Support for Bush overwhelming at Marine Corps base
Pookie
By Thanassis Cambanis, Globe Staff | October 8, 2004
FORWARD OPERATING BASE KALSU, Iraq -- It is a measure of President Bush's
unassailable popularity among the US Marines on this base that the only one
who admitted that he supported John F. Kerry would say so only on condition
of anonymity.
The 19-year-old private said he recently bought a copy of the film
''Fahrenheit 9/11," which questions Bush's rationale for going to war. ''If
half the things in that movie are true, we're here for the wrong reasons."
With that exception, Marines freely boast that the Corps is Bush country.
''I think 'W' is the man," said First Lieutenant Andrew Thomas, 25, who
still has not signed up to get his absentee ballot at Forward Operating Base
Kalsu, an hour's drive south of Baghdad.
But Thomas said he had told one of his fellow Marines to remove a
Bush-Cheney 2004 bumper sticker pasted on a Humvee on the base. ''We all
want him to win, but that's wrong," Thomas said. ''The sticker's got to go."
The ease with which on-duty enlisted Marines discussed politics, and the
near-uniformity of their views, exemplified the extent to which the military
vote has become Republican since the draft was eliminated in 1973.
Studies that track political attitudes in the military indicate that the
officer corps has historically been far more Republican than the general
population at large, and that gap has grown in the last two decades.
According to a 1999 study by the Triangle Institute for Security Studies, a
consortium sponsored by three North Carolina research universities,
Republicans outnumbered Democrats in the officer corps by a ratio of 8 to 1.
By comparison, the general civilian population has a roughly equal
proportion of Republicans, Democrats, and independents, according to the
group.
Richard H. Kohn, formerly the chief historian of the Air Force and a
professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was
one of the authors of that study and said the gap appeared to be growing.
Military officers since the Vietnam War have perceived the Republican Party
as more in tune with their values and interests, Kohn said, and many
exhibited a ''visceral, personal dislike for Bill Clinton."
In the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, headquartered at Base Kalsu, the
enlisted ranks appear to be following the same trend.
''It's the military; people are going to vote for Bush," said Lance Corporal
Rick McClusey, 19, who said he seeks out political debate with fellow
Marines.
An avowed Republican, McClusey said he avidly reads the books he receives in
the mail every month from the Conservative Book Club. The last one he read
was ''The Official Handbook of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy" by Mark W.
Smith.
He was the first in the unit to sign up for an absentee ballot, with Captain
Leigh Dubie, a 20-year Marine veteran who serves as the voting officer at
the base. Marines and soldiers on the base give Dubie absentee ballot forms,
and she helps anyone who needs to register to vote or get their ballot on
time.
About 200 people on a base of about 2,000 have voted so far, she said, but
that number only includes military personnel who did not organize their own
absentee ballots.
''This is the first year that people are jumping at the gun to vote," Dubie
said.
Before the 24th Marines deployed to Iraq in July, Dubie tried to get people
to fill out ballot paperwork so they would not have to worry about it under
the stress of combat.
''I told them if you want a voice in how the military is going to be in the
future, this is your chance," she said.
Asked whether she expected Kerry to have any support, Dubie laughed.
''We crack jokes about that," she said. ''People say, 'We want to make sure
we even have a military in four years, so we better vote for Bush.' "
McClusey -- the first in the unit to request his absentee ballot from
Dubie -- said the nearly-uniform support he had encountered for Bush over
Kerry did not translate into unanimous support for the invasion of Iraq.
''Even if the decision to come here was questionable, at least he had the
guts to come over here," he said.
Adding that ''I know I sound like a medieval conservative," McClusey said he
had only met one Democrat during his nearly 16 months in the Marines.
Standing near him in the operations center, Jamie Tyson, a 35-year-old
Marine, interrupted. ''I voted for Clinton twice," he said. Tyson, who
described himself as an independent, also said he had voted for both Bushes
and plans to vote for the president's reelection this year. ''I picked the
winner every time," he said.
Of Bush, he added, ''People may question his strategy, but no one questions
his commitment to the military as a whole."