Consider This from NPR - How a candidate's military service can help or hurt their campaign

Episode Date: August 12, 2024

By most measures, the new Democratic ticket has had an impressively smooth launch.But there is one caveat to that — controversy over how vice presidential nominee Tim Walz described his military service.A spokeswoman for the Harris-Walz campaign has said in a statement that the Democratic vice-presidential nominee "misspoke" when talking about his military service. Walz, who served for 24 years in the National Guard, had made a comment that sounded like he had been to war. Walz's Republican opponent, JD Vance, pounced on that comment to accuse Walz of what's called "stolen valor," a serious charge among veterans. But there's also a history of playing politics with military service – one that's been used in past elections. Is Tim Walz guilty of deliberately misrepresenting his military record or the victim of a familiar political smear tactic?For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.Email us at [e-mail]. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Tim. It's Kamala Harris. Good morning, Governor. On Tuesday, it will be just one week since Minnesota Governor Tim Walz was named the Democratic vice presidential nominee. Listen, I want you to do this with me. Let's do this together. Would you be my running mate and let's get this thing on the road? I would be honored, Madam Vice President. And so far, the newly minted Harris Walls ticket has been met by large, enthusiastic crowds.

As well as lots of cash. Democratic endorsements are continuing to roll in for Vice President Kamala Harris. With a look at the surge in donations for Vice President Kamala Harris. The spigot has turned back on, and my my oh my, it's been really, really overwhelming. And rising poll numbers. The polling shows Kamala Harris has pulled ahead in crucial swing states.

Sources tell the Washington Post Trump has grown increasingly upset about Harris's surging poll numbers. Look in Pennsylvania, a four point advantage. Wisconsin, a four point advantage. Wisconsin, a four-point advantage. Michigan, a four-point advantage. But this pretty wildly successful rollout of the vice presidential nominee, or honeymoon, as the Trump campaign is calling it, also has had a couple bumps. Most notably, perhaps, when the Harris campaign released this

2018 tape of walls discussing gun control. I've been voting for common sense legislation that protects the Second Amendment, but we can do background checks. We can do CDC research. We can make sure we don't have reciprocal carry among states. And we can make sure that those weapons of war that I carried in war is the only place where those weapons were at. Now, Walls served 24 years in the National Guard. He did not see combat, which means he did not carry a weapon of war in war. The Harris campaign has since said that the vice presidential candidate misspoke in that 2018 clip. Nevertheless, Walls' characterization of his time in the military has given life to a line of attack from the Trump campaign, including this statement from Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance.

What was this weapon that you carried into war, given that you abandoned your unit right before they went to Iraq, and he has not spent a day in a combat zone? What bothers me about Tim Walz is the stolen valor garbage. Stolen valor is a serious accusation. There is no evidence that Wals has engaged in stolen valor. But these attacks, coming from Republicans and the Trump campaign, echo a similar line of attack on the Democratic presidential nominee some 20 years ago.

I served with John Kerry. I served with John Kerry. John Kerry has not been honest about what happened in Vietnam. He is lying about his record. Swift Boat Veterans for Truth is responsible for the content of this advertisement. Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Swift Boat Veterans for Truth was an independent political organization that opposed John Kerry's presidential run. The group raised tens of millions of dollars and spent that on a series of attack ads and a book suggesting Kerry was lying about his record as a decorated war hero. Their accusations are widely understood now to be false.

Kerry discussed the so-called swift boating in a 2018 Fresh Air interview. The problem was that the right wing got behind this with major funding from some of the very same names who are doing major right wing funding in the country today. And they started to pick up on these alternative facts and push them out there in the context of advertisements, television advertisements. And in fact, some of the names responsible for the attacks against John Kerry in 2004 are playing roles in the Trump campaign now, 2024. Consider this. Tim Walls may have misspoken about his military record, but is he actually guilty of deliberately misrepresenting it? Or is he the victim of a familiar political smear tactic? Coming up, two NPR correspondents dig into the attacks on Tim Walz and John Kerry and give the context behind them. from NPR. By most measures, the new Democratic ticket has had an impressively smooth launch. But there is one caveat to that controversy over how Tim Walz has described his military service. A spokeswoman

for the Harris-Walls campaign has said in a statement that the Democratic vice presidential nominee, quote, misspoke when talking about his military service. Walz, who served for 24 years in the National Guard, had made a comment that sounded like he had been to war. Walls' Republican opponent, J.D. Vance, pounced on that comment to accuse Walls of what's called stolen valor, just about the most serious charge possible in veteran circles. But there's also a history of playing politics with military service, one that we have seen in past elections. For more on that, we're joined now by NPR's Quill Lawrence and Don Gagne.

Hey to both of you. Hi there. Hello. So, Quill, I want to start with you. Can you just remind us exactly what Tim Walz had said? Yes, this is a video that surfaced last week where Walz in 2018 is talking about keeping assault rifles off American streets. But we can do background checks. We can do CDC research. We can make sure we don't have reciprocal carry among states. And we can make sure that those weapons of war that I carried in war is the only place where those weapons were at. So J.D. Vance then said Walz was claiming to have been to war, which he was not, and even calling it stolen valor, which is actually a legal term when you misrepresent your service for personal gain, this falls far short of that. But Vance made that charge.

Okay. And now, days after those remarks, say more about what the Harris-Walls campaign is saying about all of this after the fact. Right. They issued that statement that he did misspeak back in 2018. But then people have been going over Walls' public statements with a fine-tooth comb and finding spots where maybe the speaker or the host interviewing him misidentified him as having been to Afghanistan or having been to war, and he did not correct them. So it's things where he just failed to correct them. Although, as recently as last month before he was picked as Harris's nomination for VP, he was interviewed on CNN, and Jake Tapper misidentified him as an Afghanistan vet, and Walz corrected him.

So I would say it's not like Walz has a reputation for running around bragging about service. He more often says things like this, what he said to Minnesota Public Radio back in 2018. I know that there are certainly folks that did far more than I did. And I know that. And I willingly say I got far more out of the military than they got out of me. OK, well, beyond this accusation about stolen valor, there are a few additional issues that Republicans have been trying to hit Walls retired two months before an alert that his unit was going to mobilize to Iraq. Now, they didn't leave for Iraq until the following year. There was plenty of time to have him replaced. But it's clear at the time, Walls knew that Iraq was probably coming for his unit. He discussed having wanted to run for Congress at age 40 at this point and after having re-enlisted after 9-11. But then it was a very bad extended deployment to Iraq for the Minnesota National Guard. And a few fellow guardsmen have alleged that he conveniently retired before his battalion was deployed to Iraq.

And they've been using words like desertion and abandonment, which again, desertion has a legal definition. This is far short of that. These charges have been around in all of Walz's campaign for Congress and for governor. It hasn't moved the needle in the past, but we'll see what it does now. Okay, well, Don, let's turn to you because all of this focus on Walz's military record has gotten people looking back at another moment in American politics where a Democratic nominee's military resume was questioned, even attacked. And that was, of course, John Kerry during his presidential campaign back in 2004. And something interesting to note, a senior advisor on the Trump campaign

today, Chris LaCivita, had played a prominent role in those attacks against Kerry, right? Yes, and that's a campaign I actually covered for NPR. John Kerry was a U.S. senator and a Vietnam vet, a former commander of a small watercraft known as a swift boat. And during the war, he earned three Purple Hearts, a Silver Star, and a bronze star for actions during combat. At the Democratic Convention that year, in 2004, he made his military service a focal point of his acceptance speech. I'm John Kerry, and I'm reporting for duty. So, I mean, that kind of sums up the vibe of it and how he featured his service. But within a week of that moment, the attacks on his military service began.

They came from an outside group known as Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Involved in that group was Chris LaCivita, present-day Trump advisor. And suddenly ads like this one were all over TV and cable. I served with John Kerry. I served with John Kerry. John Kerry has not been honest about what happened in Vietnam. He is lying about his record. You can hear the tone that Kerry let his men down, that his heroism is a lie.

The ads were indeed fact-checked and shown to be false, but they packed a punch and they put the Democratic campaign and the nominee on the defensive. And why? Like, why were those ads at that time particularly effective? This was all in the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks less than three years earlier. Afghanistan, the war there was underway. The Iraq war had also been launched, and after initial successes, it was starting to bog down and the threat of terrorism was very much still on the minds of Americans. The Bush reelection campaign, I should say, was not connected And the Swift vote adds, again, falsely called Kerry a liar regarding his military history. And it's that old political tactic of going after your opponent's strength. Right. Okay. Well, Don, how much do you think the attacks on Walls' military record,

how much do you think they could stick and rob the Harris-Walls campaign of some of their momentum right now? I mean, here's the thing. It doesn't have to fully stick to do some political damage. The goal of the attack is not necessarily for it to all be proven true, especially in the case of those Swift Boat ads. They were found to be false, but it still muddies the waters and it can confuse voters. That was the goal then, and you can see it's the kind of thing they're trying to make happen again. That was NPR's Quill Lawrence and Don Gagne. Thank you to both of you.

Thank you. Thank you. This episode was produced by Mark Rivers. It was edited by Courtney Dorning, Andrew Sussman, and Megan Pratt. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan. And one more thing before we go. You can now enjoy the Consider This newsletter. We still help you break down a major story of the day, but you'll also get to know our producers

and hosts in some moments of joy from the All Things Considered team. You can sign up at npr.org slash consider this newsletter. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Elsa Chang.