Ryan Lizza - TNR
THE FINAL COUNTDOWN: Clark's final moments on the campaign trail were a little sad. Our buses pass Graceland, make a right, and stop a mile down the road at Lanier Middle School, a polling place where a small group of sign-waving Clark fans greet the general and his wife. When he gets off the bus, a local TV reporter asks if Tennessee will be the decisive state. He smiles and says, "It might be."
Voters straggle into Lanier about one every few minutes. Clark catches them one after another in the parking lot as they approach, and over and over again he cheerfully greets them. "Hi, I'm Wes Clark," he says, "I'm running for president and I'd sure like to have you vote for me." He shows some voters a piece of paper. "This is my name as it will be on the ballot," he tells them proudly. "You vote for me, I'll take care of people in this country. I will." Clark betrays no hints of bitterness at the depths to which his candidacy has fallen since he jumped into the campaign last September as the leader in the national the polls and was proclaimed by Newsweek to be the new front-runner. "This is the most fun part of it," he says when asked whether he likes shaking hands with strangers in the middle of nowhere. "I love talking to people. It's just a thrill." As Clark finishes asking for the last votes of his campaign, the networks call Virginia, which he loses by 43 points.
There are a few reasons the Clark campaign failed. Clark started the race not as a person, but as a concept cooked up in Washington by Democrats terrified at the prospect of nominating Howard Dean. He was a resumé candidate who was theoretically ideal--a four-star general, a southerner, antiwar, blah, blah, blah--but less than awe-inspiring on the stump. His successes on the battlefield had no correlation to how he would perform in a campaign. "This was Michael Jordan playing baseball," says Democratic strategist Kenny Baer.
He entered the race when Kerry was collapsing and Dean was peaking. "This was set up as an anti-Dean campaign," says one person close to the campaign a few minutes before Clark takes the stage at the Memphis Marriott. "There was a feverish mentality that he had to be against the war. He was the guy who the establishment chose if the war was still important and you needed someone who could beat Bush. The whole rationale for his candidacy was to be the anti-Dean." Once Kerry came back the entire point of Clark's candidacy disappeared. "What the hell were we going to do?" asks Clark spokesman Matt Bennett, speaking of their situation after the Dean implosion and Kerry comeback.
According to campaign officials, Bennett and a few other senior staffers came to truly believe in Clark, but the campaign was also partly a weird bargain between a cadre of former Clinton staffers eager to find an easy way back into the White House and a retired general with a decent-sized ego who saw a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be president. "They saw this as their only path back to the White House," says a Clark aide speaking of some of the Clintonites. And it wasn't just the ex-Clinton officials that some staffers criticize as mercenaries. "If you asked [campaign manager] Paul Johnson why should Wesley Clark be president," says an aide, "he couldn't tell you." The campaign also never resolved the tension between its early draft movement and the professional consultants who came on board. In the final days of the campaign there was also an obvious rupture between Clark's family and his senior advisers. But the biggest problem was that with Dean sidelined from the race, the campaign never found a compelling explanation for why Clark should be president.
Clark's departure was assumed to be a fait accompli by most reporters traveling with him throughout the day, but his momentary second-place standing in Tennessee as precinct reports roll in convinces some in Clark's inner circle that he might yet stay in the race. Some reporters grimly joke that if he doesn't drop out it will mess up the end-of-the-Clark-campaign stories they came to Tennessee to write.
After Clark delivers a cryptic speech that fails to clarify his future--"Our goal remains the same," he tells a small crowd, "to change the direction of our country and bring a higher standard of leadership to the White House"--reporters are desperate to know how the story ends. Frustrated by the disappearance of the entire Clark staff, at about 9:30 p.m., more than a dozen reporters on deadline or about to go on the air rush upstairs to suite 1803 (the "Danny Thomas" suite) to demand some information from Clark's press aides. One semi-frightened staffer opens the door and tells the motley crew of cameramen and reporters that she has no information for us. She then sneaks out of the suite through another door. Suddenly, a bald man in a black shirt opens a door across the hall. He turns out to be a reporter, too. He says he overheard some Clark aides in the hallway whispering that the decision has already been made for Clark to exit. Not quite solid enough information, the pack agrees. Finally, the campaign schedules a press conference to make the announcement, and we all wait anxiously in a filing center for it to begin. But we won't be the first to know. A TV tuned to CNN flashes the news: The Associated Press is reporting that Wesley Clark has abandoned his campaign for president. Matt Bennett appears and delivers a formal statement. The cameras circle around him. "It's a very simple statement," he says. "General Clark has decided to leave the race."
posted 08:56 a.m.
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