In April, they reared their ugly heads, the Kerry team responded by putting all of his records, except medical records on his Web site. This included all fitness reports which included dates, so you could see they spanned the entire interval. They were uniformly not just positive but very very positive.
In August, they returned. This time with their book which told many many different, even conflicting lies. This was like a cluster bomb of an attack - simultaneously hitting with many different attacks.
Kerry did respond to this. The media was informed that his official response would be given before the Firefighters union. It got very very little coverage by a media that gave Trump like coverage with much free air time to the liars. The other campaign response was to direct the media to the official records. The media played it as the SBVT vs Kerry, but it was really the liars against the Navy records.
The media helped even beyond ignoring Kerry's response which was exactly how one responds to provable lies. Consider that there was no outcry from the media when idiots at the Bush convention wore those despicable bandaids. What would have happened if the media had given someone like Max Cleland or Bobby Mueller, who was head of Vietnam Veterans of America, an organization Kerry among others started with Mueller, on to call these people out and demand Bush himself speak out against them. Imagine if they called on McCain to demand they be removed at least during his speech.
None of that happened - almost giving the impression that the media thought it ok or that Kerry deserved the attacks. Against this implicit acceptance by the media and all the free time they were given, the surprise is that Kerry did as well as he did in a year Democrats were not favored to win.
Polls late in the campaign showed few people voted against Kerry because of the lies. However, the lies made it harder for Kerry to use that part of his life to define his character and who he is as much as he could have otherwise. The fitness reports and the Brinkley book show a very serious, mature individual whose intelligence and personal concern for others was there even in a time where his life was at risk daily.
Kerry actually outperformed all models of how a generic Democrat would do in 2004. Not to mention, the Republicans suppressed the Democratic vote in Ohio and possibly cheated in the Cleveland area through use of ballots that differed by district even when multiple districts voted in the same place.
People forget that Bush was at 60 in December 2003. The economy was growing and it was not until 2005 that most people began to see that Bush was a disaster. After the election, one of the papers did some intensive interviews in Ohio. They found that the biggest issue that led them to vote for Bush/Cheney was national security. Sadly, many completely understood Kerry and thought well of him, but thought B/C would respond more intensely to terrorists - accepting things like terror that they correctly knew Kerry would reject.
Note that the term, swiftboating, implicitly defined attacks as based on lies. Almost immediately, even Republicans started to use the word to deflect attacks on themselves as swiftboating.
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