Why Are We In Vietnam?

By: Okay, enough already! If I have to read one more word about George W. Bush in the National Guard or John Kerry and his swift boat, or who typed which memo when, and filed it where, or which medals were won or lost or tossed, I will run screaming into the nearest recruitment office.

Coverage of what these two candidates did or didn't do 30 years ago has reached ridiculous levels. The closer we get to Election Day, the farther we seem to get from covering real issues that matter to voters in 2004.

Unless Bush sold secrets to North Vietnam or Kerry was a deserter, I don't want to hear about what they did in that war. So Bush got help to get into the National Guard and avoid Vietnam. This is a surprise? What well-connected, draft-age person at the time didn't?

And if John Kerry deserved three Purple Hearts or only two, or flung his medals, or didn't get along with some other veterans, or didn?t quite spend Christmas in Cambodia, does this really affect farmers going broke in Iowa or poor blacks looking for work in Chicago or students seeking a loan in California or abortion rights, taxes, or education?

Forget Vietnam. What about Iraq? Rumor has it, there?s a war going on, and it might even be another apocalypse, now.

Yet we know more about what some deceased National Guard lieutenant colonel thought of Bush than we do about what Bush is going to do to end the war. More has been written about what John Kerry said to a congressional committee three decades ago than his health plan or views on saving social security.

You wonder why people are mad at the press. One reason: we are less than two months from Election Day and we get more meaningless coverage of what these two guys did in their 20's than what they plan to do in their 50's and 60's.

Newspapers are not doing their job. For some people, the most they know about John Kerry?s 20 years in the U.S. Senate is that he voted for the $87 billion in war funding before he voted against it, whatever that means. And they didn?t learn that from a newspaper, they learned it from a partisan ad.

Voters would be a lot better served with some in-depth reporting on Kerry?s congressional career. Instead of talking to Vietnam veterans, talk to his constituents, colleagues, Senate interns. Anyone who would know what he has been up to in the Capitol.

Several weeks ago, Leonard Downie, Jr., the respected executive editor of The Washington Post, discussed his paper?s willingness at that time to give the controversial Swift Boat Veterans for Truth front-page attention even after most of their charges against Kerry had been found to be baseless. ?We don?t set the agenda,? he told me. ?We present the facts.?

But one of the main purposes of newspapers is to set the agenda and determine what is newsworthy. Just because some TV talking heads and loud mouth partisans ? on both sides of the campaign ? want to make these 30-year-old stories important, doesn?t mean that they are. And it doesn?t mean newspapers have to put them up on the news pedestal ahead of real issues.

In his recently published book, ?Fat Man Fed Up,? Jack Germond, former Washington-based columnist for The Sun in Baltimore, spends more than 200 pages reciting why campaign coverage is so screwed up. The bedrock of his view seems to be that the press allows unimportant issues to permeate. ?If editors were to be genuinely fair to readers, they would assign a far lower value to these essentially ersatz stories that are nothing but exchanges of taunts,? he wrote.

Yes, these Vietnam-era issues are worth covering, to an extent, especially when the public finds them intriguing. But not to the level they have reached, when such stories are pushing substantive issues aside. Let the real news, and today?s choices, take center stage, and stay there.