“The President is on probation with military voters,” says Peter Feaver, professor of Political Science at Duke University and an expert on military-civilian relations.
It may be anecdotal but three stories in last week’s newspapers offer a sharp sense of the growing ambivalence military veterans and families feel toward this Administration. The once rock-solid GOP military voting bloc could become a domestic casualty for Bush. And, as the New York Times reports, with a large number of military personnel living in battleground states like Florida, West Virginia and New Mexico, even small changes in military voting patterns could be decisive in November.
With the occupation into its first year, casualties rising daily and no coherent exit plan in sight, Samie Drown–who voted for Bush in 2000 and has a husband in the Army’s 101st Airborne Division–told the New York Times that her view of the Administration has completely changed. “My husband is a soldier and his job is to fight for freedom. But after so many months and so many deaths, no one has shown us any weapons of mass destruction or given us an explanation.” A mother of four young kids, she continued: “So a lot of military wives are now asking: ‘Why? Why did we go to Iraq? The Administration talked a strong story, but a lot of us are kicking our butts about how we voted last time around. Now we’re leaning the other way.”
Rhonda Wilson, of Astoria, Queens echoed Drown in remarks she made recently to New York Newsday. Her daughter, Shawna Herron, 26, is a cook with the Army’s 225th Battalion.
“I don’t know why President Bush don’t let our children come home,” Wilson said. “He would rather see our kids slaughtered. Who’s he to say we’re sticking it out? This is not our fight. It never was.
“He’s busy trying to get himself re-elected and got all our babies over there risking life and limb,” Wilson said. “It’s wrong, wrong, and somebody needs to let him know it. So many people have lost their kids.”
Samie Drown and Rhonda Wilson must be keeping Karl Rove wide awake in the wee hours of the night.
On the same base as Drown’s husband in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, Brittany Wood, 19, whose stepfather has spent most of the past 18 months in Iraq, says she was a Bush supporter a year ago but she plans to vote for Kerry this November.
“I was glad we were doing this because we need to help other countries fight for freedom, but now lots of people feel there’s been a cover-up and it is a lie and we were not told the real reasons for being in Iraq,” Ms. Wood says. “”That is making a lot of soldiers and their families think about voting. And for the first time they’re thinking about voting Democratic.” (A recent CBS News survey found that forty to forty-eight percent of people from “military families” would vote for Kerry.)
And buried in Sunday’s Washington Post report on the small ANSWER-organized antiwar demonstration in DC on Saturday was a telling interview with a veteran on holiday who happened upon the demo unexpectedly. “What they’re [the protestors] saying is correct,” said T.J. Myers–who had recently returned from a year’s stint in Iraq after leaving the Army after a seven year hitch. “It’s all about money.” Myers, who lives in Fort Benning, Georgia and was in Washington on vacation, said “It’s my first time in DC, and I have never seen so many homeless people in my life and right near the White House. How can we send [billions] to another country when we have so many people in trouble here?”
Myers’s sentiments are shared by groups like Military Families Speak Out, which together with United for Peace and Justice, organized a press conference and walk to the White House on April 14 to deliver the message that it’s time to end the occupation.
All this is showing that military families and personnel may be this election’s newest swing voters. They certainly aren’t Republican stalwarts anymore.
