Just the Tip of the Iceberg--Major Paul Hackett, USMC

Paul Hackett’s narrow loss in Tuesday's special election in Ohio’s 2nd district is a clear-cut case study in the current state of American politics. But more importantly, it is evidence of the average American’s growing distrust of a business-as-usual approach to the war in Iraq.

Over-simplifying politics can be a meaningless pursuit – the territory of TV news pundits and partisan hacks. But it’s hard to resist looking at the Hackett-Schmidt race in black and white terms. In a district that re-elected Bush by a landslide 64 percent, Schmidt won because she stuck to the Bush administration line on Iraq, and virtually every other subject.

On Hardball earlier this week, David Gregory asked Schmidt if she thought Bush had, “made mistakes in the prosecution of this war.” Schmidt’s response? “Absolutely not.” This is a woman clearly out of touch with what is happening in Iraq.

Paul Hackett, a Marine who spent nearly a year fighting in Iraq, knows more about the reality of the situation there than your average Ohioan, Jean Schmidt included. Hackett was brave enough to speak the unvarnished truth about his experiences, his plans if elected, and his view of the Bush administration.

“I've said that I don't like the son-of-a-bitch that lives in the White House but I'd put my life on the line for him," Hackett told USA Today last week.

Schmidt’s approach -- blind reverence for the Bush administration -- won out over Hackett’s passionate and credible criticism of Bush’s leadership. But just barely. If you scratch beneath the surface, the results show a heartening trend in the public’s level of engagement. Blind faith in our elected officials, even during a time of war, has never been an American value.

So when Hackett started asking the right questions, much of the Ohio 2nd got behind him, including a significant number of those people who had voted for Bush just months earlier. In the end, Schmidt won by just a few-thousand votes.

I hope this trend continues. I don’t care if you’re a Republican, Democrat, Green, or Socialist – if someone tells you not to question your leaders, as Jean Schmidt told the voters in her criticism of Paul Hackett, tell them they’ve lost your vote. I’m sure it wasn’t easy for some of those Republicans to endorse Hackett, but it was brave, and the right thing to do. They set aside their feelings about the social issues that were the mainstays of Schmidt’s platform, choosing instead to focus on the bigger issue: we’re a nation at war, and this guy knows what he’s talking about.

Paul Hackett would have been the first Iraq veteran elected to Congress. By nearly defeating a Republican in one of the nation’s most strongly Republican districts, Hackett proved that this isn’t really about politics after all. It’s about credibility, and Hackett’s got it. The headline in today’s New York Times reads “Republican Edges Out Iraq Veteran for Congress.” It didn’t say Democrat, it said Veteran, because that’s what matters. The American public has been wandering the desert for more than two years on the issue of Iraq, and it’s getting to the point where they’re parched and searching for some real answers. We’re going to find that Iraq Veterans are an attractive option at the polls. Paul Hackett was just the tip of the iceberg. Now the scramble begins to recruit Iraq Veterans as candidates for both parties in 2006, and that’s just fine by me. It’s high time we realized the value of our Veterans’ voices in the increasingly divided debate over what to do in Iraq.