ShareThisBy GARY ROTSTEIN
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
The political advertisement depicting a mannequin in U.S. military wear being shredded by small-arms fire began showing up in August against U.S. Sen. George Allen of Virginia.
The powerful, bullet-blazing ad, claiming the senator failed to support sufficient funding for body armor to protect troops in Iraq, made its way into races against three other incumbent Republican senators who were defeated Nov. 7: Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Jim Talent of Missouri and Conrad Burns of Montana.
Another evocative commercial, softer in tone while showing a paralyzed Iraqi war veteran in a wheelchair, was used in the final days of the campaign against U.S. Rep. Melissa Hart of Pennsylvania, as well as two other GOP House members who lost, Gil Gutknecht of Minnesota and John Sweeney of New York. The claim this time: The incumbents voted against veterans' benefits.
The note at the end of the ads made clear they were paid for not by Democratic candidates but by VoteVets Political Action Committee. It is a group that came out of nowhere this year.
VoteVets supported a small group of war veterans running for office around the country, including Democratic congressional winners Patrick Murphy and Joe Sestak in Pennsylvania. It attracted more attention, however, with the emotional nature of its opposition to conservative Republicans like Santorum and Hart, whose appeal to constituents' patriotism has long been among their political strengths.
"These are the young Turks of the veterans world, a counterweight to the hard-core radical right," said former U.S. Sen. Max Cleland, a Vietnam War veteran and Democratic Party activist. "They learned real fast and went to war on the ground, and became extremely effective. ... They are a powerful force in this guerrilla war for the moral high ground of who really represents America's vets."
Such comments are tempered by challenges to the accuracy of the group's ads; questioning of any group's rightful claim to represent mainstream vets; and a perception that VoteVets' claims of bipartisanship poorly disguise strong Democratic Party leanings.
It's also hard to sort out the various factors that contributed to defeat of individual candidates and determine what role the political action committee's ads had.
It also failed in some of its efforts, spending a quarter-million dollars unsuccessfully trying to unseat Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev., among others. But it's clear that VoteVets made a quick name for itself, raising $2.5 million in a matter of months and finishing on the winning side an unusually large number of times in targeting incumbents.
"It's a principle of war _ the only time you're on defense is when you're preparing to be on offense," said Jon Soltz, the VoteVets chairman. He wants the group to be a forceful counter to other political groups claiming to represent veterans that assail the patriotism of war vets who question U.S. policy, like Cleland and U.S. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.
Much of the credit, or blame, depending on one's perspective, for VoteVets' success lies with Soltz, 29, a relative newcomer to politics. He is an Army Reserve captain who drills in Oakdale, Pa., served on active duty in Kosovo and Iraq and is working toward a master's degree at the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Public and International Affairs.
He divides his time between the organization's New York headquarters and work in Washington. His political involvement began as a volunteer in Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign.
Soltz said he was a mentally fragile, uncertain young man after his time in Iraq when Kerry took an interest in what he had to say about the war during a brief encounter at Pittsburgh International Airport in the summer of 2004.
Soltz, an Army captain organizing truck convoys in Iraq in 2003, had entered the war as a believer in the Bush administration's cause, but emerged disenchanted with the mission and the treatment of soldiers. He worked for Kerry's presidential campaign and was dismayed by the well-publicized attacks on the senator's decorated Vietnam War service by the Republican-backed Swift Boat Veterans for Truth group.
A year ago, he began talking with Jeremy Broussard, another Iraq veteran who had volunteered for Kerry, about the need for a new political action committee working on behalf of veterans and veterans issues. After initially collaborating with an existing group, the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, they formed VoteVets as a separate organization, with Soltz as chairman and Broussard as president. Their advisory board lists some notable Democratic figures, including former NATO commander and presidential candidate Wesley Clark and former U.S. Sen. Bob Kerrey.
VoteVets raised money to back veterans who shared their views about the Bush administration's handling of the war, including congressional candidates Sestak and Murphy, and to target vulnerable incumbents who had been pro-war while joining the Republican majority on certain votes that limited funding on veterans-related issues.
The group's body-armor ad, against Allen, earned it its first attention. National media based in Washington commented on it. Soltz said VoteVets spent most of what it had at the time, $15,000, to produce the ad, raised $5,000 each from six people who liked it to put it on the air, and money flowed in afterward from other contributors who supported the aggressive approach VoteVets was taking.
But a political advertising research group based at the University of Pennsylvania, FactCheck.org, found the ad misleading. It said the 2003 Senate budget amendment on which the criticism was based made no specific reference to body armor. It accused VoteVets of being unfair to suggest Allen or any other senator voting against it was uncaring of the safety of U.S. troops.
