IVFP IN THE NEWS



War gets personal in Senate race ads
Politics puts on a more human face when relatives of U.S. troops speak

Sunday, October 22, 2006
Jim Siegel
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

In an emotional voice, Pam Baragona, of Dublin, tells viewers that Sen. Mike DeWine was there for her and "it makes me sick that Sherrod Brown is not telling you the truth about Sen. DeWine."

Meanwhile, Jan Kellar, of Litchfield, looks into the camera and says DeWine "sent me back a form letter" when she wrote him about an issue, but Brown was willing to help.

"For me, it’s easy — I want a senator who cares."

Mixed into this election season’s advertising bombardment, one might be inclined to ask, so what?

But Baragona and Kellar share an important, politically coveted characteristic:

Each had a family member serve in the Iraq war. Baragona’s brother Rocky was killed; Kellar’s son has returned safely.

In the vehement ad war between the Republican DeWine and his Democratic challenger Brown, some of the more prominently featured players are those with connections to the real war.

"It naturally adds credibility to whatever they’re saying, since we all owe them a fair hearing regardless of what they’re saying about Iraq," said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.

"If a politician talks about something, most people will turn the channel. Very few people are going to turn the channel when a veteran or a veteran’s family is addressing them."

The Iraq war is key in Ohio’s Senate race and in federal contests across the country. It has spawned political veterans’ groups. Dozens of veterans are running for Congress this year, and candidates are eager to feature veterans’ family members in their ads.

Democrats, Sabato said, are wary of getting "swift-boated" again, a reference to ads in 2004 by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a public-advocacy group that accused presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry of lying about his wartime service in Vietnam.

In Ohio, using veterans or their families in ads is "part of a larger strategy of reminding voters that Mike DeWine is much stronger on security issues than Sherrod Brown," said Aaron McLear, spokesman for the Republican National Committee.

DeWine has pounded Brown for failing to vote for military body armor and for favoring cuts to intelligence spending in the 1990s. Brown has said De-Wine is distorting his record, firing back that the senator missed Intelligence Committee meetings and failed to hold the Bush administration accountable on the war.

But the political squabbling gets a powerful human face when Baragona starts off an ad for DeWine: "My brother Rocky died while serving in Iraq."

Baragona is a political independent who did not support President Bush in 2004 and thinks going to war in Iraq was the wrong decision. But she heaped nothing but praise on DeWine for the help and support he gave her family after her brother’s death in 2003.

"He really reached out to us," she said, noting his help in working through the military bureaucracy to find information on how Rocky died, and his continued contact afterward.

"When I saw this ad on TV saying that Sen. DeWine didn’t really care about the troops, it really upset us," Baragona said. "So I wrote to the senator that if there’s anything I can do … I would speak on behalf of his integrity."

Brown said he met Kellar in 2003 when she attended one of the meetings he hosted in his district for military families. She was upset by the lack of body armor and other supplies for troops and said DeWine only sent her a form letter.

Brown wrote to her, and in December she came to his campaign kickoff in Akron to thank him for his help.

"She talked about what it had done for her son and for her," Brown said. "She said DeWine had been indifferent to her."

Having the mother of an Iraq war veteran deliver an ad message can be powerful, Brown said.

"I think everybody wants to honor the soldiers who have served us, and I think that cuts across all partisan lines."

A recent New York Times/ CBS News poll of Ohioans found that 44 percent of Iraq war veterans or their families said military action was the right thing to do in Iraq, while 51 percent said it was not. Only 22 percent said the war is going well and 55 percent want to see troops start to come home.

Veterans traditionally have been fairly reliable Republican backers. But reflecting the Iraq war split, some of the newest political veterans groups, such as VoteVets.org, are attacking Republican incumbents.

VoteVets co-founder Jeremy Broussard, an Army veteran of Iraq, said his group is still deciding whether to get involved in Ohio. He said neither party has been willing to set clear goals for the war.

"They just want to corner people into ‘stay the course’ versus ‘cut and run,’ and that does nothing to further the debate," he said.

A liberal California-based group, Iraq Veterans for Progress, has sent veterans to work on campaigns for Brown and Victoria Wulsin, a Democrat challenging Rep. Jean Schmidt in southwestern Ohio. The group is helping a handful of candidates who support bringing U.S. troops home.

But will it matter? In races like the Ohio Senate battle where both candidates are working to highlight backing from veterans, the voters might not give either candidate an edge, Sabato said.

"They get so much contradictory information, they end up rejecting most of it, probably correctly," he said.