What’s in this story:

• How GOP challenger Saxby Chambliss used imagery of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein to frame decorated Vietnam veteran Max Cleland as weak on national security.
• An explanation of how a congressional fight over workers’ union rights in the newly proposed Department of Homeland Security became the race’s defining wedge issue.
• Political analysts break down why Cleland’s campaign failed to respond, how the race helped spark a historic Republican takeover in Georgia, and how it deepened modern political polarization.

ATLANTA, Ga. (Atlanta News First) — Max Cleland survived a grenade explosion in Vietnam that cost him three limbs — and a 30-second television ad in the wake of 9/11 would cost him a Senate seat.

When the dust settled on Georgia’s 2002 Senate race, a decorated war hero had been painted as soft on national security, effectively ending his political career.

During the 2002 midterms, a congressional debate over the creation of the new Department of Homeland Security became the central issue in Georgia’s U.S. Senate race. While incumbent Democrat Cleland supported the department but fought to preserve civil service protections for its employees, GOP congressman and challenger Saxby Chambliss used those votes to frame Cleland as opposed to President George W. Bush’s defense policies.

“The 9/11 attacks played a role in Cleland’s defeat,” said Dr. Charles Bullock, professor of political science at the University of Georgia.

In the attacks’ aftermath, President George W. Bush proposed creating the Department of Homeland Security. However, the bill establishing the department also contained provisions that stripped away civil service and union bargaining rights for the new department’s employees.

While Cleland voted for the department’s creation, he and other Democrats voted 11 times against those provisions, and “Chambliss was able to exploit that,” Bullock said.

During the course of his Senate bid to unseat Cleland, Chambliss — then a four-term congressman from middle Georgia’s 8th district — ran a TV ad featuring images of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. The ad claimed Cleland had “voted against the president’s vital homeland security efforts 11 times.”

Prominent Republican leaders, including U.S. Sens. John McCain (R-Arizona) and Chuck Hagel (D-Nebraska), broke ranks with their parties to condemn the ad.

“I’ve never seen anything like that ad,” McCain, a fellow Vietnam veteran, said. “Putting pictures of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden next to a picture of a man who left three limbs on the battlefield — it’s worse than disgraceful, it’s reprehensible.”

“Cleland did not respond to these attacks, and Chambliss’ campaign effectively used imagery and other information about that political context to defeat him,” said Dr. Ben Taylor, Atlanta News First analyst and professor of political science at Kennesaw State University. “Part of the issue was a campaign strategy response, or lack thereof, from Cleland, but it’s also notable even in the very early days after the 9/11 attack, just a year later, we already saw political actors using those events for political gain.”

Though the Chambliss campaign eventually removed the images of bin Laden and Hussein, the core message had already taken hold. The legislative dispute over labor rights was framed by Republicans as a refusal to support national security, and Chambliss would oust Cleland with 53% of the vote to Cleland’s 46% (a Libertarian captured 1%).

“Cleland gave it his all in Vietnam, losing three limbs and then spending months in hospitals,” Bullock said. “He was a hero, and when he recuperated, he became a state senator, director of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Georgia secretary of state and a U.S. senator.”

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Chambliss himself had received medical deferments during the Vietnam War for a bad knee.

“But Republicans were surging in Georgia in 2002,” Bullock said. “In that same election, Sonny Perdue defeated Gov. Roy Barnes, becoming the first Republican governor in Georgia since Reconstruction. It was not a good year to be a Democrat in Georgia.”

Chambliss was first elected to Congress in 1994, the same year fellow Georgia Republican congressman Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” resulted in the GOP’s first U.S. House majority in more than 40 years.

While in the House, Chambliss served on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and chaired the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security in 2001.

Chambliss would serve two terms in the Senate, choosing not to run for reelection in 2014. He served on both the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, you saw in Georgia and the United States, a sense of unity and shared purpose,” Taylor said. “It didn’t take very long for that level of unity to wear off, and unfortunately, 25 years later, we now see our political system, policymakers, and citizens more polarized than we have been in many decades, and perhaps more polarized than at any time since before World War II.”

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