More on the Viet Nam strategy

A couple posts back, I commented on what Kerry's strategy of basing his campaign on his service in Viet Nam indicates about his character and intelligence, given how vigorously that record is being challenged. After reading this post at QandO, I realize that there's another explanation that should have been obvious:

So why all the Vietnam. Well, frankly, the Democrats, using the criteria of "electablility" over substance, picked a bad candidate. That's the short of it. They were left trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. His 4 month's in Vietnam was about as much silk as they could find in that sow's ear.

My comments were based on the assumption that there was an alternative to the Viet Nam strategy that would present Kerry in a favorable light. The logical choice under most circumstances would be Kerry's 20-year record in the Senate. But as Mark Steyn, quoted by McQ in his post, says:

The one thing the Democratic Party owed America this campaign season was a candidate credible on the current war. The Democrats needed their own Tony Blair, a bloke who's a big socialist pantywaist when it comes to health and education and the other nanny-state hooey but believes in robust projection of military force in the national interest.

John Kerry fails that test. If you wanted to pick a candidate on the wrong side of every major defense and foreign policy question of the last two decades, you would be hard put to find anyone with judgment as comprehensively poor as Mr. Kerry: total up his votes and statements on everything from Grenada to the Gulf war, Saddam to the Sandinistas, the Cold War to missile defense to every major weapons system of the 1980s and '90s. He called them all wrong.

In his article, Steyn goes on to say:

But that's not how the Democratic Party muscle saw John Kerry. Since the notion of a credible war president wasn't important to them, they looked at the war on terror merely as a Bush wedge issue to be neutralized. And they figured their best shot at neutralizing it was Lt. Kerry on a Swift boat.

In certain circumstances, it might even have worked. But the Democrats let their contempt for Mr. Bush run away with them. It wasn't enough to argue Mr. Kerry's four months in the Mekong Delta gave him authority on national security issues. Instead, they saw an opening to diminish Mr. Bush, to reduce him from the 21st century commander in chief who had toppled two enemy regimes to the 1970s pampered frat boy with the spotty National Guard record. And so they made the strategic error of hammering on about what their man was doing vs. what the Republicans' guy was doing during the Vietnam War. And they were having such fun at Mr. Bush's expense and getting so high on those four months from the 1960s that they gave not a thought to the great wasteland of John Kerry's 1970s, '80s and '90s.

This, then, would put the blame for this course at least partially on the shoulders of the Democrat leadership rather than Kerry himself. Even so, I still wonder at what Kerry himself actually believes. The tenet of The Big Lie is that, if you tell a lie often enough, people start believing it. The person or people telling that lie are not always immune from its effects. One wonders if one reason Kerry can talk about Viet Nam with a straight face is not so much that he's a good actor, but that he actually believes what he's saying.