The Magazine

An Army of 50 Million?

The surpassingly dishonest draft debate.

Dec 11, 2006, Vol. 12, No. 13 • By WINSTON GROOM
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One of the most cynical political tricks played in the 2004 presidential campaign was the false rumor, started by Democrats, that if George W. Bush was reelected, he secretly planned to reinstate the military draft. Clearly, this was aimed at striking fear into the American student population and their frightened mothers, in order to mobilize them to go out and vote for the antiwar candidate, John Kerry.

Of course there was no truth to the Bush draft rumor, which nevertheless whipped across the Internet, and then onto cable news talk shows and into newspaper columns. Fact was, at the time, there were two bills before Congress to restore the draft, but both were sponsored by liberal Democrats--Charles Rangel in the House and Ernest "Fritz" Hollings in the Senate. No Republicans supported them, and certainly not the Bush administration.

Rangel had started on his project a year earlier, when he made a series of baseless charges to the media claiming that the U.S. military was filled with a disproportionate number of blacks and Hispanics who were being sent overseas to die in Iraq while white youths were safe in their schools and colleges. When all statistics proved this assumption false, Rangel changed his tune and proclaimed that the draft should be renewed, coupled with a requirement of universal national service, so that all draft-age citizens would be required "to serve their country"--a laudable notion on its face, but a screwball idea from a practical point of view.

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