I was a first-time voter in the 2004 presidential election, and was studying abroad the final four months of the campaign trail.  I didn’t use that as an excuse for not casting a ballot though. I went out of my way to postmark my absentee ballot in India.  In hindsight, I was what Winston Churchill deemed the best argument against democracy.  I was an average voter with much less knowledge of the candidates than I knew at the time. In my experience during the 2008 presidential campaign, I realized that an informed voter has to create their opinion with continued evaluation of the candidates’ dynamic campaigns, and that a digital communication shift has helped to facilitate this opinion formation.

After reading, Decision 2004: The War for the White House (a chapter from Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy) it became clear how ill-informed I really was in 2004.  I knew very little of the topics and controversies that shaped the debate and were scrutinized during the Bush versus Kerry race to the White House.  I learned three things: Bush did not fully serve his National Guard term; the Killian memos discredited much of the media’s attacks on Bush’s military record; Bush was wired during the first presidential debate.

Admittedly, my prior knowledge of either candidate’s military background was principally informed by the infamous viral video “This Land”, created by Jib Jab.  From that, I believed John Kerry earned three Purple Hearts, and George W. Bush was probably pro-war.  It wasn’t until Decision 2004 shed light on Bush’s service background that I knew anything of Bush’s stint, or lack thereof, with the Air National Guard.  It now seems clear that Bush firstly received preferential treatment to escape going to Vietnam -  a deferment that “Ben Barnes, former lieutenant governor of Texas, said that he was ashamed of having been involved.”  Secondly, Bush was given an uncanny opportunity to transfer from the Texas Air National Guard to the Alabama National Guard in 1972 to campaign for a Bush family friend Red Blount.  Though Bush agreed to maintain his service after his relocation, evidence suggests that he quickly abandoned the commitment.  Blount’s nephew recalled on NPR, “in a campaign full of dedicated workers, Mr. Bush was not one of them.”  To that end, he was never seen by his assigned regiment in Montgomery or by active Red Blount campaigners.  Bush maintained a record of service so undistinguished that one researcher summed it up with, “…not only did Bush walk away from his final two years of military obligations…but he attempted to cover up his absenteeism through swindle and fraud.”

Learning of this lackluster military commitment, the Killian memos piqued my curiosity and led me to fervently delve into the Killian Memo Controversy (also referred to as Memogate and Rathergate).  Memogate centered around six documents – four of which were presented as authentic by CBS’s Dan Rather – that were allegedly written by Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian criticizing President George W. Bush’s service in the Air National Guard during his last year of service (‘72-’73).  Ultimately, after an interview with Bill Burkett in late September, Rather “admitted that [CBS] no longer had confidence that the memos were authentic and apologized for airing them.”  This led to a rapid discrediting of not only these memos and the allegations contained within them, but also an ancillary questioning of associated, likely truthful, critiques of Bush’s military record.

As Pat Buchanan commented, Dan Rather and CBS’s “behavior [was] more like that of guilty accomplices than beguiled victims.”  While the Republicans may have conveniently capitalized on this CBS error as an example of liberal media bias, there is evidence that CBS was not without fault nor consequence in Memogate. Mary Mapes, who was one of the CBS producers at the time went out of her way to connect one of the illegitimate informants of the memos to Kerry’s campaign.  That informant, Bill Burkett, was “the former Texas National Guardsman who had earlier sworn he had witnessed the cleansing of Bush’s records in Guard offices by Bush’s operatives” Decision 2004.  A later Washington Post article critical of CBS argues that, “Mapes is far too casual in her dismissal of the revelation that she helped Burkett contact Kerry adviser Joe Lockhart.  Mapes says it was all innocent, a casual bit of horse-trading designed to get a source (Burkett) to talk.  That may be so, but it looks ghastly and plays right into the suspicion of Mapes’s critics.”  In addition, the chain of custody of the documents was hardly pursued with diligence.  As a Washington Post article points out, “[c]rucially, Mapes didn’t ask too many tough questions about the source of the memos: an embittered, Bush-hating Texas cattle ranger and former Guardsman.”

It is worth noting, that Decision 2004 stretches the evidence when it comes to whom it believes is responsible for the forged memos.  It theorizes that the entire Killian plot was a duplicitous double bluff by the Republicans to create a story and then in revealing its falsehood, use it to “sting CBS and discredit all media investigations of Bush’s failure to fulfill his Guard service.”  The evidence for this appears unsound.  For example, to be credible, this would rely on an operation to first convince a significant number of Americans of the “truth” of the Killian memos, and then critically have them realize that the memos were in fact inaccurate.

Irrespective of the source of the Killian memos, their appearance and subsequent discrediting clearly had a powerful impact in silencing public debate on Bush’s military record. “Discussion of the facts of Bush’s Guard years and whether he actually fulfilled his obligations were largely erased, however, from the media agenda when CBS and Dan Rather admitted that they could no longer authenticate the memos that suggested Bush had not fulfilled his duties” Decision 2004.

An altogether different conversation was the controversy of Bush being wired. I agree with Decision 2004 that the suit George W. Bush wore the night of the first debate wasn’t poorly tailored.  There is simply too much compelling evidence to support the speculation that George W. Bush was wired to something and/or someone during the debate. The testimonials from expert tailors were not gripping refutations, nor was the conversation around his inadvertent blurt, “[n]ow let me finish.”  In my opinion, it was most telling that he and his staff were not able to give a good enough, or consistent enough, response to inquiries about the bulge on the back of his suit.  As Otto von Bismark said, “[p]eople never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.” I believe the reasoning of a poorly tailored suit was a lie. It would have been more believable if they went with the bulletproof vest explanation The Hill offered.  That being said, the larger discussion should be why was he wired?  Can the presidential candidate not think for himself?  Was it a safety precaution?  Is such dishonesty going to plague his administration?  Who was he wired to?  I have a barrage of questions related to the scenario that, four years later, still have no concrete explanation.

So, it’s only after four years and a detailed investigative effort by the authors of Decision 2004, that three additional revelations would have rightly factored into my ’04 presidential vote.  Not to say, I would have cast a different ballot, but my justification would have been more concrete and educated.  I take full responsibility, but in doing so, I recognize the difficulty of forming an educated opinion.  The truth is, it’s easy for people to step into their echo chambers and hear all the messages that bolster their own pre-conceived opinions.  It is more difficult to seek an understanding of political happenings from both sides.

The compelling question this raises today is, could it happen to me again?  While spending four months on a ship on the far side of the world will always impose some limits on participation in an electoral process, does an increasingly digital communication sphere break down some of the limits I experienced?  Reflecting on my learning, I can’t help but wonder if the facts would have broken through to me in the increasingly decentralized campaigns of 2008.  I believe it would be highly likely that a confluence of fact-check sites, blogs, spamming, Twitter, Facebook feeds, and iReporter newscasts would have quickly disseminated & popularized the news of one candidate’s unimpressive military record.  Notably, Pundits in Muckrakers’ Clothing studied four influential blogs and found that surveillance (news gathering that included applying original research to fact-check media reports) happened in 93.5% of electoral posts.  Now, imagine today the combined impact of these influential blogs with other increasingly popular digital media outlets! These digital communication streams permeate all social strata and bring political conversation into the most unlikely of forum.  “With the integration of the Internet into every aspect of society, the Web has become a realm in which it is necessary for all kinds of political actors to have a presence- at least in order to be credible among the growing population of Internet users in the U.S.” Web Campaigning.  That being said, in a distributed digital communication world, I believe the news now spreads unabated as individuals pick up on the veins and narratives that most interest them and spark debates amongst their communities.  Never again will the major networks collectively decide in a cartel-like manner to retreat from a story like that of Bush’s military record after the Killian debacle.

While we should not conclude that we live in a political sphere of perfect and complete information and debate, we can at least welcome the dawning of digital democracy as a facilitator in that end goal, and for this proud Republican, a small seed of uncertainty in my past voting record has been planted.