I have a picture of Arnold Schwarzeneggar slaying two dozen cutthroat bushwhackers in one hairy engagement, emptying his 21st Century bazookas on the bloody lot without pausing for a heavy breath.

This was a for-sure hero of the republic, brick jaw, flashing eyes and all, knocking down a platoon of extras as fast as his hand-held cannon can spray them dead. It was a macho performance dazzling enough to create a cult of three million video game worshippers and noisy enough to vault him into the governorship of California.

I have another picture of a dashing airman straight off the banks of the Potomac and the casting office of the Republican National Committee. He is deplaning in full fighter pilot regalia on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier a few knots off the coast of California. Beneath a banner especially choreographed for the occasion he is proclaiming “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq.

He is the Man. The Hero of the new Millennium. The Heart and Soul of America. Those are the subliminal captions for the scene. The reason we know this is the characteristic swing of those elbows as he stalks purposefully into history — “I am a WAR president” — to join George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and possibly William McKinley. The sight angles for the embedded camera crews have been carefully orchestrated so as not to molest the Olympian quality of this scene. No prying lens is allowed near that superhighway not far away.

The Warrior has landed off the coast of California while the real warriors in Iraq are about to get ambushed.

So that is one heroic candidate for president of the United States.

There is another.

He is being daily chopped up by the headhunters of the money-stuffed crowd that wants to stay in power.

This is a crowd convinced it doesn’t much have to worry about the discernment and taste of the American people in what is acceptable slander and defacement in politics.

This is the crowd that was worried about controling the U.S. Senate four years ago, so it destroyed Max Cleland, a disabled veteran of the war in Vietnam. It made him sound like a subversive and it did this with impunity.

So now John Kerry is unfit to handle the duties of president of the United States.

The words were those of Dick Cheney, the vice president, standing in front of a bank of American flags at a midwestern college. He was acting as a judge of the character of a man who got shot up doing his duty in an unpopular war, saving a life, and a few years later denouncing the war as a sham and a needless killer of thousands of young Americans.

Millions of Americans in both parties said the same at the time, in different language, in different form. Cheney’s gratuitous assault on Kerry was so abhorrent to the president of the college that he invited the candidate to speak, as a matter of elemental fairness.

I think if you’ve ever worn the uniform of the United States, you have to look at John Kerry’s conduct in Vietnam with pride and respect. I think if you are a citizen of America you have to look at it the same way. And you have to be infuriated by a mounting campaign to cheapen both his performance in combat—a former commander now active in politics says Kerry probably should have received two Purple Hearts not three—and his fitness to serve in the Oval Office.

They are trying to grind this man into irrelevance. They have the money to do it. They have the forum for it, a cowed media, outright political partnership with part of the media, and the formula. They’ve even buffaloed the mainline Democratic leaders into silence.

“Run,” Carl Rove instructed Bush two years ago, “on the war.”

How long to you do that?

How about 2008?

“What war? Against terror? Iraq? It doesn’t much matter. The message is inviolate. We own the power to run the world and we’re not going to shrink from it. We’ve got the power and we’re going to use it. The polls say millions of Americans respond to that idea. If they start to have second thoughts, tell them their freedom’s at stake and the war on terror is endless. It works almost every time.

“What deficits? The deficits aren’t going to hurt anybody until we’re out of here.”

Do you want to see something surpassingly ugly about the presidential scenario today? The man who occupies the White House got the job only because his brother’s political apparatus in Florida disenfranchised thousands of black voters and then passed the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. The majority on the Supreme Court, with Antonin Scalia beating the loudest drums, ignored the citations and with unclean hands slipped this tangle-tongued mediocrity into the White House of what was once the world’s greatest democracy.

Voices like those are now telling you that John Kerry is unfit to serve as president.

They say: We need tough guys to run the country. We don’t have to tell you how we’re doing it, and if that sounds like an elected dictatorship, wait until 2005.

I tried to remember when I heard shrillness to match what we’re hearing now from a power-hungry gang worried about hanging on. When I was a boy growing up in the Depression those same voices were screaming about America losing its way because it was wrecking the dreams of the founders by concocting minimum wage laws, worker protection laws, a 40-hour work week, and some bolshevik scheme called Social Security.

A half century later, after the social and economic reforms helped rescue the country and produced unprecedented prosperity, these echoed voices have managed to roll back the calendar and achieve one-party government. A gullible public has been their enabler, to the point where it has blinded itself to the hazards confronting the country’s children and grandchildren. At this point the country has come reasonably close to voting itself out of democracy. So that today some of its legislatures, instead of seriously examining the crisis of public funding, accept the erosion of education and critical social services while they debate building half billion dollar athletic arenas for billionaires and expanding gambling to legalize society’s theft from the dumb and vulnerable.

We don't know until he reaches office how a candidate will handle the duties of president of the United States. We do know this about Kerry: He is a working senator who knows the world and the difference in world politics between the impulse to dominate and the summons to lead. We know that in the one critical and defining moment of his service until now, he put his life on the line to save another's. In view of this, I doubt that we need Dick Cheney's smears to define this man's character.

All the same, I looked up the Bronze Star citation of John Kerry, the man called unfit to be president, in the spring of 1969 in the middle of an unpopular war. It said the lieutenant was the officer in charge of one of five inshore patrol boats on a river in Vietnam. One of the boats hit a mine. Another mine exploded nearby. One of Kerry’s crewmen was knocked out of the boat and into the river. Kerry had been ordered to exit the river but learned about the crewman. He reversed course and pulled the crewman into the boat in the midst of enemy fire from shore. Kerry himself was bleeding from the mine explosion and was exposed to shore fire while he pulled his shipmate to safety. His commander, declaring that his actions met the highest standards of the United States Navy, called them calm, professional and courageous.

It’s a standard of conduct, that shames the alleycat yapping of his detractors.

Copyright (c) 2004 Jim Klobuchar