To Sir With Love - A Wesley Clark Blog

"A Pound of Prevention" (New Republic Primary)

On a more positive note, Jonathan Cohn in the New Republic finds Clark's healthcare proposal may have an edge over those of the other candidates. We emphasized this yesterday in a blog post, "Policies that set Clark apart."

For about $70 billion a year, Clark's plan would cut about 32 million people from the rolls of the uninsured--a substantial improvement that would probably represent the biggest jump in coverage for the uninsured since the creation of Medicaid in the 1960s.

The details: Estimates by Emory University's Kenneth Thorpe suggest that, relative to other Demoratic plans, Clark's plan actually covers more of the uninsured even though it comes with one of the lowest price tags--a selling point the campaign emphasizes. But that's primarily because in the other plans some of the new spending ends up lowering premiums for people who already have insurance or providing an economic stimulus. Both are perfectly respectable goals. Also, Clark's plan wouldn't actually kick in until 2006, which is one reason it costs a little less.

A more important strength of the Clark plan is that, like the proposal Edwards has made, Clark's would make insurance for children mandatory--thereby making coverage for children truly universal, something the other plans would only approximate, at least in the early stages.

The most novel feature of the Clark plan, though, may be its focus on improving the quality of health care. All of the candidates have paid lip service to this notion, but Clark has gotten more specific. Among other things, Clark would establish a commission to develop quality treatment guidelines, require all federal programs to abide by them, and then--in what seems like a pretty aggressive move--demand that private insurers follow if they want to keep receiving any tax subsidies.

If Clark ever got to be president and tried to implement such a scheme, conservatives would howl about all the unnecessary regulation. But Clark has a pretty good retort: He merely wants to do for all Americans what the military already does for its soldiers. The military has been aggressively promoting prevention and quality care for years, figuring it's better to make sure soldiers don't get sick rather than treat them once they are. Clark used this language in his speech on Tuesday: "It seems to me that just as our soldiers can't do their jobs without adequate health care, our families shouldn't be expected to do their best jobs without adequate health care, either." And at least some experts are impressed: "The rhetoric is stronger than any other candidate I've seen, and it relates to his personal experience," says one well-respected policy analyst who advises Democrats. "He really thinks there needs to be much more emphasis on prevention and quality."

You think you're frustrated with the campaign?

Say it ain't so, Josh? Talking Points Memo spares the crew in Little Rock little in today's condemnation of the campaign thus far.

. . . Let's be honest: the air's going out of his campaign. In money, in direction, in the polls, at the grass roots.

In fact, that doesn't even quite capture it. The air's going out of his candidacy because he doesn't have a campaign. Where's the campaign, the strategy, the organization?

What's surprised me most is that he's managed to do as well as he has over the last six weeks even with the complete lack of direction and organization from Little Rock.

The operation is being run by an interlocking directorate of folks who can't be bothered to be more than absentee proprietors of the general's campaign. (We'll say more about the details on these points in a follow-on post.)

I have to imagine Clark can see this. How could he not? The question is whether he's going to really do anything about it. Getting a national campaign up and running on the quick is no mean task, especially if you're new at it. And I still think he's a very strong candidate. But even the strongest candidate can be run into the ground by a bad campaign operation. He needs to get some new heads in the operation and let some others roll.

Why I don't blame Clark for voting Republican

The Washington Monthly has a lengthy piece exploring the "murky" demographics of the military electorate, and more importantly, the vastly larger "national security" electorate, who base their vote on which party appears to better respect and support the military. It provides a lot of evidence to support the points I made in an earlier blog post, "It's a Volunteer Army." While the eroding relationship between the GOP and the military, their families, and the states where they are influential voters may not necessarily work to the Dems' benefit, some of the statistics sited reinforce my tendency to give WKC a pass on his Republican "leanings," which Lieberman, Kerry, et al. would have us believe disqualify him to run as a Democrat.

". . . The consensus view seems to be that the military as a whole votes Republican by a margin of slightly less than 2-to-1, Benjamin Wallace-Wells tell us, with enlisted men and women Republican by 3-to-2, and Republicans outnumbering Democrats among officers by 8-to-1."

Speaking more directly to Wesley Clark, the young officer who voted for Richard Nixon and eagerly served as a White House Fellow under President Ford, Wallace-Wells notes:

By the early '60s, the ranks reflected the conservatism of the 1950s. Vietnam made the military even more conservative. First, the all-volunteer military established by the 1973 abolition of the draft gave the troops a different demographic cast. They were disproportionately Southern, rural, poor, and morally traditional -- the cultural base which would drive Nixon's Southern Majority and, 30 years later, Red America. Second, and perhaps more importantly, scholars say, men who had fought in Vietnam came out of that era with the sharp sense that they had been abandoned by American liberals, and to a lesser extent by the nation as a whole. A profound cultural divide appeared to develop between civilians and the military, two institutions with different sets of values. The distinction served, social scientists say, to help sharpen the soldiers' conservatism.

. . . Thomas E. Ricks, a Washington Post reporter then with The Wall Street Journal, wrote a remarkable journalistic account of this divide in The Atlantic Monthly in '97, which found that soldiers tended to find civilians undisciplined, immoral, unpatriotic, and selfish.

Though Clark has been criticized (without evidence) for failing to inspire rank and file troops under his command, I think he is particularly tuned in to the findings of a 1999 Duke University study:

One important moderating influence, sociologists think, has been the presence of large numbers of uniformed African Americans and, later, Hispanics and women. In 1973, when the brass tried to figure out how to staff a volunteer force, they chose to focus their recruiting efforts in large cities, where the most potential enlistees lived. By the mid-'80s, the military was the one place in America "where blacks regularly commanded whites," sociologist Charles Moskos wrote in 1984, and its reputation for giving minorities a fair shake drew increasing numbers of blacks, Hispanics, and women. Blacks now comprise almost a quarter of the military, women are nearly 15 percent, and Hispanics are more than 9 percent. The blacks, Hispanics, and women in the military are less liberal and Democratic than blacks, Hispanics, and women in the general population, but they are also less conservative and Republican than white men in the Armed Forces.

And here's a statistic to ponder:

A reassignment of less than two-hundredths of 1 percent in the military vote to the Democrats from the Republicans in Florida in 2000 would have moved that state to the Democratic column, and a similar shift of less than 5 percent in the veteran vote alone would have given Arkansas, Nevada, and New Hampshire's electoral votes to Gore, not Bush. And Pennsylvania and Ohio, expected to be crucial swing states in the next presidential election, each have more than a million veteran voters.

Can Clark connect with these voters? If not, Democrats should ask themselves who can?

To respect the military doesn't simply require the sort of offhand pieties that liberal politicians frequently toss at it, but a deeply felt sense of belonging, a sense that the military embodies values which most of the country believes in. Treatment of the military consequently acts as an indicator for tens of millions of Americans who aren't enlisted of how seriously a party, administration, or politician takes the nation's security, and how competent he is to defend it. Political scientists call these people national security voters. ". . . What should really worry the Republicans is the potential for all of these problems you hear about to add up to an impression for the national security voter that the Republicans may not be so good for the military."

All of which may speak to a frustration on the part of military Republicans that mirrors that of Democrats without necessarily changing the balance. Wallace-Wells sat in on a local conservative call-in show in North Carolina:

"The president keeps dragging these boys over there to be shot at; we don't know when it's going to end," one widow, from Morehead City, whose husband had been a veteran, told me. But she, and the other callers, had a near-sputtering, subarticulate hatred towards the Democrats - from Wesley Clark on left. "The Democrats are the ones who drew down the forces to begin with," Tony, a young ex-marine from Havelock, N.C., told me. "They have no respect for what we're trying to do."

If Wesley Clark can't reach these potential swing voters, does anyone believe Howard Dean can? South Carolina should be interesting.

Policies that set Clark apart

Everyone, from the talking heads who subliminally resent him for "using" his CNN exposure to build a following, to draftees who want to do more, is demanding Clark be much more than capable, commanding, intelligent, well-briefed, and charming. It's ironic that the campaign has seized on the meme that "this administration fits facts to an ideology," because true as that may be, his staff seem to be encouraging a candidate profile that works his resume rather than what he's repeatedly said over time.

So in the public interest, here are some positions that set Wesley K. Clark apart:

1) Affirmative action as the muscle behind "inclusiveness." I think Charlie Rangel (Vieques aside) and Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick get it while Kwame Kilpatrick was too busy during the Detroit debate for Clark to button-hole him on the subject. But affirmative action is a resonant Democratic issue for Clark, as much as health care are for Dean and Gephardt, and he should be working all the get out the vote, shame on Diebold, angles he can.

2) Preventative health care and the right cuts in military spending. Clark may not (yet) be the defict hawk that Dean is (and it's one of things I like best about Dean) but as a commander of military resources on a continental scale, he knows pork when he see it. Managed care was supposed to head off catastrophic illness and weapons technology is supposed to protect our homeland, but in both critical policy areas, actuarial statistics overrule what is right. The outsider's leverage is that he is ostensibly free of influence; his achilles heel is that he lacks the leverage to influence. Nowhere can WKC's pragmatism do more good, for us and for him, than in the area of health care and military spending. He needs to marshall some facts about this.

3) Information intelligence. Whether it's having enough Arabic speaking intelligence translators listening in or creating a national database of family medical histories that will follow the patient from doctor to doctor, Clark can put a benign face on intelligence gathering. He hinted as much in describing the first stage of the Civilian Reserve sign-up. I may be naive, but I think this is what Clark had in mind with Acxiom, which some have gone so far as to say implied his support for the Patriot Act. But I'm one of those people that wishes Time Warner cable did register all of my viewing choices. Tracing IP addresses isn't going away and that's probably a good thing for security. Whether it can be abused, a la the RIAA, is up to ethical government that "gets" technology.

4) Portable skills, portable insurance, portable retirement savings. No one likes to move house: Wesley and Gert Clark moved on average about once a year for 34 years. He did it because he was ambitious and committed. So he can relate to workers of all kinds who are moving in and out of jobs, homes, and retirement plans, like it or not, at a frightening pace. He has hinted that the unions can play a major part in protecting workers' basic security. This may be as naive as Bush suggesting logging companies will protect the environment, but it is a new idea born from Democratic Party principles. He needs to find a union in sympathy with this and expand on the notion that, yes, you may be forced out of work from time to time, and yes, you may have to start over with new skills, but wherever you go, you have a sophisticated social security policy to support you.

"One Car Caravan" traces Dems' "invisible primary"

You won't find Wesley Clark in USA Today columnist Walter Shapiro's new book on the embryonic Democratic presidential campaigns, since the book ends in August of this year and WKC declared in September. But One-Car Caravan: On the Road with the 2004 Democrats Before America Tunes In looks like one of those books the winner will either want to buy boxes of to give away or have removed from the public libraries. USA Today provides excerpts on the early campaigns of five of the "first-tier" candidates.

On Howard Dean:

So, I asked, how did you decide to run for president? "The answer should be that I deeply care about it, and I thought it all out," Dean replied. "But the way it happens is that I'm very intuitive, so I was driven toward running before I knew why I was doing it. I know that doesn't make any sense. It sounds like I'm just a very ambitious person who wants to be president."

Naked ambition, of course, has spawned many other candidacies. But after an obligatory tour of his ideological orientation ("I want to balance the budget, I want a decent foreign policy ... "), Dean opted for something more personal. "My choice basically was that I decided in August (2001) that I wasn't going to run again (for governor)," he said. "It then quickly came to me that I had a choice of joining boards and swearing at The New York Times every morning and saying how outrageous it was. Basically, I was in a position where I thought I could run for president, so I decided that I was going to."

Joe Lieberman:

. . .Midafternoon Sunday, Dec. 15. Lieberman had just returned from Connecticut to his home in one of Washington's rare gated communities; his wife Hadassah was in New York City; and the senator was sharing the house with their 14-year-old daughter, Hani. Suddenly, he got a message from a Senate staffer on his Blackberry wireless console: There's a rumor that Al [Gore] isn't running. Lieberman and his daughter immediately switched on CNN to learn that Gore would indeed announce on 60 Minutes that he had chosen not to be a candidate. . . Hani, a deeply religious teenager, let loose with what even Orthodox rabbis would agree was the only appropriate response: "Holy s-t!"

John Kerry:

Speaking of Kerry's early attempts to curry favor with major Dem fundraisers, "These cash-and-Kerry fantasies completely misjudged the dynamics of the 2004 money primary. In a contest without an obvious favorite, there was small incentive and large risk for fundraisers to prematurely anoint any candidate as the Daddy Warbucks of the Democratic Party. If they bet on the wrong horse, they could end up following the next Democratic administration on CNN rather than from, say, the embassy in Stockholm. A handful of glowing news clips, some promising New Hampshire polls and a consultant-heavy campaign staff were not nearly enough to ever cloak Kerry in an aura of inevitability. In fact, Patricof, that emblematic New York fundraiser, endorsed Wesley Clark as soon as the retired general belatedly entered the race in September.

WKC addresses Peace Conference while Bush spins "Mission Accomplished"

While our president was holding his first press conference in four months and crediting the Navy for the "Mission Accomplished" banner that provided the perfect accessory for his flight suit, Wesley Clark was addressing the “New American Strategies for Security and Peace” conference. Video is here and the conference website is promising to post complete speeches shortly.

Meantime we have a Clark-friendly observer in Josh Marshall: "The event kicked off with a speech by Wes Clark, which was quite good. (There’s no question that the long-form exposition is Clark’s forte and in this case it showed. . . Ted Sorensen’s introduction of Clark was surprisingly fulsome.") I'm particularly looking forward to hearing Sorensen's remarks. Wesley and Ted have much to share with each other, and as a former speech writer (some say ghost writer) for JFK, Sorensen is one of the great Democratic Party solons of our time.

Commenting on how much more effective the general appeared to be when speaking at length rather than in "debate," I wrote in an earlier blog post: ". . . he needs someone besides Gert to throw it around with. Wes needs to be in debate prep mode every moment he isn't kissing babies. A Ted Sorensen is called for. Someone who is passionately devoted to the general's principles who can first help him forge them into an agenda, and secondly work closely with him to articulate it.

Some have already accused Wesley Clark of selling us short. Some have accused members of his team of selling the candidate short. What Wesley Clark needs most of all right now is a brother in political faith. Bobby Kennedy types preferred. War experience a plus."

Marshall concludes his Talking Points Memo post with high praise for a speech by Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser. ". . . What stood out to me over everything else was the speech in the early evening by Zbigniew Brzezinski.

I don’t know whether a transcript of the speech will be available. I’m not even sure how much of it was precisely written out or just extemporaneous. But the basic sanity, wisdom and tough-mindedness of it was bracing. And for me it brought home the nature of our historical moment, and the critical turning point we’re at, more powerfully than any other public address I’ve heard. I don’t know if the transcript will be available or if there’ll be some sort of recorded live feed on the conference website. But if it is, watch it. Balanced, powerful, shrewd -- it was that good."

Chris Matthews, closet Democrat, likes Dean, not Cheney

Speaking at Brown University yesterday, Chris Matthews of MSNBC's Hardball, "acknowledged that his personal favorite in the race is Howard Dean," according to Jim Baron of the Journal Register News Service.

"He came out of Vermont, a small state," Matthews said, "with no foreign policy experience and with sheer guts he believed in one big idea and that big idea was: 'It was wrong to go around to the other side of the world to fight a war.'"

The problem for Dean, the former aide to House Speaker Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill of Massachusetts, Matthews said, is the American people have to decide, "do you put a lefty in at a time of crisis?"

". . . The 2004 campaign will be and should be fought on the issue of the war," Matthews suggested, noting, "presidential politics are driven by foreign policy failures. . . Of the last 10 presidents, five were unsuccessful," he said, and in three of those cases it was because they were entangled in unpopular foreign policy crises. . . . Matthews said the Bush administration's rationale for going to war in Iraq was "nonsense" and totally dishonest. He laid most of the blame at the door of Vice President Richard Cheney.

"Cheney is behind it all," the former newspaper reporter and columnist said. "The whole neo-conservative power vortex, it all goes through his office. He has become the chief executive. He's not the chief operating officer, he's running the place. It's scary."

Matthews painted Cheney as the guy "who put his thumb on the scale" to affect the balance between Secretary of State Colin Powell and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

"The ideologues started circling around the president," Matthews said, warming to his topic. "They saw a man who never read any books, who didn't think too deeply and they gave him something to think about for the first time in his life. This thing called pre-emption, the Bush Doctrine. They put it in his head and said 'Iraq, Iraq, Iraq.'"

Slate's Saletan gets Clark wrong on debate remark

William Saletan commenting on the Detroit debate said:

By the way, what is Wes Clark getting at when he keeps saying, "I stayed with the United States Army when other people left the service"? Is that a dig at Kerry? Does Clark really think anyone begrudges a winner of the Silver Star the right to get on with his life?

I actually don't think Clark was thinking of Kerry at all. The discipline he's showing in not sniping at rivals may be forced but it's a real expression of his character: one supposes sarcasm is of very little effectiveness in negotiating with dictators or French diplomats.

On the other hand, he is sad and a little bitter about how the country turned its back on the military after Vietnam until Gulf War I. In this regard, he and Kerry have more in common probably than not. When he says, "I stayed in," he is certainly blowing his own horn and there is the somewhat self-pitying implication that if he had not been so devoted to selfless duty he might have made a fortune and be competing as a well-to-do Senator rather than a retired grunt with good health care and a modest pension.

However, Clark's commitment to the values of military life and the opportunity it offers its volunteers is sincere and culturally apt for this time. I believe that when he gets a grip on the spectrum that ranges from homeland security to jihad, with its implications for education, training, infrastructure construction, military spending and alliance building, Clark will distinguish himself from the Democratic pack.

His "staying in" is important to that. Frankly, I think he spends a lot more time thinking about himself and how people are "taking" him than he does about John Kerry.

Hardball interview best yet

For those who were as underwhelmed with the Detroit debate as I was, MSNBC has a transcript up from last Friday's interview with Chris Matthews for Hardball.

I've also posted it as variable bandwidth streaming video here. A permanent link is in the Multimedia section to the right.

Many will agree that the 9 candidate debate forum is awkward and superficial: last night, perhaps because Fox was broadcasting, everyone seemed to be shouting at the top of their lungs, including Gen. Clark, who should be taking it easier on his voice. Though I shouldn't have been surprised, I found the panelist's regurgitation of the Shelton canard to be particularly snarky.

All of the candidates, with the exception of Sharpton, Braun, and Kucinich (who all came off better than the "first tier" on Sunday) are spending too much emotion on Bush and the past and not enough time on their programs for the future. Even John Edwards, who usually does well in these fora, kept telling us, somewhat pathetically, that he'd "written it all down" and was giving "it" to people across the country but he didn't tell us much about "it." Though I don't agree with him (or Clark) on voting "no" on the $87B, Edwards' "blank check" line resonates because "trust us or your kids will be bombed on the way to school" seems to be the sum of the administration's efforts at dialogue.

It's such a good line that Gen. Clark couldn't seem to do much better than parrot it when his turn came immediately after Edwards'. In the retelling, the NY Times actually made it appear as if Clark had used it first, followed by Edwards.

[Clark said] "I want to commend John Edwards and John Kerry and those who voted on the resolution. I didn't believe last year we should have given George Bush a blank check in Iraq. Now we're trying to give him another blank check."

Mr. Edwards, who was the first of the pro-war Democrats to announce his opposition to the $87 billion, also shrugged off Mr. Lieberman's attacks.

"My view of leadership is standing up for what you believe in, Joe," he said. "For me to vote yes on that would be to give President Bush a blank check, and I am not willing to give George Bush a blank check."

All in all the debate was not pretty.

Now, Chris Matthews' attitude toward the general spoke volumes about Clark's credibility whenever he's lucky enough these days to enter a "no-spin" zone. WKC had apparently impressed Matthews in previous conversations which they both alluded to in the course of the interview, and the Hardball host was both respectful and genuinely interested in what the general had to say. He really seems to "get it."

Some highlights:

CLARK: But actually, the administration, in my view, and what I heard from people on the inside and around the edges is, this administration did want war. They wanted the show of force, the use of force in the Middle East. They wanted a country to pound and they wanted that country as a stepping stone to other adventures.

I was told in the Pentagon, and in November of 2001, before we ever finished the campaign in Afghanistan, they had a list of seven countries. Six after Iraq that they were intending on taking down. Now, that doesn't sound like an administration that was worried about threats or weapons of mass destruction.

That sounds to me like an administration that didn't have any strategy other than to go after states because they were afraid they couldn't go after terrorists effectively. And that's what we've just seen now in the Rumsfeld memo. He admits it.

MATTHEWS: Do you think the president still buys into that line? Do you think he is still in line with people like Wolfowitz and Fife and Scooter Libby and the whole crowd of them who are pushing war and trying to get the evidence to bring to us war? Do you think that he is still backing that line to the point where we're going to Syria next and then on to Iran? Do you think he is still of one war after another? Of conquests?

CLARK: I think he has kept his cards close, but I think there are those in the administration still pushing for the Syria option. I think I can see that option being set up now. You can see it in the rhetoric, you can see it in the legislation that's going in front of the Hill. And you can see it as the sort of logical outgrowth of where they are right now in Iraq.

There is no exit strategy from Iraq. This administration hasn't given us a strategy. They haven't given us a success strategy. And they've got a clean bill from Congress on the $87 billion without having to come forward with the strategy for Iraq. So I think the odds are that this administration is still looking for another foreign policy crisis.

MATTHEWS: Do you believe that the war, the case for war against Iraq was sexed up?
CLARK: Well, I think that what they did is they took the existing information and they made the strongest possible case with it. And intelligence information really doesn't come that way. It really is balanced.

It is nuanced, and there's no one more eager than an intelligence analyst to tell you that there are two sides of this information. None of that came through in the public discussion. I think there was a lot of pressure that came from the highest levels within the administration to show the need to go after Saddam Hussein.

MATTHEWS: . . . Have we put ourselves in a position where the game now, the horrible game, the tragic game is, our enemies can defeat us by simply knocking off a trooper who is out on patrol every night or standing guard duty in front of a bank or something? Isn't that a position we can't possibly win in?

CLARK: Well, I think the American people are well prepared to accept sacrifices if there's a reason for them and there's a clear strategy for success. The problem is, in this case, we haven't been given a valid and accurate and truthful reason for why we went to Iraq, and we haven't been shown why we're there and where we're headed after that. And so I think because of that, the lack of information the administration's lack of candor, it's lack of planning, I think that the impact of the deaths of these American is magnified.

This administration went to war without the real support of the American people. It never came back and went to the Congress of the United States just before going to war and got a vote. It was afraid to do that.

Instead it pushed it through. You had the president going around in January and February of this year saying, if we're forced to go to war, if we're forced to go to war. But who was forcing us to go to war? He was the only one forcing the action.

And so the American people are rightly concerned now. And they should be. So I don't think anyone should misunderstand the courage and resolve of the American people. We'll stay and fight as long as it is necessary for a real objective when the American people are told the truth that there's a reason for it, and public support lines up behind it. That is simply not the case in Iraq.

MATTHEWS: . . .Let me ask you this, General. What about the politics of winning? How do you win having started so late?

You're now contesting Iowa; you are contesting New Hampshire. But Howard Dean has a huge lead up there. When will you begin to show your fire power in this campaign for president?

CLARK: Well, I'm in New Hampshire now. I'll be here about half the time.

It's really not about electioneering. It is really about ideas, it's about credibility, and it is about leadership. There's two things going on right now across America. One is there's a deep sense of anger at the administration that is in office right now not only for what they've done in Iraq in misleading people and the casualties we're taking, but also for their failure on the economy and for the neglect of so many of the promises that were made during the election.

But beyond that, there's a real hunger for leadership. That's why the draft movement got started. That's why I got pulled into this.

. . . Clearly, in my case, this has come about because this country is at war. We are at war right now. It doesn't matter whether the president landed on an aircraft carrier in a flight suit and said it was over. It's not over.

And when you look at the Rumsfeld memo that was released or leaked a couple of days ago, you realize that at last, the Pentagon started to ask the same questions. It's, OK, we're there, we spent $160 billion in Iraq. And we're no-not really any closer to winning the war on terrorism.

Rumsfeld asked, maybe we should have a real long term strategy. That's what I've been saying for two years. I think that's why people are coming to me. They're looking for someone who can help create and ask the honest questions, ask the tough questions, and help create a real long-term strategy.

MATTHEWS: Thank you very much, General Wesley Clark. Good luck up in the snow. I think it is coming. I'm feeling the weather already down here. Thank you, General Clark.

General Clark will be joining us at Harvard University on December 8, as our series, "The Battle for the White House" continues.

Howard Dean reaches out to Iowa Independents

The Bigger Picture - Wesley Clark Finds His Voice (Ryan Lizza)

The general's personal history is the parent of his message, Lizza argues persuasively.

The Wesley Clark candidacy has its share of critics at the New Republic. Earlier this week, describing the general as "self-assured to the point of delusion," Adam B. Kushner went so far as to say:

"Yes, Clark's record is impressive. Even his harshest critics must admit that much. But are we beginning to see a picture of a man who realized his greatest achievements in spite of his personality, not because of it?"

Today, however Ryan Lizza reads between the lines of WKC's career to provide one of the most, dare I say, "nuanced" profiles of the candidate yet. Lizza finds that behind the stark facts attesting to Gen. Clark's accomplishments, there is a philosophy and methodology that helps set him apart from his rivals, not to mention the former baseball executive charged with our security.

. . .For a month, the Clark campaign has been about everything but the candidate's message. Clark's tumble from the Olympian heights of a reluctantly drafted American hero to just another Democratic candidate was swift. . . Faced with charges that his campaign was one of "convenience" rather than "conviction," in the words of Joe Lieberman, Clark's stump-speech rhetoric quickly shifted away from the big ideas his advisers say he brings to the race and toward primary pandering ("I'm pro-choice, I'm pro-affirmative action, I'm pro-environment, pro-health care, and pro-labor").

. . . Individually, each of these episodes was minor, but, taken together, they overwhelmed the campaign's attempt to quickly position Clark as an above-the-fray candidate --"a historic figure," in the words of one senior adviser--unsullied by the pettiness of the long primary process. Clark is now trying to turn the corner.

. . .The problem for Clark is that the tales of staff intrigue and questions about his commitment to the party have started to drown out his message. For example, last weekend it became news when someone dug up another videotape of Clark praising President Bush, this time for winning the war in Afghanistan. It would be hard to find a Democratic leader who didn't praise Bush for that, but, because Clark's commitment to his new party is suspect, a throwaway line supporting Bush's victory over the Taliban became ammunition for the argument that the general isn't a real Democrat. That's pretty much how it has gone during Clark's first month as a candidate.

Policy-wise, Clark is not breaking much new ground. . . But the potential of the Clark candidacy has never rested on his specific policy ideas. Aides argue it's more about delivering a bigger, more inspiring message to sell those policies, one that lifts Clark above the tired field of politicians.

Obviously, his biography is central to this message. Although most people know him for his service in Kosovo, the general rarely mentions that war in his speeches. Instead, when Clark talks about terrorism, the experience he draws on is the 30 years of his military career he spent fighting the cold war. . . . "That was the climate I grew up in--the cold war," Clark said. "And I went to West Point because I believed America was in danger, and I wanted to do something to protect my country."

After West Point, Clark didn't just fight in Vietnam--he came home and was so disturbed by how the war had harmed the military's reputation that he devoted his career to fixing it. "I spent much of my military career helping to rebuild the war-shattered U.S. army," he writes in Waging Modern War. He's not just boasting. In 1986, a superior noted in one of Clark's performance reviews that it is "not possible to overstate the significance of Col. Wes Clark's impact on our Army." War-gaming as the Soviet or North Korean military, Clark revolutionized the training of U.S. forces when he ran the Army's National Training Center. He is credited with helping the Army prepare for the Gulf war. It's only a slight exaggeration to say that Clark's pre-Kosovo career was devoted to helping the United States win the cold war and overcome the Vietnam syndrome. Not a bad vein of experience for a Democrat to mine.

And Clark is beginning to take advantage of it. The parallels between his military career and his presidential campaign are obvious. Once again, Clark says, he sees the country in danger--this time from terrorism--and he wants to serve. Just as he found Vietnam had damaged an important institution he cared about, he wants to repair the damage he thinks the Bush administration has done to our government. He calls it New American Patriotism, but government reform may best describe the overriding theme of his campaign.

In a revealing comment to an msnbc reporter recently, Clark said, "This election is about good government, fundamentally. Set aside the war on terror, that's very important--we want to be safe and secure. Set aside the economy, we've got to deal with it, we've got to create jobs--but all that notwithstanding, fundamentally we have to protect the government and the system, with a pluralist democracy that provides the rights for the minority, the will of the majority for our future generations. That's the issue that I see lurking in this campaign." Clark seems to be saying the Bush administration is actually the biggest problem the United States has right now.

In the Army, Clark gained a reputation as a fix-it man. He has written that he became an expert at "what businessmen would call `turn-around situations and start-ups.' From staff officer to commander to trainer for units, many of my positions involved muscling-up an organization that had been `low-performing' or swimming upstream to start something new."

His performance reviews show he always approached these assignments as a pragmatist with a deep skepticism for conventional wisdom. One review notes how he "freely stated and defended opinions at variance with conventional wisdom." Another praised him for "tempering brilliant intellect with pragmatic know-how." The picture is of someone who is the opposite of an ideologue.

This pragmatism is now a major part of the general's message. Echoing something Bill Clinton has been talking about lately, Clark seems to be trying to set up a debate between ideology and pragmatism. Clinton put it this way: "They--Republicans--believe in government by ideology, enemies, and attack. We believe in government by experiment, evidence, and argument. We actually think we might be wrong now and again, we might have to change." Clark's speeches are filled with similar references. "Traditionally and ideally, we Americans meet our challenges by starting with the facts, analyzing the problem, and reasoning toward a solution--in as public a manner as possible," Clark said in one recent speech. "This administration does things in reverse. They start with a solution, cast about for a problem that 'requires' their solution, and mold the facts to make their case--in as secret a manner as possible." Sometimes it sounds like he's running as the candidate of the scientific method. This "just-the-facts" approach is politically useful. It allows him to make the argument that he's running for president not because he's an ambitious Democrat but simply because Bush has failed. "I don't oppose the president's policies because they are Republican policies," he said recently. "I oppose them because they don't work."

There are two other major themes Clark is weaving into his speeches to try to set himself apart from the field. The first is meritocracy. He holds up the military as the U.S. institution in which connections and birthright matter the least. It's a reminder that he rose from an Arkansas boy of modest means to a four-star general strictly on merit. The contrast with Bush is so stark it doesn't need to be pointed out. Similarly, one of the values of the Army he is trying to borrow for his campaign is equality of opportunity. "One of the things that I loved about the Army is that everyone, from every background, had a chance to advance," he said this week. "The same ideal applies to our country. There are great inequalities in America--vast wealth and deep poverty. But that doesn't have to divide us--as long as everyone has an opportunity, a chance to succeed."

Finally, Clark is trying to become the candidate of optimism. His advisers see an unfilled niche for a candidate with a message of hope to contrast with Dean's anger. "The candidate who comes up with a really forward-looking, optimistic, big message is the one who will win," argues a senior adviser. "JFK, FDR, Carter, and Clinton all ran on fundamentally optimistic messages that offer hope." Clark began hitting this theme hard this week in his economic speech. It was one of the first speeches from a candidate that spent as much time explaining how much potential the economy has as it did explaining how badly Bush has screwed the economy up. Clark noted that he was "as optimistic as I've ever been about our future." He said he disagrees with "the pessimists" who say "our best days are behind us" and "that we're on a long slide we can't get off of." "In short," he concluded, "I'm bullish on America." It doesn't hurt that, in person, Clark is a naturally sunny and positive guy. Several of his rivals are not.

Overall, it's not a bad message. Now that he has his voice back, maybe people will start to listen to it.

"Success of military diversity proves affirmative action works" by Wesley Clark

Op-ed by WKC in the Detroit Free Press today breaks no new ground but this type of short articulate piece is one of his strengths.

When I left the military and contemplated entering political life, many issues led me to find my political home in the Democratic Party. Affirmative action was one of the most important. This is an issue that Democrats both understand well and feel deeply. And, based on my experiences, I believe without hesitation that we Democrats are right in our belief that affirmative action is good for all Americans.

. . . There is one thing the opponents of affirmative action have never wanted to admit: It works.

I know this firsthand from my 34 years in the United States military. Affirmative action was essential to creating the diverse officer corps we need to defend our country. Throughout my career, I have seen the benefits of seeking out qualified minority candidates for leadership positions -- and I am a beneficiary of their leadership.

In the University of Michigan affirmative action case this year, I joined military and political leaders in an amicus brief affirming my deeply held belief that policies combating discrimination are essential to good order, combat readiness and military effectiveness. As a result of these policies, the military is one of the most integrated institutions in America. And our country is safer today because it is defended by a diverse, integrated, talented military that is the envy of the world.

. . . Our president, on the other hand, seems unable to pull himself away from his right-wing advisers long enough to examine the facts. The Bush administration argued against affirmative action in the Michigan case. And they've done everything possible to undermine diversity, not promote it. I think Bush should head down the hall and talk with National security adviser Condoleezza Rice, or speak with Gen. Colin Powell, both of whom have testified to their support of affirmative action.

Conservatives say they are opposed to affirmative action "on principle." They invoke "quotas" to scare people into thinking they will lose their place at the table. But this is a pessimistic view of America's future.

If we make room for everybody, there will be more room for everybody. An integrated America, where each and every American is treated with the same dignity and respect, is a better America for everyone.

Democrats have always believed that our diversity is our greatest strength, whether in our schools, our workplaces, our government or our courts. Unlike the ideologues who deny the facts and denounce affirmative action, we will work for an America where everyone has a chance to contribute -- and receives the respect each and every American deserves.

Focus on IA, NH hurts Dems' chances against Bush (MSNBC source)

An article by Tom Curry analyzing two candidates' decision to sit out the Iowa caucuses quotes a "veteran New Hampshire Democratic activist who asked not to be identified by name."

"Increasingly, moderate candidates now see both states as playgrounds for exotic liberals slanting the nominating process before it begins," he said. "The Democratic Party must come to grips with this situation: Its nominees are hurt by this process. Can there be any doubt the party would be stronger if you started elsewhere?"

This activist added, "My prediction is more and more candidates are going to bypass one or both. One or two things are going to happen. Either Dean wins big here [in New Hampshire], gets nominated, and is blown out (by losing to Bush), allowing moderates to say, 'I told you so.' Or, Dean wins here, but is tanked in other primaries and is not nominated, making New Hampshire seem like an anomaly a la Paul Tsongas (in 1992). Either way, we come out a loser."

And in a New York Times op-ed piece, former editor of The Des Moines Register, Gilbert Cranberg, has even less good to say about his home state's "arcane" caucus system: "Iowa's caucuses not only showcase questions from farmers about the nearly impenetrable intricacies of agricultural economics, they also require a search for needles in haystacks. These are the little more than one in 10 registered Democrats who may actually attend the meetings."

". . . And for what [are the candidates campaigning]? Surely not for delegates. Iowa is vote-poor, with only 55 voting delegates at the national convention, where there will be more than 4,000 voting delegates. The state is publicity-rich, however, by virtue of its first-in-the-nation caucuses.

One of these days, perhaps, it will become commonplace for candidates to decide not to pose with pigs in Iowa. If so, the absence of General Clark and Mr. Lieberman could be seen as the beginning of the end of Iowa as a required stop on the way to the White House."

Iraqis on the Sidelines (NY Times op-ed)

Don't know much about history: "In pressing their request for nearly $20 billion for reconstructing Iraq, Bush administration officials have been invoking the Marshall Plan. . . In fact, however, such invocations are highly misleading, and the Congressional conferees who are shaping the final version of the Iraq appropriation bill would do well to review what made the Marshall Plan a success - and how the Bremer plan may be headed for failure."

Susan E. Rice, formerly assistant secretary of state, quotes Marshall himself and goes on to point out that the Iraqi people are incidental to the Bremer "plan": "It would be neither fitting nor efficacious for this government to undertake to draw up unilaterally a program designed to place Europe on its feet economically. This is the business of the Europeans. The initiative, I think, must come from Europe." Marshall's central insight is missing in the proposal before Congress. Under the Bremer plan, Iraqis need not do much of anything except sit back and watch American occupiers and contractors decide how to rebuild their country. There is no requirement that Iraqis - Sunni, Shiite, Kurdish, Turkmen - resolve their differences and together plan to rebuild. That means there is no opportunity to improve Iraqis' capacity for standing the country on its own feet.

The Bremer plan recalls the cold war era, when the United States pumped billions into corrupt dictators' coffers and asked questions later. A return to this failed approach is odd in an administration that promised last year to revolutionize foreign assistance through the Millennium Challenge Account. To get Millennium Challenge money, a country's government and its nongovernmental organizations will have to work together, will have to relate their program requests to their larger national development strategies, and will be held accountable for the results.

The Millennium Challenge philosophy should be applied to Iraq's reconstruction. The Iraqi Governing Council, and the Iraqis themselves, would decide where the money was needed most. Iraqi businesses would be in a better position to compete directly for contracts, and hiring local companies through transparent bidding procedures would help control costs. Instead, under the current plan, Mr. Bremer and the coalition authority will dole out contracts worth almost double what the American government spends annually on all foreign assistance, and the United States will be no closer to establishing a united and self-sufficient Iraqi government.

The Marshall Plan was also devised to be finite in cost and duration. Congress authorized and appropriated the money after careful review each year. The goal was to give Europeans a limited window of opportunity, not a limitless gravy train, and to give the American people a clear voice in the plan's operation. In contrast, the $20.3 billion proposal for Iraq and Afghanistan is a multiyear request masquerading as an "emergency" supplemental, meaning that lawmakers get to vote only once, and after a relatively hurried period of consideration. More important, the money is but a small fraction of what will be needed to rebuild Iraq. Last month, the Bush administration estimated the cost of reconstructing Iraq could be as much as $75 billion. Bush officials say, optimistically, that $12 billion of that could come from Iraqi oil revenues, and hope American allies will provide the balance. Yet only a little more than $3 billion in grants had been pledged by yesterday, the start of donors' conference in Madrid. Shouldn't lawmakers know where the balance of reconstruction funds will come from before they approve the first installment? That doesn't mean, however, that they should bend to pressure to transform some of the proposed grants into loans, which would further cripple an Iraq that already has more than $100 billion in debt. We cannot afford to fail in Iraq. Congress has a responsibility to examine the president's request thoroughly - and it should heed the central lesson of the Marshall Plan and use Mr. Bremer's billions to help unite Iraqis in rebuilding their country.

Clark's "Republican past" makes GOP strategists nervous (TAP)

Nick Confessore in The American Prospect, "based on talks with some of my sources and colleagues," contends that "conservatives clearly think [Clark] is the most electable Democrat in the race. (Unlike some liberals, they believe -- and I suspect they're right -- that Clark's Republican past will actually be a huge asset, especially in the general election.)" As I have been known to say myself.

Since The Washington Post made a similar argument on behalf of Dick Gephardt yesterday, my Clark/Gephardt ticket may be getting some traction.

"The Endorsement Primary" (Carpetbagger Report)

Today everybody seems to be weighing in on Clark's positive demographics, while criticizing Dean's. The Carpetbagger Report provides a tally of Congressional endorsements to date:

Dick Gephardt -- 32 endorsements
John Kerry -- 18 endorsements
Joe Lieberman -- 13 endorsements
Wesley Clark -- 12 endorsements
Howard Dean -- 10 endorsements
John Edwards -- 8 endorsements
Carol Moseley Braun -- 2 endorsements
Al Sharpton -- 1 endorsement
Dennis Kucinich -- 1 endorsement
(Bob Graham had 7 endorsements -- mostly from Florida lawmakers -- before dropping out)

Carpetbagger observes: . . . Clark's support is unusually strong in geographic balance. Among the 12 are Charlie Rangel from New York, Rahm Emanuel from Chicago, Jim Matheson from Utah, Betty McCollum from Minnesota, Mike Thompson from California, and Gene Taylor from Mississippi.

Not only are Clark's endorsers from all over the country, they're also from all over the ideological spectrum. Matheson and Taylor are from the more conservative wing of the party, while Rangel and Emanuel are from the more progressive side.

In addition, Clark backers on the Hill are suggesting his endorsements are likely to grow by quite a bit. Rep. Marion Berry, a fellow Arkansas Democrat, told the AP a few weeks ago that "more than 30" members of Congress have told him they will back Clark in the primaries. If these come through, Clark's endorsements will soon rival -- if not surpass -- Gephardt's.

For Clark, these endorsements suggest a remarkable opportunity. Remember the old Will Rogers joke? "I don't belong to any organized political party. I'm a Democrat." That's the trick of national Dem politics -- it's incredibly difficult to bridge the chasms within the party. One candidate has to do everything possible to draw support from liberals in the North and West, conservatives in the South, labor in the Midwest, grassroots activists on the 'net, establishment players on the Hill, and fundraisers everywhere. It's not easy.

Clinton did it and he became a Dem icon. As evidenced by the use of his name by the nine Dem candidates on the campaign trail, Clinton remains the one figure who is popular with all of the various factions of the party.

Looking over the current field, and their totals in the Endorsement Primary, I can't help but wonder which candidate is best positioned to bridge the party's gaps. It's not Dean, who is as widely disliked by the party as he is liked. It's not Lieberman, for the same reason. It's not Gephardt, who seems to have limited support outside of Labor. It might be Kerry, but his support seems limited to the North for now.

And it very well may be Clark, who appears to be uniquely well positioned to appeal to all of the various (and competing) constituencies of the party. Outside of party identification, there isn't a whole lot that liberals like Charlie Rangel and conservatives like Gene Taylor agree on. The fact that both want to see President Clark speaks volumes about the General's broad appeal.

Somehow I feel the endorsement splits are yet another reason why Clark/Gephardt are a good fit.

"Clark may reconfigure the electoral map" - Gene Lyons

Gene Lyons, interviewed on BuzzFlash, comments on Clark's appeal to conservatives in the South.

BUZZFLASH: If Wesley Clark gets the nomination, it upsets the Republican Southern strategy. Give our readers a little bit of context and history to what the Southern strategy is, and how Clark affects the geo-political landscape and culture war.

LYONS: Well, basically the Southern strategy started with Nixon in the late ‘60s. The idea was to convince the core constituency -- Southern white men -- that the Republican Party was their home and that the Democrats were the women's party, the black people's party, the homosexual party, the party of disgruntled minorities who were anti-religious, anti-patriotic, and anti-American, in a fundamental way. That Democrats supported "race-mixing," immorality, and the welfare state. It worked well enough to swing the South to the Republicans in the wake of the Civil Rights Act.

Lyndon Johnson is famous for having predicted this. Dale Bumpers, the former Arkansas Senator, told me that as a very young man he congratulated LBJ for signing the Voting Rights Act of '64, and Johnson said, "Well, just as long as you understand that the whole South is going to be Republican in 10 years." And it has worked for a long time.

But I think that as a person and as a symbol, Clark has the potential to take all that away from the right-wing. I might add that I also think that there are an awful lot of genuine conservatives, in the classical sense, who are uneasy about where Bush is going. The conquer-the-world schemes, the giant sinkhole of the federal budget. Some of the best writing about Iraq has come from conservative or libertarian columnists like Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune or James Pinkerton of Newsday. Now this is sad, but those conservatives aren't going to listen to Carol Mosley Braun make the same criticism as that coming from Wesley Clark, who is a Southerner and a decorated military man. I think it's sad but true. Again, I think it's a battle of symbols.

I think that in practical terms Clark puts several Southern states back in play. Right now, Bush would be very hard-put to win any of the states that Gore won in the last election. So if you can take away from Bush, or at least strongly compete in Arkansas, West Virginia, Kentucky, possibly Georgia, Florida, with all of its military people, you all of a sudden take from Bush this air of invincibility and fundamentally change the electoral map. When you look at it like that you have to ask, how in the world is Bush going to win this election? Where are his electoral votes going to come from? BUZZFLASH: There's this perception among progressives and Democrats that because the Bush administration is so right wing, and effectively all three branches of government are in the control of the Republican Party, that we're underdogs. But people forget that Gore won the election by a half-million votes. And let's not forget over 95,000 people cast their vote for Ralph Nader in Florida, while Bush "won" by 537 votes. When you look at the electoral map, the Democrats start out much stronger than what you would think they do. I think that the Democrats could feel a little bit more aggressive and empowered based on those things. As you've pointed out, if the Democratic candidate wins every state that Gore won, all the Democrats have to do is just pick off one more, whether it's Arkansas or West Virginia, and the Democrats take the White House. LYONS: Well, I've been reminding people of that all along. But I also think Clark does more than that. My subjective view was that culturally there was no way that Dean, for example, could win in the South -- he would be a complete non-starter. Dean has a terrific line about this. He says he'd tell the pickup driving set (a group that would include me, for what it's worth) that they've been voting Republican for 30 years, and ask them "What have you got to show for it?" Great line, but would they ever hear it at all coming from a Vermont Yankee? I've got my doubts. And that would allow the Republicans to spend a lot more money in places like Missouri and Pennsylvania and Michigan that are states that are very competitive. And it would make it extremely difficult for Dean to win in that he'd have to run the table in all the other states and pick up one more state somewhere.

I'm just talking about pure symbolism now. I'm not talking about the candidates or their virtues or standards. The symbolism of Clark -- because we are talking about a television show, after all, if we're talking about a presidential campaign -- means you have trouble finding a way for the Republicans to win.

I think Clark would bring back a lot of military people. I think there's great disquiet among people of the old-fashioned style of patriotism right now, and it's looking for a place to go. And I think there's a very good chance it would go to Clark. I think that he would have a strong chance to unite that which has been divided.

. . . You almost wouldn't know it from the campaigns of the Republican Party that used the Southern strategy. There is more open opportunity and more genuine friendship among and between different racial groups than ever before. The Republican campaigns in some parts of the South would make you think that everyone was a George Wallace supporter, or would be happy to vote for George Wallace, which isn't true.

Even so, many people that won those kinds of elections are sort of embarrassed by all that -- even people who voted for Wallace are ashamed. Arkansas Republican Gov. Mike Huckabee, for example, is neither racist nor reactionary. I mean, yes, there's a subdued minority who are both of those things. They were the core of the Clinton haters, for example. But remember, Clinton always won.

A "Red State Army" may be waiting to support WKC (TAP)

That Jason Vest of the American Prospect is no particular fan of Wesley Clark makes his "fair and balanced" analysis of the general's potential strength in red states all the more encouraging.

". . . if his campaign gets its act together and runs the Clark who wowed students and seniors at DePauw University in late September, it might even affect more than Kerry's and Dean's poll numbers. While George W. Bush holds a comfortable lead among both Republican and Democratic voters on national security, many current and former members of the military's officer corps -- as well as some civilian conservatives who increasingly see the neocons for the spendthrifts they are -- have had it with Bush's crew and are poised to become, as one officer put it, "Clark Republicans."

As an archetypal New York City Upper West Side liberal, I can't remember the last time I voted Republican. Even when I reluctantly voted for Rudy Giuliani for a second term it was on the Liberal Party ticket. But Clark's partisan agnosticism is a plus for me: more than ever, putting this country back on track requires a reinvigoration of commonly shared values and goals around a leader who should be judged on his effectiveness rather than his party loyalties. And there's almost no American institution that has remained relatively apart from the rabid partisanship of our day aside from the military. Had the Republicans chosen to run Colin Powell in 2000 (and I can't fault the man for opting out), I would have given him a very close look over Al Gore.

Vest continues:Though it was a far cry from Bobby Kennedy's raucous 1968 reception in another conservative corner of the Midwest, Clark's warm welcome by nearly 3,000 people -- including folks from as far away as St. Louis, Cleveland and Chicago -- in staunchly right-of-center Greencastle, Ind., was significant. . . What explains this unlikely enthusiasm? . . . Korean War veteran H.J. Trubitt, a retired colonel in Army intelligence and a professor emeritus of criminal justice at Indiana University, met with nods of approval from fellow veterans as he explained to the Prospect his view of Bush versus Clark: "Those of us of my vintage -- those who fought or served in the military during the Cold War -- remember a time when we had leaders, men like [Dwight] Eisenhower, who understood the importance of unifying nations, not just against something but for something. I think a lot of people here are increasingly unhappy with the 'go it alone' approach."

. . . Bush does have a weakness that Clark is singularly well-suited to address: When it comes to national security, as The Wall Street Journal noted last month, the president's numbers, though strong, have been dropping among the general public -- and, if anecdotal evidence is any indicator, possibly with active and retired military officers, who went all out for him in 2000. In interviews I conducted this summer with more than three dozen current and former military officers and some of their families, the vast majority proffered variations of the line, "I haven't voted Democratic in two decades, but if Wesley Clark runs as a Democrat, I will."

. . . As evidenced by increased back-channel collaborations between some high-ranking brass and the Department of State, the military has about had it with being lectured to by powerful ideologues who have the president's ear. Whatever their "defense intellectual" credentials, these neocons are resented by the military for their condescension, for having never served and for usurping the military's post-Cold War power niche, which embraced diplomacy as well as combat. By putting ideology and geopolitical dreams before everything else in the service of some truly dubious objectives, and by leaving National Guard members and reservists (and their families) to wonder when they will be coming home, Bush has invited serious discord. What's more, while this doesn't necessarily translate into larger conservative civilian defections, some conservatives -- particularly hard-liners on deficit spending -- are growing increasingly restive.

While this may not lead to widespread conservative civilian defections, when one recalls how incredibly close Bush's margin of "victory" was in 2000 (537 votes), it's clear it wouldn't take many to defeat the president. If Clark peeled off some military-family votes along with a smattering of deficit hard-liners and the so-called NASCAR Dads (described by The New York Times as "Bush Republicans who could be won over if a Democratic man's man came along"), it would not make for a happy Karl Rove, indeed.

. . . But in the near term, the problem for Clark is one of image, of how to replace the stumbling novice backpedaler with the engaging and nimble stump speaker and glad-hander.

The latter was evident at DePauw during a small, private forum with students after the speech. Hit with trenchant questions posed in less than deferential tones about everything from his abortion-rights and pro-affirmative-action views to his historically Republican inclinations, Clark responded with clarity and earnestness. Asked how a general recently ensconced in a Belgian chateau could relate to the average American, Clark spoke of his pre-four-star days, when he lived close to the bone. He recalled wrecking the family car as a lieutenant colonel; with only $4,000 in savings, he spent a leave in the Fort Carson, Colo., auto shop rebuilding the vehicle. Queried about affirmative action, he discussed how, as a major general at Fort Hood, Texas, several events forced him to recognize prejudice and discrimination in his beloved Army.

Explaining his history of voting mainly Republican, he presented a story of evolution fused with apostasy, of how, as a young officer, he'd faced a society hostile to the military. "In the summer of 1971," Clark recalled, "I was a captain, and 100,000 people converged on the Pentagon, throwing blood on the steps. They probably weren't going to vote Republican, and it was pretty clear most of us in the military weren't going to vote with them." Yet after the Cold War ended, he continued, when it came to the state of the armed forces, "Republicans became more interested in weapons than in people. I found that the Democrats believed more in people. I saw few in the Republican Party who had the right answers."
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Vest's conclusion? "Whether or not he wins the primary, his powerful presence on the campaign trail as an articulate critic of Bush's foreign and national-security policy is sure to hurt the president." Despite his inflamed vocal cords, WKC this week appears to be recovering the poise and charm he has consistently demonstrated in town hall settings; his retort to Judy Woodruff's latest "but you praised Bush" zinger yesterday was both firm and witty. It's true that from time to time we are uncomfortably exposed to the wheels turning in Wes' mind, but I think the real payoff will come when the general has a tag team partner and running mate. I'm liking Dick Gephardt a lot as the partner who can bring out the Democrat in Wesley Clark.

WKC deftly deflects Judy Woodruff on why he's praised Bush

The general is regaining his pre-announcement poise on-camera as his CNN Inside Politics segment yesterday demonstrates.

Confronted by Judy Woodruff over his speech at yet another Bush love-in, Clark was quick to put a constructive spin on his remarks.

Well actually, the full quote I think was "all the troops who fought. And then the top of the chain of command too."

I think that as a fair person, you have to give credit to Russians, Chinese, Frenchmen, and even Republicans when they do things right. And that's what I did here. And I supported the war in Afghanistan.

Now, I've also said in my recent book, "Winning Modern War," that . . . the failure in Afghanistan was not to finish the job on Osama bin laden. We didn't put in the American troops, we didn't finish the job.

But, you know, Judy, you have to recognize when somebody does something well. If the Republicans -- and "TIME" magazine had quoted the rest of the speech, you'd have seen the bulk of the speech indicted the administration for not having an effective strategy for leadership, for American leadership in the world today. That's the subject I've been speaking on.

New Poll: What will be WKC's tipping point in the primaries?

Find the poll in the Links section to the lower right. Suggestions for better tipping points are welcome.

The Clark Sphere: Centrist Coalition's Clarkbot

Stirling Newberry reported: "Want to know what is going on around the blog space related to Clark? The Centrist coalition has "Clarkbot" which gathers the day's posts - but be forewarned, it's everything and Clark bloggers aren't shy about weighing in on every aspect of the campaign..."

Rick Heller, the programmer/publisher of the Centrist Coalition has provided me with a link that brings up a week of Clarkbot posts.

"To Sir With Love" is only a month old, more or less the same age as the campaign which inspired it. I started out with Blogger, because I've always enjoyed the Google Tool Bar and the "Blog This" button lured me in.

After a week, I discovered RSS and realized that without syndication the blog was in a cul-de-sac. It took another few days to convert the Blogger messages to Movabletype, import the Blogger posts, and tweak the stylesheet.

Finally, I started submitting the feed URL to indexes such as Feedster. Within a day or two, Rick's Clarkbot picked up on the feed and "To Sir With Love" was on it's way. So to link directly to the Clarkbot, see the permanent link in the Links section to the lower right.

The Privatization of War and Peace (Richard Reeves)

Cheney and Rumsfeld have been quietly building their own private army. Once WKC hits his stride on the mainstream issues, watch him go after pork in the military budget. The growth of PMC's, "private military companies," is just as snarky as the voting machine mess to come and should be an area of reform where Clark can take the lead.

"One PMC," Richard Reeves tells us, "called DynCorp. . .was the employer of the three security guards killed by a bomb as they guarded American diplomats in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday. When you call to ask questions about DynCorp, you are referred to the State Department, which does not discuss the trade secrets of private companies."

In other words, private companies doing the public's business are not accountable to the public. It is a big business now. DynCorp alone, with 23,000 employees, had at least $2 billion in federal contracts last year. Two more facts: PMCs are a $100 billion industry, most of that money coming from taxpayers; one in 10 Americans doing military work and occupation duty in Iraq are actually civilians working for PMCs. They are called contract employees now -- flying and maintaining military helicopters around the world, among other things. Once upon a time they would have been called mercenaries.

A month ago, a DynCorp pilot was shot down and killed by ground fire in Colombia. What was he doing? None of your business. More than a dozen of DynCorp's employees have been killed in Colombia, and even their families can't find out what they were doing there. ...Three Northrop Grumman employees whose plane crashed or was shot down are being held hostage somewhere in Colombia. What were they doing? None of your business. But it must have been interesting stuff, because our State Department is offering a $5 million reward for information leading to their rescue.

PMCs are one face, a veiled one, of the accelerated privatizing of the government of the United States. The idea, of course, is to save money -- Dick Cheney was the first to push the idea when he was secretary of defense during the first Gulf War -- and to avoid accountability. Corporate executives are not answerable to congressional oversight committees or to reporters babbling about the public's right to know. Under this system, the public has no rights.

Another face of the new privatization was revealed briefly last week on the Maryland side of the Potomac. It was not Page One news that the U.S. Navy, under a White House "competitive sourcing" program, was deciding whether a private contractor could take over the work of 21 kitchen workers at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda.

The 21 people, some of whom have been there for more than 20 years, are officially "disabled." They are mentally retarded. The U.S. government has given them a life. They live in group homes or have managed to buy their own homes, living with their parents or other relatives -- productive lives made possible by government policy. They are among 1,734 mentally retarded people making between $9.42 and $12.80 an hour under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.

Compassionate conservatism is giving capitalism a bad name and crushing democracy under its vicious heel. For shame, Mssrs. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. General Powell should hope with the rest of us he doesn't have to serve this band of thieves for another four years.

"Iowa, Go Home": Mickey Kaus writes off the caucuses

Conservative Kaus indirectly supports Clark and Lieberman's decision to pass on Iowa.

Will the decision of Sen Joe Lieberman and Gen. Wesley Clark to bypass the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses undermine that proud, venerable institution? Here's hoping! The Iowa caucuses are highly unrepresentative, media-created event. In 2000, for example, only little more than a tenth of the state's registered Democrats--forget about Independents--attended the party's meetings. All of the caucusers, as always, seemed to be members of the teachers' union, the National Education Association. Every four years this tiny minority pushes the Democratic candidates way to the left, so they can spend the rest of the year scrambling to make themselves palatable to the actual voting public. ... In fact, the only non-incumbent Democrat who won Iowa and actually went on to win the White House was Jimmy Carter in 1976. Carter put the caucuses on the map. The state's unimpressive track record in the ensuing years has gradually dulled its luster, and this could be the year the hype collapses completely....

Talking Points Memo: "We're rebuilding Iraq because we don't know what else to do with ourselves."

Josh Marshall offers a somewhat different and disturbing perspective on the administration's compulsion to lavish compassionately conservative largesse on "rebuilding Iraq."

If you go back to last fall, or even the early months of this year, there was plenty of talk about reconstruction in Iraq. But if you look closely most of the talk was about social and political reconstruction: building a free press, purging the army of Baathists, creating the building blocks of a rule-of-law society, and so forth.

There was precious little talk about rebuilding their stuff, i.e., the physical infrastructure of the country -- bridges, schools, telephones, electrical grids, all up to western standards.

Certainly, there was a recognition that we'd need to rebuild stuff that we broke in the course of prosecuting the war. But the entire focus of reconstruction underwent a wholesale transformation in the months after the war.

The reason for this, I think, is that we very quickly found out, on entering the country, that the social and political reconstruction task was vastly harder than the planners of the war had anticipated, and that they were woefully underprepared for it. That left them scrambling for a new raison d'etre for the war, a new justification for what we were doing there. What we came up with was rebuilding their stuff. Of course, fat cats of all varieties were ready on hand to enable this drift in policy. And needless to say, most already had the president's ear.

Building bridges and schools can be terribly expensive. But it's something we know how to do and something that shows concrete results. Building civil society can be, to paraphrase Bolivar, like plowing the sea.

So let me see if I've got this right:

We elected a compassionate conservative who has underfunded even his own signature programs, such as "Leave No Child Behind."

We are governed by a majority party which has traditionally stood for fiscal responsibility, yet supported the highest deficits in history.

We were led into war by an adminstration at odds with itself on pretexts which have been disproven, yet which for reasons of political expediency, it is happy to have the electorate continue to believe.

And finally, a president who derided nation-building in every sense before his election is insisting we spend $20B because Iraq shows no signs of becoming another Orange County any time in the foreseeable future.

There oughta be a law.

Official Clark '04 Campaign Blog: Generally Speaking...: Note From The General

Reproduced from above link verbatim. You'd be surprised how many top executives have trouble typing. Not Wesley Kanne Clark.

"Talk about an internet campaign strategy! I flew into Little Rock last night for 3 days to get my voice back! So, it's ALL internet now!

We had a great week: released my public service proposal; met some great people in Florida, New York, New Mexico and Nevada; and released my efficiency reports - "OERs" (Officer Evaluation Reports) - yesterday to give folks an idea of what I've done with my life.

There's very strong interest in the candidacy, and it's growing around the country! We need all your support for this. I think many people are beginning to realize how important this election really is...it's not "business as usual." What's at stake is more than the next four years - it is really about what kind of future we want for our country...should government represent the governed, or just direct them? ...should government respect dialogue and discussion, or just brand it as disloyal and unpatriotic. One path leads us to a cleaner, more transparent democracy - I don't like to think about where the other path leads...but it won't well-represent the values of freedom and democracy.

The New American Patriotism I've talked about is emerging strongly around the country. These are people who want to pitch in and help, not just wave flags. And these patriots also understand that what we're protecting isn't just our borders against an invasion but also our rights and ideals against their compromise. That's why one of the strongest reactions I get is in pointing out that in a democracy in time of war, dialogue and debate, disagreement and dissension are the essence of patriotism - not a failure but a celebration of who we are as a nation! No Administration has the right to say that if you disagree, it's unpatriotic!

In the near term, we have problems at home and abroad. On Iraq, I don't see the UN Resolution on Iraq as changing much...but now that it's in place, maybe the Administration will tell us what their strategy is! We hear the President tell us about the strategy succeeding, but we have never heard what the strategy is! Once we've heard it, we'll know better about what's going to happen and how we should move ahead.

On the economy, I'll be speaking about this next week - assuming my voice recovers - and we'll discuss the big picture of the economy. We're so strong, we have so much talent that our economy will fully bounce back, and then some. And I'll tell you about how we'll help that along.

So, it's a beautiful autumn day in Little Rock. I should have been in Michigan talking to Arab-Americans. Instead I'm here, hoping for a speedy recovery. But I want to say to all Arab-Americans, we appreciate you, and your patriotism. And we know in this country, just as I saw in the Army, that diversity is one of our greatest strengths. I hope to be with you soon.

And to all out there in the former draft movement, again, thanks. Thanks for all your faith and support, and thanks for caring about our country. I wouldn't be here without you, and I'll want you with us in January '05!

This election is about our children and grandchildren. And with your continued support we can leave a legacy they'll be proud of!

Posted by Gen. Wes Clark (Ret.) at October 18, 2003 05:17 PM

An Exit Strategy from of all people, an Iraqi: "America Must Let Iraq Rebuild Itself" (NY Times)

Catch these wise words of advice while you still can - Iyad Alawi is serving as president of the Iraqi Governing Council this month. What makes me think Bremer will allow Mr. Alawi's freshness date to expire? Nevertheless, Iyad has been trying to solve our mutual problems while the administration is busy circling the wagons.

In the months since Iraq was liberated, jubilation has given way to insecurity and chaos. When my fellow Iraqis finally go to the polls to elect their government, they must have confidence that state institutions are not only legitimate and independent, but robust enough to guarantee safety and civil rights. That is why the coalition and the council must take several immediate steps to establish these necessary conditions for the constitutional process to succeed.

First, it is vital to call up the Iraqi Army and the national police force, at least up to mid-officer level. The coalition's early decision to abolish the army and police was well intended, but it unfortunately resulted in a security vacuum that let criminals, die-hards of the former regime and international terrorists flourish. And the coalition's plan to build a 20,000-member lightly armed force mostly responsible for security and border control would make poor use of a valuable resource: the 300,000 Iraqi soldiers who simply went home with their weapons in the face of the American-led invasion.

Or as the NY Times piece, "Study Foresaw Trouble Now Plaguing Iraq," put it:

The group studying defense policy and institutions expected problems if the Iraqi Army was disbanded quickly - a step L. Paul Bremer III, the chief American civil administrator in Iraq, took. The working group recommended that jobs be found for demobilized troops to avoid having them turn against allied forces as some are believed to have done.

Mr. Alawi continues:

Most of these soldiers are Iraqi patriots who chose not to fight for Saddam Hussein. Americans should not confuse the Iraqi Army with the hated Republican Guard, which Saddam Hussein created precisely because he distrusted the legitimate military. In one simple process, the coalition authority can support the governing council to call the army back to its barracks for retraining and, ultimately, for redeployment. Most soldiers and their officers will proudly return to their units and contribute to their country's future.

As the Future of Iraq Project put it:

After special security organizations that ensured Mr. Hussein's grip on power were abolished, the working group recommended halving the 400,000-member military over time and reorganizing Iraqi special forces to become peacekeeping troops, as well as counterdrug and counterterrorism forces. Under the plan, military intelligence units would help American troops root out terrorists infiltrating postwar Iraq.

"The Iraqi armed forces and the army should be rebuilt according to the tenets and programs of democratic life," one working group member recommended.

Back to Mr. Alawi:

The coalition and the Iraqi Interior Ministry can vet officers to remove those who committed crimes under the old regime, and then rapidly redeploy the most capable units to work with, and progressively relieve, American troops of security duties. Iraqi Army units have an established chain of command and esprit de corps. Not only can they be recalled to barracks immediately, but it would be much easier and quicker to retrain and re-equip them within their existing organizational structure than to start from scratch.

By supporting the recall of army units, the United States would not only speed the process of relieving the burden on its troops, it would also gain substantial good will in Iraq. In contrast, any American-led military presence, even if complemented by the United Nations, will never have the credibility and legitimacy that the Iraqi Army has among the people.

In addition, the Iraqi national police must also be recalled. Most Iraqi policemen - as opposed to Saddam Hussein's feared intelligence and security organs - are dedicated to law and order. The United States does not have the time or money to create a police force from the ground up, nor is it necessary, because we have a large, organized force that is ready and willing to serve.

Finally, as security improves, Iraqi institutions are re-established and the constitutional drafting process is completed, the United States should support international recognition of Iraqi sovereignty. Then a recognized interim government could quickly present a popular referendum, under United Nations monitoring, on the new national constitution. It would be a grave mistake for the United States to hold out sovereignty and international recognition as the reward for passage of a constitution. Rather, making Iraqis once again a part of the international system is the prerequisite of successful reconstruction and a durable democratic system.

Since one way or another, Mr. Alawi is going to be out of job soon, WKC would do well to sit down with this guy as soon as possible.

Ambassador Wilson, meet Tom Warrick: "Study Foresaw Trouble Now Plaguing Iraq" (NY Times)

The Times reports yet another thing that makes you go hmmm: "A yearlong State Department study predicted many of the problems that have plagued the American-led occupation of Iraq, according to internal State Department documents and interviews with administration and Congressional officials."

Beginning in April 2002, the State Department project assembled more than 200 Iraqi lawyers, engineers, business people and other experts into 17 working groups to study topics ranging from creating a new justice system to reorganizing the military to revamping the economy.

Their findings included a much more dire assessment of Iraq's dilapidated electrical and water systems than many Pentagon officials assumed. They warned of a society so brutalized by Saddam Hussein's rule that many Iraqis might react coolly to Americans' notion of quickly rebuilding civil society.

Several officials said that many of the findings in the $5 million study were ignored by Pentagon officials until recently. . . .

So if Bush gets his news from Rumsfeld and Rice, who does Rumsfeld get his news from?

The man overseeing the planning, Tom Warrick, a State Department official, so impressed aides to Jay Garner, a retired Army lieutenant general heading the military's reconstruction office, that they recruited Mr. Warrick to join their team.

George Ward, an aide to General Garner, said the reconstruction office wanted to use Mr. Warrick's knowledge because "we had few experts on Iraq on the staff."

Now that's no reason to hold back an invasion.

But top Pentagon officials blocked Mr. Warrick's appointment, and much of the project's work was shelved, State Department officials said. Mr. Warrick declined to be interviewed for this article.

Wait until they out his wife.

Administration officials say there was postwar planning at several government agencies, but much of the work at any one agency was largely disconnected from that at others.

Just what has Condi Rice been doing when she isn't giving George the Cliff Notes version of the news?

In the end, the American military and civilian officials who first entered Iraq prepared for several possible problems: numerous fires in the oil fields, a massive humanitarian crisis, widespread revenge attacks against former leaders of Mr. Hussein's government and threats from Iraq's neighbors. In fact, none of those problems occurred to any great degree.

Good things these guys don't run 911.

Officials acknowledge that the United States was not well prepared for what did occur: chiefly widespread looting and related security threats, even though the State Department study predicted them.

Those wonks in the State Department spend too much time reading evidently. What they need is a military man in charge, a man who takes decisive action only after digesting credible intelligence from stake-holders on the ground. Does anyone in the White House have Colin Powell's cell phone number?

"It was mostly ignored," said one senior defense official. "State has good ideas and a feel for the political landscape, but they're bad at implementing anything. Defense, on the other hand, is excellent at logistical stuff, but has blinders when it comes to policy. We needed to blend these two together."Calling Condi Rice, you're wanted at home.

The groups' ideas may not have been fully incorporated before the war, but they are getting a closer look now. Many of the Iraqi ministers are graduates of the working groups, and have brought that experience with them. Since last spring, new arrivals to Mr. Bremer's staff in Baghdad have received a CD-ROM version of the State Department's 13-volume work. "It's our bible coming out here," said one senior official in Baghdad.

"Buy just one CD at the regular Club price within a year. Then choose your remaining FREE selections." By the way, the ignored study prepared by the disrepected Iraqi experts cost $5M. But that's just about the average investment banker bonus of a few years ago.

Posted by Ron Ross at 01:51 PM | Comments (0) | Email this entry