Call it Swift Boat II.
A group of former special operations soldiers have release a short film criticizing President Obama for taking credit for slaying Osama bin Laden.
“Mr. President, you did not kill Osama bin Laden, America did,” Navy SEAL Ben Smith says in the film posted on opsecteam.org. “The work that the American military has done killed Osama bin Laden. You did not.”
The ad also accuses the president of leaking the information and putting U.S. operatives’ lives in danger in order to gain political advantage.
The group, Special Operations OPSEC Education Fund, claims to be a nonpartisan group, although founder Scott Taylor is a Republican and former unsuccessful congressional candidate in Virginia.
It smacks of 2004 all over again.
In August of that year, a group funded by a major Texas Republican campaign donor began running an attack ad in which former Swift boat veterans claimed Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) had lied to get one of his two decorations for bravery and two of his three purple hearts for conduct during the Vietnam War.
Factcheck.org said the group was contradicted, however, by Kerry’s former crewmen, and by Navy records.
But Kerry never regained his footing once the attacks were launched. Mired in trying to disprove false accusations, he never fully discredited the attacks, nor other attacks that painted him as weak on national defense and a “flip-flopper” on the decision to invade Iraq as a strategy to pursue terrorists connected to the Sept. 11 attacks.
The latest ad raises the question of how effective Obama’s reelection team will be in shooting down the attack.
Unlike 2004, Obama’s campaign quickly identified a Republican connection to the film and likened the effort to the anti-Kerry ads, which were ultimately repudiated by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a Vietnam vet and former prisoner of war. Some of the Swift boat veterans who appeared in the film also later sought to disassociate themselves from the attack.
Obama himself said he’s not paying them much mind.
“I don’t take these folks too seriously,” the president said in an interview with the Virginian-Pilot. “One of their members is a birther who denies I was born here, despite evidence to the contrary. You’ve got another who was a tea party candidate in a recent election. This kind of stuff springs up before election time.”
In Kerry’s case, the funder behind the attacks wasn’t known initially. It was later revealed in an IRS filing that the money was provided largely by Bob J. Perry, a Houston home builder, who had also given millions to the Republican Party and Republican candidates, mostly in Texas, including President Bush and former Republican Majority Leader Tom DeLay, whose district was near Houston.
But will pointing to Republicans be enough to discredit the attack?
Chad Kolton, who was the spokesman for the director of national intelligence in the Bush administration and now represents the Opsec group, told The New York Times that the group was not required to identify its donors because it was classified as a 501(c)(4) educational group under tax laws.
He also told The Times that Opsec had raised nearly $1 million since June and would run ads on TV and online and would air the video in swing states.
FactCheck.org noted parts of the video distorted the facts in its editing of the president discussing his role in the operation, including using quotes from an opinion piece by a Republican lobbyist and blogger to make it appear that The Washington Post was critical of the president taking credit for bin Laden’s killing.
The Obama campaign pointed out that the president had vowed to end the war in Iraq and focus on taking out al Qaeda’s leaders. That had once been believed enough to establish the president’s bona fides on national security, but the Republicans are hoping to find a weak spot in that scenario that can be exploited.
Surely the president is taking some credit for approving the plan that brought down bin Laden. As commander-in-chief, he certainly would have taken the blame had the operation gone horribly wrong, so it should come as no surprise that he would claim the victory.
But beyond likening the effort to the 2004 campaign against Kerry, the Democrats need to find a way to shut this effort against Obama quickly or the incumbent will be spread thin trying to fight attacks on multiple fronts against a better funded opponent.
For example,a new book by journalist Richard Miniter, “Leading From Behind: The Reluctant President and the Advisors Who Decide for Him,” alleges that Obama kept delaying the bin Laden mission until Secretary of State Hillary Clinton finally came along to push the president into acting.
National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor called the claim “completely made up and wrong.”
With the Swift Boat II ad, it’s not the first time an ad has taken the president’s words out of context.
After all, from where the GOP sits, if a plan worked well once, there is no reason not to use it again, unless and until it fails.
Jackie Jones, a journalist and journalism educator, is director of the career transformation firm Jones Coaching LLC and author of “Taking Care of the Business of You: 7 Days to Getting Your Career on Track.”
