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.
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."Joe Lieberman: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."
. . .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.
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."