Military Supports Bush 4 to 1

There is a 55-point gap between support for Bush and support for Kerry in a survey of active duty personnel. Whole article is worth reading, excerpt below.

excerpt:

Officers and enlisted troops, active-duty members and reservists, those who have served in combat zones and those who haven't, all supported Bush by large margins. And the survey hints that Kerry's emphasis of his decorated service in Vietnam may have done more harm than good with those in uniform.

Duke poli-sci prof Peter Feaver, noting Kerry "has wooed the military more ardently than ever before," says of the survey: "Frankly, the margin (for Bush) greatly exceeds anything that I or any other analyst had expected."

The Military Times survey, with its yawning 55-point chasm between support for Bush and support for Kerry, confirms much about two cultures in America: one military and insistently conservative; the other civilian and far less so.

Specifically, the two cultures agree on little regarding the defense of the nation and the role of the military in it. And they share increasingly few values about life - especially the values inherent in political ideology as it spills into their daily routines - in these United States.

...

Finally, the Military Times survey may be telling Kerry and the Democrats that a hefty military majority sees through the careful veneer of moderation to the deeply ingrained leftism that drives him.

Kerry has been hostile to the military; probably since Yale - and certainly so since he returned from Vietnam, led peacenik demonstrations, decried the American military as reeking with war criminals, and first ran for Congress. His 20-year Senate record - marking him as the Senate's most liberal member - is one of uninterrupted hostility to almost every military weapons system and almost every military enterprise proposed during that time. (A 1984 Kerry campaign memo has the candidate saying: "We are continuing a defense buildup that is consuming our resources with weapons systems that we don't need and can't use.")

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The left detests the military, and the military knows it - and reciprocates, as the Military Times survey overwhelmingly testifies.

A functionary in the Clinton White House told a military aide to Colin Powell to leave his uniform at home the next time he visited. The story goes that Hillary Clinton wanted such aides to help pass out appetizers at White House parties.

And despite Kerry's conflicting attempts to reinforce his leftist base while simultaneously seducing the military, the latter obviously isn't interested. It spurns him. Those in the military resent the prospect of risking their lives with him as their commander in chief in a war he terms "wrong" and "a grand diversion" - with allies he terms "coerced and bribed."

Understandably, none of it computes for the military. And little of it translates into military votes for Kerry.