A Cease-Fire For Draft Dodgers

The times, they are a-changin.’ Forgive the anachronistic reference to a Bob Dylan song, but it’s in the service of a point. There was a time when his music, as well as the war he protested, was relevant in American politics. Whether presidential candidates avoided service evoked painful memories of a war we only remembered but never celebrated. Dodging the draft made Dan Quayle look elitist, Bill Clinton slippery and George W. Bush dishonest. But now Dylan’s music plays on the oldies station, and not even the most ardent Democratic activists seem to care about Mitt Romney’s draft dodging. Even in these hyper-partisan times, the fact that four deferments kept Romney out of Vietnam seems to get less attention than how he took his dog on a family vacation. Almost four decades after cease fire in Vietnam, whether someone dodged the draft has become something that we used to talk about, like nuclear disarmament, the line-item veto and Japanese manufacturing. Under the old rules, Vietnam might have been Romney’s Waterloo/Jason Stanford, Moscow-Pullman Daily News. More here .

Question: Why doesn’t military service for a presidential candidate matter as much as it used to?