If Nate Silver’s band of Bayesians can be believed, former Vice President Joe Biden is winning the 2020 presidential race’s “endorsement primary”—and by a substantial margin. Whether this stray factoid makes a difference in an era of weak political parties and skepticism of elite opinion is a question that can’t be answered, but Biden nevertheless has a new data point to brag about: John Kerry has added his endorsement to the pile.

Perhaps this was never in doubt, seeing as the two men have forged a strong fraternal bond as both Senate contemporaries and alumni of the Obama administration. In a statement released on Thursday, Kerry cites the ineffable logic of the match: “I believe Joe Biden is the President our country desperately needs right now, not because I’ve known Joe so long, but because I know Joe so well.” But Kerry’s endorsement also comes loaded with an undeniable paradox. There is no one better suited to disabusing Biden of his notion that Republicans will have an “epiphany” and become a peaceful and collaborative party than the man who famously fell prey to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.



Or rather, there is almost no one better suited to the task. There are the Republicans themselves, who have gone to extravagant, mendacious lengths to ruin Biden’s electoral hopes and destroy his good name in the effort. This is, at bottom, the essence of Swift Boat tactics, which—far from disappearing from American life at the conclusion of Kerry’s ill-fated 2004 presidential campaign—have become a mainstay in Republican politics. Having been perfected over time, they are being deployed today against Biden.



During Kerry’s campaign—in which he, much like Biden, had positioned himself as the candidate who would restore the decency of the presidency frittered away by his incumbent opponent, George W. Bush—the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth emerged into public life with a letter, in which 250 signatories claimed to have served alongside Kerry during the Vietnam War, each attesting to the Massachusetts senator’s serial misdeeds. Of those 250 claimants, only Steven Gardner had served in close proximity to Kerry, and only for a month and a half. Extant military records demonstrated that several of those who emerged as Kerry’s decriers had, during the war, personally signed their names to various commendations.



For every reported account that blasted the Swift Boat Veterans for their wanton lies, there was another that treated the matter as being up for debate.

Their lies should not have held up under scrutiny. But the Swift Boaters managed to exploit a major flaw in the ethos of the political press: the media’s preference for documenting the optics of a controversy in an electoral setting rather than settling the matter at hand with forthright truth-telling. For every reported account that blasted the Swift Boat Veterans for their wanton lies, there was another that treated the matter as being up for debate. An “investigative” report by The Washington Post’s Michael Dobbs concluded that the Swift Boaters’ accusations were merely “incomplete,” and that both sides of the dispute had “withheld information from the public record and provided [a] ... sometimes inaccurate picture of what took place.” ABC News’ The Note—that era’s morning tip sheet of record—summed the matter up: “If John Kerry can’t build a campaign organization that can de-fang 250 guys spending a million bucks, how good a president could he possibly be?”

