you politically. They will trash you. They will bring up lies, and they will create false issues to discredit your character and your courage. They do that at a calculated means to take the burden off of them to produce something positive.

"When they target you, it is hell to pay."

Arizona Sen. John McCain, a naval aviator who was shot down and spent more than five years in a North Vietnamese prison camp, found out when he challenged Bush for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000. Two years later, Cleland was smeared as an ally of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, "as if my voting record in the Senate was somehow supportive of terrorist attacks against this country."

"And they're doing the same things with John Kerry, a man who actually did serve and served honorably and well and with great distinction and moral courage and decisiveness if you read the officer efficiency reports. They're creating a cartoon character, a straw man out here that's not true. And they do that to distract from the fact George Bush never served in the war of his generation. Dick Cheney got five deferments. Karl Rove got one. They're the essence of chicken hawks, where you're chicken to go yourself, but you're a hawk to send somebody else."

Cleland's anger and understanding of what fires up his party manifested itself recently in a trip to the gates of the president's Crawford, Texas, ranch to deliver a diatribe and accuse Bush of deception during his malnourished military career in the Texas Air National Guard.

But Cleland was there to do more than set a 35-year-old war record straight. He battered Bush's presidency from the economy to Iraq.

"This is not about John's Vietnam," he said. "This is about George Bush's Vietnam that he's created in Iraq. It's also about his disastrous economy ... the worst since Herbert Hoover."

Then there's the issue that's close to the hearts of most Nevadans, Yucca Mountain.

Cleland accused Bush of lying to Nevadans on the Yucca Mountain issue. But even if he used a little down-home hyperbole -- the facts don't actually show presidential prevarication -- Cleland knows the proposed nuclear waste dump is a winning issue for Kerry. While Kerry has vowed to fight Yucca Mountain, Bush said he decided to let the project go forward based on sound science.

To which Cleland replied, "So he's the nation's great scientist now? He sold out to the energy companies, plain and simple. He has given up on the citizens of Nevada, and the citizens here can hold him accountable for that Nov. 2."

Surely, President Bush will have something to say about that during today's Las Vegas visit. And Kerry is due Thursday.

Max Cleland calls himself the warm-up act, but for my money he's the main event.

John L. Smith's column appears Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. E-mail him at Smith@reviewjournal.com or call 383-0295.