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.'"
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.