Democrats still carry heavy 'wimp' baggage

Talk's cheap for most of us.

But if you're running for president, careless talk could cost you the White House.

So if you do run for president, don't, as Barack Obama did, say that "bitter" voters "cling to guns and religion."

Don't, as Hillary Clinton did, say that you've been under "the threat of sniper fire" when you haven't.

Don't, as John McCain did, say that Iran, a largely Shiite nation, has been training Sunni al-Qaida militants in Iraq.

And if you're trying to pick a president, don't forget that the 2008 Final Three are under wall-to-wall scrutiny in an absurdly lengthy campaign season that's already an ordeal for both candidates and voters.

As Obama put it during Wednesday night's debate with Clinton in Philadelphia: "Both of us are working as hard as we can to make sure that we're delivering a message to the American people about what we would do as president. Sometimes that message is going to be imperfectly delivered, because we are recorded every minute of every day."

They aren't the only ones. As if defending their own relentless chatter weren't demanding enough, the candidates also must disavow rash rhetoric from supporters, including friends, families and even preachers.

Yet this April 7 low blow from an Obama backer transcended standard mudslinging: "McCain was a fighter pilot who dropped laser-guided missiles from 35,000 feet. He was long gone when they hit. What happened when they get to the ground? He doesn't know. You have to care about the lives of people. McCain never gets into those issues."

That would have been an appalling enough insult if delivered by a campaign flunky. What made it downright disgraceful — and politically moronic — was that it came from the chairman of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

That fourth-term senator from West Virginia, Jay Rockefeller, issued a statement of contrition the next day: "I have deep respect for John McCain's honorable and noble service to our country. I made an inaccurate and wrong analogy, and I have extended my sincere apology to him."

The Obama campaign properly distanced itself: "Senator Obama has a deep respect for Senator McCain's service to this country and he does not agree with what Senator Rockefeller said."

Rockefeller should have known that McCain was shot down in Vietnam a year before our pilots started using laser-guided missiles, that our warriors have long raised their own risks to minimize civilians' risks and that former POW McCain often "gets into" war's moral dilemmas. In a major foreign policy speech on March 26, McCain said, "I detest war," then explained why:

"Innocent people suffer and die. Commerce is disrupted, economies are damaged, strategic interests shielded by years of patient statecraft are endangered as the exigencies of war and diplomacy conflict. Not the valor with which it is fought nor the nobility of the cause it serves can glorify war. Whatever gains are secured, it is loss the veteran remembers most keenly. Only a fool or a fraud sentimentalizes the merciless reality of war."

So Rockefeller issued an apology that McCain accepted.

So what?

No apology could silence the familiar tone underlying Rockefeller's revealing casting of America's military as the villain.

No amount of "we're proud of our troops, but ..." refrains has erased the late Jeane Kirkpatrick's successful Republican Convention branding of Democrats as a "blame America first" bunch.

By that 1984 point, she was a soon-to-be ex-Democrat serving as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. in the Reagan administration

By this 2008 point, Democrats' enduring reputation as appeasers who "blame America first" has helped Republicans win seven of the last 10 presidential elections.

Maybe you think that long-term "soft on defense" charge is unfair.

Tough. Voter perception equals election-result reality. And the "wimp" shot keeps hitting the voter-perception mark because so many Democrats make themselves such easy targets.

OK, so some — though far from all — Democrats told us so about Iraq.

Lots of them also have lately told us to be nicer to terrorists.

Wednesday news flash: An alleged enemy combatant at the Charleston Naval Brig has been furnished with a laptop computer, cable TV, exercise machines and a nearly 400-volume personal Islamic library.

Poor thing.

Waterboarding shouldn't be the American way — a point that torture victim McCain has made while braving hard-liner ire. But the U.S. apparently has used that harsh technique sparingly. And if relatively rare civilian casualties inflicted by our forces today make us the bad guys, what does mass civilian slaughter inflicted from the sky in World War II make our "Greatest Generation"?

Most Americans still rightly root for America's military.

So if you're rooting for a Democrat to win the White House, stop sounding like you're rooting for our troops to lose in Iraq.

Frank Wooten is associate editor of The Post and Courier. His e-mail is wooten@postandcourier.com.