The problems dogging John Kerry’s presidential campaign deepened on Wednesday as a row over the authenticity of documents about George Bush’s National Guard service took centre stage.
The Kerry campaign insists it had nothing to do with the documents, which contain derogatory remarks about Bush’s National Guard service, apparently written by a superior officer in the early 1970s. But evidence that they may be forgeries could damage Kerry’s challenge when he is trailing in the polls and striving to regain his footing.
Forensic scrutiny of the typefaces, spacing and verbal style of the National Guard memos could help shield Bush against a concerted Democratic attack on his Vietnam era record.
”The ‘forgeries’ have become the story, not the story itself,” David Corn, the Washington editor of the Nation magazine, said.
The timing of the appearance of the documents has led some Democrats to wonder if they had been put into circulation to discredit the anti-Bush effort. Fingers have begun to point — as they often do among Democrats — at Karl Rove, the president’s electoral mastermind.
”If this is Rove, it is his greatest masterpiece,” a Kerry campaign adviser said on Wednesday.
The rumours may say more about the extraordinary powers attributed to Rove by his adversaries than about the facts. CBS News, which first reported the documents last week, is not saying where they came from, but according to some press reports, they were provided by a retired officer with a grievance over hospital bills.
The memos appear to be signed by Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian, Bush’s commander in the Texas Air National Guard, who died 20 years ago. They rail against the young pilot and ambassador’s son for failing to attend a compulsory physical examination and complain about pressure from senior officers to ”sugar coat” his performance evaluation.
Since their publication, several experts have questioned whether they could have been produced on typewriters available at that time, although the technical evidence is not conclusive.
On Wednesday, to cloud an already murky picture, Lieutenant Colonel Killian’s former secretary declared that the documents were forged, but were factually correct.
”These are not real. They’re not what I typed, and I would have typed them for him,” the former secretary, Marian Carr Knox, told the Dallas Morning News.
However, Knox added: ”The information in here was correct, but it was picked up from the real [documents].”
Both she and another former colleague of Lieutenant Colonel Killian, Richard Via, recalled that he had kept careful notes on Bush’s shortcomings and transgressions as a pilot and stored them in a locked filing cabinet, the contents of which have since gone missing.
Corn said it was unlikely the documents were the work of Rove and the Bush camp. ”The cost of being caught is too high,” he said.
Corn said it was more likely the documents had been recreated by someone who was familiar with the originals and who was angry they had disappeared.
Kerry’s drop in the polls after a month of attacks by conservative veterans questioning his claim to Vietnam combat medals, has led to hurried efforts to bolster his team. It was reported on Wednesday that Mike McCurry, the White House spokesperson who saw Bill Clinton through the Monica Lewinsky saga, would join the candidate on the campaign trail to help deal with the media.
Senator Kerry’s aides argue their campaign has suffered because the US media has focused more on sideshows such as the row over the documents than on substantive issues such as Iraq, unemployment and healthcare.
They also point out that the Democratic candidate’s gaffes seem to get more of an airing than those of the president. Last month, Senator Kerry got the name of a stadium wrong in football-mad Wisconsin. His mistake has been broadcast relentlessly since, even becoming the subject of a Washington Post article on Wednesday, weeks after the slip.
By contrast, Democrats believe Bush’s slips have been treated as footnotes, even when he claimed earlier this month to have called for more funding for the Iraq occupation ”which is money for armour and body parts and ammunition and fuel”.
McCurry’s job is to try to divert the attention of the media away from Kerry’s shortcomings towards the administration’s failures.
As Charlie Cook, a Washington political pundit, put it: ”If the campaign spotlight ends up shining on Bush, Bush loses. If it focuses on Kerry, Kerry loses.” – Guardian Unlimited Â