CHICAGO, 18 October 2004 — Connie Cominsky, a suburban businesswoman, has become the archtype disillusioned Republican and made it her mission to vote the US president out of office.
An opponent of the Iraq invasion, Cominsky became active in the anti-war movement and then the Democratic presidential campaign.
Her face is showing up in advertisements for groups such as MoveOn.org, and the anti-war Band of Sisters that are running issue ads backing the Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.
“I’m speaking out while I can,” said Cominsky, who comes from the Chicago suburbs and speaks in a voice made reedy and uneven by a degenerative condition. “The president let me down. He let the country down.”
“I don’t feel that pride in my country that I used to,” she went on. “We’re not liked in the world ... people see us as bullies, a nation that will go to war to satisfy its oil needs.”
Conventional wisdom holds that a war president has the advantage over a challenger in an election year. But many Americans say they feel this year that it is their patriotic duty to show President George W. Bush the door.
And they are doing that, arguing their case in letters in the New York Times, on scores of websites, and through bumper stickers and town hall meetings.
Academics, nobel laureates, billionaire businessmen like George Soros, people with relatives in the military, united by unease over Iraq war and the administration’s unilateralism, have gone public with calls for a change in the White House.
Equally, there are those on the other side of the debate who relish having a commander-in-chief who is willing to use decisive force to defend the nation, particularly after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. “I feel better (about America) now, than I did when Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton was in there,” said Korean War veteran John Russo, in a reference to two past Democratic presidents. “I’m a firm believer that if you’re in the cross-hairs you’d better be able to defend yourself.”
Like many veterans, the 73-year-old from Springfield, Illinois, supports Bush.
He is uneasy about the Democratic hopeful, who is a decorated Vietnam veteran, sensing that Kerry would sell America short in his eagerness to restore America to the family of nations. “He wants an international court, an international army, an international everything,” Russo grumbled. “I don’t want my armed forces put under the command of some dinky little country with a standing army of 550 men.”
“Our soldiers take an oath to uphold the US Constitution, not to be at the beck and call of the rest of the world.”
The impact on the election of the huge upsurge in patriotism since Sept. 11 is almost impossible to assess, according to analysts.
“It has got wrapped up in the wider debate this year over national security, homeland security, and American values,” said Scott McLean, a political scientist at Connecticut’s Quinnipiac University. Certainly, Kerry’s decision to play up his Vietnam record — a move designed to neutralize the president’s advantage as a war-time president — backfired on the Massachusetts senator, McLean said.
A television ad by Vietnam veterans that lambasted Kerry for “dishonoring” his country, and selling out the troops in Vietnam by speaking openly of the atrocities committed by US forces got enormous media play.
The spot dominated the election coverage for 10 days in August, according to Ken Goldstein, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who tracks political advertising for the Wisconsin Advertising Project.
It was “a very powerful message,” said Goldstein, that had “a direct negative effect on Kerry.”
