IN 1969, THE CALIFORNIA rock musician John Fogerty wrote a song called "Fortunate Son," recorded it with his band, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and released it on the album Willy and the Poor Boys. It is a short song, lasting just over two minutes, and it is an intense one. "Some folks are born, silver spoon in hand," Fogerty screeches, and his barely controlled fury, overlaid atop distorted guitars, made the song a classic--one that has popped up ever since in film soundtracks, television commercials, and during the occasional antiwar protest. Last week, Fogerty's song resurfaced as the name of a high-stakes political operation run out of Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington--and as shorthand for the DNC's accusation against George W. Bush.

"It seemed appropriate," Howard Wolfson said, when I asked him how the project he runs came to be called "Operation Fortunate Son." (We'll call it OFS for short.) The goal of OFS is to paint President Bush as a spoiled "child of privilege" who used his connections to weasel his way into the National Guard, and then later used those same connections to weasel his way out of his Guard commitments. "I think [Fogerty's song] fairly well sums up the president's life and experiences," Wolfson said.

He has been busy. Last week the story of Bush's National Guard service was all over the news, though not in the way the DNC had hoped. Because CBS used now-discredited documents as the hook for its report on the president's Guard years, the CBS story quickly overshadowed the story of Bush's service. But a chunk of the DNC is working day and night, trying to keep alive complaints about Bush's Guard record.

Wolfson is a political consultant, a marathon runner, and one of several Clinton operatives brought aboard the ailing Kerry campaign in recent weeks. In 2000, during Hillary Clinton's successful run for the Senate, he served as the first lady's communications director, and in the course of the 18-month campaign set up a rapid-response "war room" that rivaled her husband's 1992 version. He has mastered the press secretary's art of using clipped, one-word sentences to answer almost any question. Ask him what it was like his first time around at the Kerry campaign, which employed him for four and a half days in early April, and he'll tell you, "Short." And ask him if he ever thought Vietnam would figure so heavily in a 21st-century presidential campaign, and he'll tell you, "Never."

OFS has two goals. "One, we're going to make the point that the president has misled the nation about his National Guard service in the same way that he's misled the nation about so many other issues, like Iraq, the cost of his prescription drug bill, the deficit, the implications of his tax plan, and on and on," Wolfson said. In other words, the DNC wants to turn Bush's time in the Guard into a character issue. "And second," Wolfson went on, "we're going to make this point that he's a son of privilege, a fortunate son, who's had special privileges and favors done for him, and is now in the White House handing out special privileges and favors to special interests, like the oil companies and the pharmaceutical companies."

It might seem a stretch for the Kerry campaign to make "privilege" a key theme of the race. After all, their candidate is the offspring of two venerable New England dynasties--the Forbeses and the Winthrops--and attended a Swiss boarding school, St. Paul's, and Yale before marrying a billionaire heiress. But Wolfson's team is barreling ahead. They have deployed surrogates like Iowa senator Tom Harkin and DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe to talk to reporters at press conferences and in conference calls and television appearances. Wolfson's team has organized veterans, too; some served in the Guard, others did not. The veterans hold press conferences in swing states (Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, and so on) in which they raise questions about Bush's Guard service.