Clark backers raise close to $1 million for White House bid
By James Harding in Washington
The Financial Times
Published: August 25 2003 21:27
news.ft.com
Activists trying to persuade Wesley Clark (pictured), the retired four-star general, to run for president said on Monday that by this weekend they would have $1m pledged to finance a bid for the White House.
The group behind draft-wesleyclark.com told a Washington briefing they had helped mobilise 30,000 people to write letters to Mr Clark urging him to stand.
The polling data compiled by Zogby International also showed Mr Clark was just beginning to prick the US public consciousness, making it into the top five most popular contenders for the Democratic nomination.
The opinion polls and the draftwesleyclark.com news conference showed just as convincingly that Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont once dismissed as a long-shot for the nomination, is now in the lead.
The Zogby poll put support for Mr Dean's candidacy at 16.6 per cent, clearly on an upward trend. Gen Clark got 4.9 per cent, having barely - if at all - registered in previous polls.
John Hlinko, one of the co-founders of the movement to co-opt Gen Clark into running for the Democratic nomination, said on Monday that the organisers had been "blown away" by the public response to the website they set up in April.
But Gen Clark was conspicuous by his absence on Monday. He has acknowledged that he is taking seriously the public's pleas to declare his candidacy, but has still not revealed any intention to run at this late stage in the contest for the Democratic nomination. The primary elections for the Democratic nomination begin in January.
The attention being generated by Gen Clark's would-be campaign workers - coupled with the momentum being built by the Dean campaign - is fuelling speculation that Gen Clark is being positioned as an ideal running mate for the former Vermont governor.
Mr Dean has been a vocal opponent of President George W. Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq, which has earned him recognition and support among the ranks of anxious and angry Democrats.
Gen Clark, the former Nato allied supreme commander, would therefore add much needed national security credentials to a possible Dean ticket, Democratic strategists say.
But Mr Hlinko, a Democrat, and his co-founder Josh Margulies, a Republican, were on Monday pushing Gen Clark for the presidency.
The West Point graduate and Rhodes scholar, they said, not only boasted training as an economist but also 33 years of military experience that would serve him well as a "wartime president". |
