WASHINGTON - Talk of a military draft keeps blowing in the wind this campaign season, and it's giving many people chills.

 

E-mails and Web logs continue to warn that Congress and the White House are moving to reinstitute a draft by next spring for all men and women 18 to 25 years old, with no deferments for college students, as there were during the Vietnam War. The Bush administration has denied having any such plans, but Democrats have seized on the issue in an attempt to energize worried young voters and mothers to vote for Sen. John Kerry.

 

When a voter in Florida asked him about it last week, Kerry said he wouldn't bring back the draft, but couldn't say what President Bush would do. In a column that appeared online and in newspapers last week, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean warned of "the real likelihood of a military draft being reinstated if President Bush is re-elected."

 

With fighting intensifying in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military is stretched so thin that soldiers are being prevented from retiring, tours in combat zones are extended, and some retired soldiers are being recalled to active duty. A Pentagon advisory board recently warned that the military doesn't have enough people to meet its commitments around the world and the Army hasn't done enough to reinforce itself.

 

Democrats in Congress have introduced two bills to revive and expand the draft, which was discontinued in 1973. Adding to the anxiety, the Selective Service System recently began advertising for people to serve on local draft boards, which would help administer a draft. The government still requires millions of men ages 18 to 25 to register in case the draft is ever reinstated.

 

Even so, it's highly unlikely the draft will return, barring some major national emergency. There's virtually no backing for the legislation in Congress, which must authorize a draft. In fact, the very thing that makes the bills dead on arrival in Congress - the intense public opposition to reviving the draft - is fueling the Democrats' attempts to make it a campaign issue.

 

"It would be potentially disastrous for any party to push for a draft or to advocate for a draft," said Stuart Rothenberg, the editor and publisher of the nonpartisan Rothenberg Political Report in Washington. "It would be the ultimate middle-class vote-killer."

 

A poll earlier this month of 18- to 29-year-olds by CBS News and MTV found that 78 percent opposed reinstating the draft to provide soldiers for Iraq; just 18 percent favored it. A poll of registered voters in April by Fox News found that only 41 percent approved of reinstituting the draft if it became clear that more soldiers were needed in the war on terrorism, while 51 percent disapproved.

 

Those numbers probably understate the volatility of the issue, which caused major social upheaval during the Vietnam War.

 

"It's a high-intensity issue," independent pollster John Zogby said. "That's the sort of thing that gets people to ask friends to vote against somebody."

 

The two bills in Congress have so little support that no hearings on them are scheduled. A bill in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, HR 163, sponsored by Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., who won a Bronze Star in Korea, has only 14 co-sponsors, all of them Democrats. A bill needs 218 votes to pass the House, and it's almost impossible to pass a bill without a Republican co-sponsor.

 

An identical bill in the 100-member Senate, SB 89, sponsored by Sen. Ernest Hollings, D-S.C., has no co-sponsors - and Hollings is retiring.

 

There's almost as much support for a third bill, HR 487, sponsored by Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, to eliminate the Selective Service System, which maintains a database of about 14 million names. Seven House members - five Democrats and two Republicans - have co-sponsored that bill.

 

Perhaps most important, no Republican leaders have indicated any support for resuming a draft.

 

Rangel and the others who support his bill proposed the draft as part of a national service program, in which draftees could serve in the military or do other public-service work. They envision the program preventing more wars by spreading the risk to all young Americans.

 

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