Lost in the pointless furor over Dean and his flag flub was one of the only new positions to emerge from the "Rock the Vote" debate: Wesley Clark came out firmly against the embargo of Cuba. "The best example of political courage I've seen in the campaign thus far," raves the Carpetbagger Report.
Clark seems to answer questions about his positions in one of three ways:
1) On the biggest issues, such as the Iraq resolution, he often fails to compress his appreciation of their complexity into a consistent sound bite and hence appears indecisive at best and disingenuous at worst. More a product of his military training which required him to prepare arguments for various opposing options than a reflection of opportunism, I expect him to grow out of it as he embraces more fully the realization that he's, for the time being at least, more of a politician than a strategist. Politics, of course, is frequently more about tactics than strategy, and Clark is much more the strategist than the tactician.
2) Clark also seems to waffle a bit on issues like gays in the military, where he has strongly held personal convictions, but where his policies have yet to be sharply defined. He was at his best last night when he said, simply and sincerely:
One of my Army friends came to me. He said, 'Sir, I've got a little bit of trouble with your position on gays in the military.' I said, 'Well, let me explain it to you this way. If you had a son or daughter who was gay, would you love them?' And he said, 'Well, yes.' I said, 'Would you want them to have the same rights and the same opportunities in life as everybody else?' And he looked at me and he said, 'Now I understand why you're saying what you're saying.'But this was his second pass at the topic. The first time around he appeared to be seeking a technically correct answer that probably wasn't required of the question:We need to do a lot better job in communicating in this society and crossing barriers and setting aside a lot of old mythologies. And as president of the United States, I'm going to take the lead in doing that.
COOPER: Are you saying 'Don't ask, don't tell' works?He would have done himself much more good if he had simply explained the difference between our policy of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," and the British policy of "Don't Ask, Don't Misbehave." The issue as I'm sure Clark understands is that under one policy, once a gay is out, he's gone, while under the other, her sexual preferences are explicitly off-limits in any evaluation of her suitability for the job. Clark affirming that military, not civilian, leadership should be responsible to review a policy that doesn't work well for all to whom it applies may make sense, but it's a wonkish answer to an emotional question.CLARK: I don't think it works everywhere. I've seen it work in some units, but I get a lot of reports where it doesn't work. And I think it depends on the service, it depends on the unit. I think it depends, to some extent, on the commander.
And so, I think the policy, as I've said, the policy needs to be reviewed because there are so many indications that it's not working. I think you start a review with the presumption that it isn't. And let the armed forces leadership go back through it and give us a better policy so that every American who desires to serve can.
3) Then there are the questions that Clark answers so succinctly and affirmatively that if you blink, you miss them. You are far more likely to hear him give such answers in the context of a town hall meeting than the debates, but hopefully that is changing. When a woman in New Hampshire asked him if he would deprive someone who was critically ill access to medical marijuana, he replied, "No" immediately and without unnecessary elaboration on policy. It was the answer she wanted to hear, and it also seemed to spring from Clark's core beliefs. Similarly when asked if he would support an amendment prohibiting same-sex marriage, he quickly responded, "I would not." No sophistic distinctions between civil unions and marriage were required and none were given. Coming from a guy's guy who probably watched comrades who were stoned get shot to death in 'Nam, such quick, positive positions are impressive.
It was the third kind of answer that Clark gave on the Cuban embargo, thus winning the endorsement of highly regarded blogger, The Carpetbagger Report.:
CLARK: The way we won the Cold War was not by isolating Eastern Europe, but by engaging it. We won the Cold War not just because we had great armed forces, but because we had the AFL-CIO, we had Citibank, and we had a Polish pope. And we reached out to Eastern Europe, and we connected with humanity.Carpetbagger tells us,CLARK: That's why I'm against embargoes. They don't work.
(APPLAUSE)
When you isolate a country, you strengthen the dictators in it. If you want to change the dictators, you've got to open it up so ordinary people in those countries can see what they're missing in the rest of the world, and gain strength and ideas from everybody else. And they'll take control of their future.
We're not going to reward Fidel Castro, but we are going to make sure that Cubans have a democracy and they have the same rights as everybody else on this planet.
I've been prepared to support any candidate who had the courage to admit the embargo hasn't worked, but in my lifetime, no serious candidates have stepped up. . . So I've waited, wondering if I'll ever see a presidential candidate brave enough to acknowledge reality, risk the wrath of Cuban-Americans in South Florida, and announce support for ending the Cuba embargo.. . . Last night, I'm pleased to report, I found a candidate with the courage to state the obvious. Wesley Clark announced that he opposes the U.S. embargo of Cuba. . . I genuinely couldn't believe my ears. I liked Clark before, but now I'm convinced. He's my guy.
Clark is not exactly new to Latin-American affairs. Before becoming Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, Clark was Commander in Chief of the United States Southern Command, Panama, where he was responsible for the direction of U.S. military activities in Latin America and the Caribbean. In other words, he knows of what he speaks.Truth be told, Clark has opposed the embargo for a while. In July 2002, long before he was even thinking about running for president, Clark said, "The way to deal with Castro is to send Cuba American tourists, American goods and American farm products. There could be no better way to deal with this last vestigial form of Communism than to turn American business and American agriculture loose on them."
. . . The fact that he's standing by his previous statements and is willing to end a foreign policy that clearly does not work, represents the best example of political courage I've seen in the campaign thus far.