Calling all swift boat veterans! It’s time to rescue your nation from its debauched public debate. Your mission, should you choose to accept it: leave no bamboozled media outlet behind!

Drastic measures are needed because the Kerry campaign is too flatfooted and the press too blind to see what is happening. Indeed, serious people have been claiming, preposterously, that “the elite media is on Kerry’s side” in this surreal swift boat charade.

They say this because the New York Times, the Washington Post and others have done mega-investigations that confirm that young volunteer John Kerry served with honor. Most TV outlets have broadcast these findings. Conservatives whine that this means the media is doing its best to tilt the race toward Kerry.

But all this misses the point. And if you’re Karl Rove, the real point is managing the news agenda and the terms of debate. There is only a finite amount of space on page one and a finite amount of time on the evening news. If you can get the New York Times to devote page after page to swift boat accusations – and then fill the cable channels with wall to wall “debates” over the same – you’ve displaced what might otherwise have been covered.

In short, you’ve won.

As long as everyone is talking about what did or did not happen 35 years ago in Vietnam, they’re not talking about the candidates’ rival visions for the future, or domestic policy differences between the parties that are huge.

This is the dynamic that Karl Rove understands, and that news producers and editors either don’t grasp or feel helpless to combat. Rove knows that for all their supposed liberal sympathies, the elite media’s agenda can be hijacked. That’s because the coverage of our top outlets is governed more by stenography than by ideology.

Exploiting this reality is hardly something on which Republicans have a monopoly – though they do seem to be better at it than Democrats nowadays, and they’re certainly more brazen and ruthless. Both parties value media management above nearly all other skills, because setting the news agenda is central to the pursuit of power (and to the achievement of policy goals once you have that power).

Still, the Swift Boat affair marks a new low. The audacity is stunning. An administration whose leaders almost all avoided service in Vietnam orchestrates an attack on the service of a man who volunteered for hazardous duty repeatedly.

Yet its taken over the debate!

My guess is that if you polled people you’d find they don’t care much about what John Kerry did or didn’t do 35 years ago. But so long as one side manipulates the “news” shrewdly, that’s the debate we get. Little wonder people hate politics. You can hear the high fives at the White House.

Still, you can’t fight something with nothing. And while Team Kerry seems to think that means rolling out vets to hail his war record, what they really need is something to snap media attention back to America’s future.

That’s right: what we need are Swift Boat Veterans for Universal Health Coverage, Swift Boat Veterans for Great Urban Schools and Swift Boat Veterans for A Living Wage.

Imagine the ads.

“Back on the swift boat, John Kerry made sure we all saw a medic when we were sick or injured. Now he has a plan to insure every American while lowering health costs. John Kerry has always said we’re all in the same boat.”

“Back on the swift boat, John Kerry expected all of us to learn new skills; now he has a plan to bring great teachers to the schools that need them most …”

You get the idea. Kerry needs creatively to turn policy differences into matters of character – or else we’re doomed to an orgy of “it was only a flesh wound!” cable controversy.

If that happens, the terrorists – I mean, er, the Republicans – win.

So, progressive swift boat veterans of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but a presidential “debate” that by November may make us nostalgic for the soaring erudition of the Willie Horton era.

Matthew Miller is a syndicated columnist and author. Reach him on the Web at www.mattmilleronline.com.

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