Can some elected Democrats improve their rhetoric on the military?

[w4rma]

The Compassion Gap

While I was in North Carolina, I spent two hours as a guest on the local political call-in show. I came on right after Rush Limbaugh's nationally syndicated program, and just before the local host interviewed Rush's brother, David Limbaugh, who has apparently written a book about liberals' war on Christianity. ("What the secularists don't want to admit," David Limbaugh told the host, "is that the monks kept learning alive throughout the Middle Ages.") The callers were all conservative, and no more than one personal relationship removed from the military (their husband, son, or co-worker had just left for Iraq, or they themselves had just come back. To a caller, they were upset with the way the war had been conducted. "The president keeps dragging these boys over there to be shot at; we don't know when it's going to end," one widow, from Morehead City, whose husband had been a veteran, told me. But she, and the other callers, had a near-sputtering, subarticulate hatred towards the Democrats - from Wesley Clark on left. "The Democrats are the ones who drew down the forces to begin with," Tony, a young ex-marine from Havelock, N.C., told me. "They have no respect for what we're trying to do."

Misusing the military is one thing; failing to respect it is a much more grave offense. If Democrats are to take advantage of the Republicans' vulnerability among national security voters in the 2004 Presidential election, they're going to have to learn to speak the language of the military, and communicate a passion for and empathy with the soldiers that few Democrats so far have managed. Another scene I saw at the mobilization ceremony in Jacksonville suggests the Democrats still have a long way to go.
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Dole's, by contrast, was wonderful, touching, and personal. She talked about the "trials" the soldiers would go through, and how proud and worried the families would be. She discussed the experiences of her husband, fighting through the mountains of Italy in World War II She wrote empathetically about the difficulties that families would face, and employers, and how crucial their small sacrifice was to the larger, so important sacrifice the men in the guard would be making. She mentioned the places the men in this company came from by name, and reminded them how proud they had made those towns. When Colonel Harris finished reading Dole's letter, the two women on my left were crying, for the first time in the ceremony, and the older gentleman in front of me began to applaud, quietly, to himself.

Any Democrat in the crowd or among the Wolverines would have cringed at the contrast. These letters are an unglamorous staple of life in political offices in Washington; 27-year old junior staffers, not Edwards or Dole themselves, wrote them. But they reflected quite clearly what many, many retired officers told me last month: The Republican majority in the military community is due less to any specific policies than to a sense that they "get" what the military is all about, while the Democrats don't. Elizabeth Dole's letter, compassionate and personal, "got" the military. John Edwards's perfunctory, bland sending off, which could have been a fare-ye-well to recently assigned airport security guards, did not.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0311.wallace-wells.html

Is this an isolated incident? Or is it being reported inaccurately? Or is this normal attention and rhetoric from some elected Dems towards military voters? It seems to me that maybe a small change in rhetoric, not policy, could bring more Democrats into the fold.