Just Think - News Archive

By William M. Welch and Jim Drinkard, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — An organization stirring controversy in the debate over Social Security's future is applying techniques learned through years of fundraising for conservative causes.

The group, USA Next, has been around since 1991 under the name United Seniors Association. It has long styled itself as "the conservative alternative to AARP," the 35-million-member retiree organization it is taking on over Social Security.

President Bush is seeking to remake the 70-year-old social insurance program by including an option for individuals to invest in the stock market through personal accounts. How that proposal fares will affect millions of Americans, making it prime fodder for USA Next Chairman Charlie Jarvis, who learned his craft from conservative fundraising pioneer and United Seniors Association founder Richard Viguerie.

Viguerie's formula has changed little over the years: stir conservatives to open their checkbooks using sharp attacks, dire warnings and strong rhetoric. "The only time we win is when there is a sharp ideological difference," he told an interviewer more than a decade ago.

Blending those well-worn direct-mail tactics with new Internet-based fundraising, the group has taken up a variety of causes. The most recent was supporting Bush's Medicare prescription-drug program by using millions of dollars from the pharmaceutical industry.

The group plans an initial $10 million campaign accusing AARP of a "shameful record of liberal activism," including backing gay marriage. Its first step was an Internet ad last week that asserted AARP supports gay marriage. It included a picture of two men kissing at what appeared to be their wedding over the words, "The real AARP agenda."

In style and tactics, the USA Next campaign appears to be modeled on the effort by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth to tarnish Democrat John Kerry in last year's presidential campaign.

The veterans group parlayed an initial financial stake, about $500,000, into a much larger political force through a provocative TV ad. That generated media attention, which led to stepped-up fundraising. The group, later renamed Swift Vets and POWs for Truth, raised and spent $22.5 million on hard-hitting anti-Kerry ads, putting it among the most influential of the independent political groups in the campaign.

Many of those involved in the USA Next campaign are alumni of the Swift Boat ad campaign. Strategist Chris LaCivita has been hired. The group is looking to enlist the same media firm that devised the Swift Boat ads, Stevens Reed Curcio & Potholm. Creative Response Concepts, a public relations firm that worked for the Swift Boat Veterans, and Regnery Publishing, which produced an anti-Kerry book for the Swift Boat group, also are helping.

Jarvis' group ran 19,800 TV ads last year supporting conservative causes and plans a similar campaign this year demanding that AARP "stop scaring seniors." He defended the gay-marriage ad by saying AARP's Ohio affiliate had opposed a gay-marriage ban in that state.

AARP says it has taken no position on gay marriage and dismisses USA Next's attacks. "We've deliberately not responded to erroneous accusations of USA Next because USA Next does not propose legislation, vote on legislation, nor does it sign legislation into law," spokesman Steve Hahn said.

Sen. Jon Corzine, D-N.J., called on President Bush last week to repudiate the group. "The motive for USA Next's irresponsible use of such hot-button issues is not difficult to decipher; if you can't attack the message, attack the messenger," he wrote.

By William M. Welch, USA TODAY

The war in Iraq is producing a group of young combat veterans who face a lifelong struggle to cope with physical wounds so severe, they might not have lived through previous conflicts.
The nation's system of veterans' health care is already seeing the first of those men and women, saved by modern battlefield medicine but in need of long-term rehabilitation. While their numbers are not nearly as large as the injured from Vietnam or World War II, the severity of their wounds is often greater than from previous wars.

"What is important is the really more profound nature of their injuries," says Tony Principi, the Veterans Affairs secretary during President Bush's first term.

While armored vehicles and jackets sometimes protect vital organs, the car bombs and booby-trap explosions so common in Iraq have left American soldiers with catastrophic amputations and serious brain trauma.

"The nature of their injuries is different in some ways from what we've been dealing with before," says Stephan Fihn, the VA's acting chief research and development officer. "They are a group of people who are going to be alive for a long time. Our goal is to return them to a functional and productive and fulfilling existence."

The biggest difference now, Fihn says, is the incidence of multiple amputations from bomb blasts, as opposed to the bullet or fragment wounds to the chest or stomach more common in previous wars. The blasts have also left some soldiers with significant brain trauma.

The VA is financing research into a variety of new technologies to help amputees, including high-tech prosthetic limbs and regeneration of tissue. A study underway at the VA's center in Providence, in collaboration with Brown University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is exploring the potential for restoring greater function after limb loss.

One project seeks to build "biohybrid" limbs, in which a prosthetic would be implanted in tissue and become an integral part of the patient. Another goal is to develop a system in which a patient's brain signals could direct movement of a computerized limb.

"Some of these things seem like science fiction," Fihn says. "Our hope is that there are early payoffs for these soldiers coming back home as well as the larger disabled population."

Amputee veterans are already getting some high-tech prosthetic limbs with microprocessor-controlled knee functions.

Erick Castro, who turns 25 today, has one to replace his left leg, which was blasted from the hip by an anti-tank weapon when his cavalry regiment was ambushed Aug. 25, 2003, between Ramadi and Fallujah.

Castro uses a cane to help him walk. If he needs to move faster, he takes off the limb and uses a set of lightweight titanium crutches. He's back home in California now and studying mechanical engineering at Santa Ana Community College.

"It's never going to be the same," he says. "I can't go for a run or just get up and go. I have to plan how I'm going to do this. I have to give myself extra time. ... Slowly, I have to readjust, to the best of my abilities."

By William M. Welch, USA TODAY

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Jeremy Harrison sees the warning signs in the Iraq war veterans who walk through his office door every day — flashbacks, inability to relax or relate, restless nights and more.

By Robert Deutsch, USA TODAY

He recognizes them as symptoms of combat stress because he's trained to, as a counselor at the small storefront Vet Center here run by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. He recognizes them as well because he, too, has faced readjustment in the year since he returned from Iraq, where he served as a sergeant in an engineering company that helped capture Baghdad in 2003.

"Sometimes these sessions are helpful to me," Harrison says, taking a break from counseling some of the nation's newest combat veterans. "Because I deal with a lot of the same problems."

As the United States nears the two-year mark in its military presence in Iraq still fighting a violent insurgency, it is also coming to grips with one of the products of war at home: a new generation of veterans, some of them scarred in ways seen and unseen. While military hospitals mend the physical wounds, the VA is attempting to focus its massive health and benefits bureaucracy on the long-term needs of combat veterans after they leave military service. Some suffer from wounds of flesh and bone, others of emotions and psyche.

These injured and disabled men and women represent the most grievously wounded group of returning combat veterans since the Vietnam War, which officially ended in 1975. Of more than 5 million veterans treated at VA facilities last year, from counseling centers like this one to big hospitals, 48,733 were from the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Many of the most common wounds aren't seen until soldiers return home. Post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, is an often-debilitating mental condition that can produce a range of unwanted emotional responses to the trauma of combat. It can emerge weeks, months or years later. If left untreated, it can severely affect the lives not only of veterans, but their families as well.

Of the 244,054 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan already discharged from service, 12,422 have been in VA counseling centers for readjustment problems and symptoms associated with PTSD. Comparisons to past wars are difficult because emotional problems were often ignored or written off as "combat fatigue" or "shell shock." PTSD wasn't even an official diagnosis, accepted by the medical profession, until after Vietnam.

New York Times
Thursday, February 24, 2005
by Richard Bernstein

MAINZ, GERMANY -- President Bush of course is not the first president named Bush to come to this town on the Rhine, but the very physical circumstances of this president's stopover here on Wednesday suggest how different, how less automatically warm, German-American relations are now than they were when his father stopped in Mainz 16 years ago.

Most conspicuous was the lack of contact between ordinary Germans and an American president visiting what could almost have been a stage setting: a town with buildings but no people, the shops and restaurants in the center of town closed, and only uniformed police officers on the streets.

Compare that with the main event of the first President Bush's trip here in 1989: a speech to an enthusiastic audience of 3,500 people gathered in a flag-draped hall, thrilling to Mr. Bush's declaration that Germany and America are more than 'firm allies and friends,' they are 'partners in leadership.'

After the speech, Mr. Bush and Chancellor Helmut Kohl - two men united in the great cause of winning, or at least surviving, the cold war - took a boat trip on the river, enjoying each other's company.

Of course, in the security-minded post-9/11 world, a visiting American president cannot just stand exposed before throngs of German citizens, as John F. Kennedy did in 1963 when he made his famous 'I am a Berliner' speech, or as Ronald Reagan did in 1987 when he declared 'Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!'

But this president was entirely sealed off from Germans - other than Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and the German journalists at a news conference, and even a town-meeting-type encounter with Mainz residents was scrubbed out of worry the mood would be hostile. A meeting with a group of carefully screened "young leaders" was put in its place.

Still, Mr. Bush's seven-hour stopover was very successful, according to German and American officials focused on repairing German-American relations damaged by disagreements over the war in Iraq. But the isolation of Mr. Bush from everyday Germans seemed a metaphor for how far apart Germans and Americans have drifted.

"I think it was not only fine, but excellent," Karsten Voigt, a senior German Foreign Ministry official, said after Mr. Bush met with Mr. Schröder. "Both sides obviously want to symbolize, by language, by rhetoric and by body language that German-American relations are good. When politicians do that, it's more than symbolic, it's also substance, because it gives a signal to public opinion that this is the way they want it to be in the future."

"I'm not saying that all the differences have been solved," he said. "But the dialogue is no longer about whether a policy is right or wrong; it is now about developing the right strategy to deal with problems."

But what of the eerie absence of the population of Mainz, and the cancellation of the town meeting? Mr. Voigt said that, aside from restrictions imposed for security reasons, the invisibility of ordinary Germans illustrated the skepticism felt by a majority of Germans toward Mr. Bush.

"It's simply a fact that the German government is moving in this direction," Mr. Voigt said, meaning toward warmer ties with the United States, "but that the German population is skeptical."

To be sure, one purpose of Mr. Bush's visit was to erase the memories of those days two years ago when Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld called Europe "irrelevant," and Mr. Bush and Mr. Schröder were essentially not speaking.

Mr. Bush might have succeeded in his fence-mending; certainly in calling Mr. Schröder by his first name at their joint news conference and thanking Germany, France and Britain for "taking the lead" on Iran - an initiative toward which the Bush White House had been openly suspicious - Mr. Bush altered the oratory and perhaps the mood.

It may in this sense be unfair to compare Mainz 2005 with other, showier American presidential visits to Germany, from Kennedy's in 1963 to Bill Clinton's stroll through the Brandenburg Gate, marking the withdrawal of American troops from a reunified Berlin. Those were times when Germany lay exactly across history's main fault line, and, quite simply, it does not any more.

But the dispute over the Iraq war awoke German citizens to something new in their relationship with the United States, an unease over the price that they might have to pay to be members of an alliance led by a figure whose instincts they distrust.

"Most Germans are still emotionally averse to what Bush stands for - going it alone, not paying attention to due process, which we love in Europe," said Eberhard Sandschneider, the director of the German Council on Foreign Relations.

The Germans remain anxious that their country will yet be drawn into a foreign military venture by a president who, as Mr. Bush has affirmed several times so far on his European tour, keeps all options, including military action, on the table.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company