Corps Voters, Wash Monthly, Iraq may make the military less Repub

[seasat]

Washington Monthly Article

Six months ago, that patriotic support extended to President Bush and the Republican Party. This section of coastal Carolina is staunch GOP territory, with Rush Limbaugh on the radio and flag decals--American mostly, but a few confederate--on the back of the pick-up trucks. "That's the recent tradition here--being a patriot and supporting the military means being a Republican," says Lockwood Phillips, publisher of the Jacksonville Daily News and conservative host of the local political call-in show. The Third Congressional District, which includes Jacksonville, gave President Bush a 23-percent margin over Al Gore in 2000, and even favored Bob Dole over Bill Clinton by 15 percent in 1996. Six months ago, you simply didn't hear anything against Bush in Jacksonville, and if people had doubts about the war in Iraq, they kept them to themselves. But these attitudes have begun to change. The local newspaper's editorial board, which has been vocally pro-Bush throughout his administration, ran an editorial at the beginning of October criticizing the administration's policies on Iraq, and suggesting that the campaign could end in a Vietnam-like quagmire. Soldiers' wives ask reporters why their husbands are still being sent off to Iraq, to face car bombs and chaos, months after the president said the war was over. Returned reservists, who saw their return dates pushed back again and again while they sat in a chaotic war zone, call the same radio station to say they didn't sign up for this sort of treatment, and they won't be reenlisting. If pressed, most people you talk to around here still say they'll support Bush. But their faith in him, and the GOP powers in Washington, has been rattled. "I'm a strong Republican, but the Republicans have been the problem; we've been treated like second-class citizens," a retired Vietnam Marine helicopter gunnery sergeant named Don Beaver told me in North Carolina. Elsie P. Smith, the town's Republican mayor, says: "There's a few people who have become very hostile . . . the longer the war goes on, the more of that subtle shift you're going to see."

I found this article interesting. One thing that I learned from my father-in-law (a Vietnam vet and Democrat) is that a person in the military experiences some shifts in views when exposed to the horrors of war. The article underscores how the Democrats can appeal to the military and how Shrub has let them down in many ways. This normally reliable Republican voting block may be vunerable. If Shrub does not go back the UN and seriously kiss butt to get international support in Iraq, it could cost him some of the military vote.