General Clark's Backers, Brewing Up a Draft
By Ann Gerhart
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 6, 2003; Page C01
On a typical evening at Stetson's on the U Street strip, the paper Heineken bucket is for hauling chilled beers to your table for serious swilling. This night, the bucket holds "regime change," and look there -- four quarters, five dimes, a nickel and a penny, to fund the effort to draft a certain former Army general to run for president.
It's Meetup night for the Draft Wesley Clark movement, and early Monday evening, there's a sign on the door leading upstairs: "Closed for Private Party." There, the guys who started this mini-movement in April are bustling around the two pool tables and the Dr. Who pinball machine, putting out bumper stickers and buttons, pasting up a banner. Priscilla Chism climbs the stairs, sees she's the first one there, asks hesitantly, "Do we sign in anywhere?"
"We're still waiting for our sign-in sheet to show up," says John Hlinko, one of the co-founders of DraftWesleyClark.com. "But you can have a Clark bar."
"I'm chronically early," Chism says apologetically.
Unlike the non-candidate. He's late.
Nine Democrats have been running for months, raising money and building support. None of them is good enough for those who would draft Clark. It's nothing personal; most Clarksters just think the declared candidates can't win in a campaign that will turn on national security. But how about that four-star general? Impeccable bona fides on that, they say. Led the NATO forces trying to put the Balkans back together, believes in America working with its allies, shot four times in Vietnam, Bronze Star, Purple Heart.
Some 30,000 people have sent Clark letters begging him to run, and $338,000 has been pledged to his campaign if he gets in, draft organizers say. On Monday night, Clarksters gathered at 92 Meetups across the country. "Something is going on here," says Hlinko.
As for the conventional wisdom that says Clark is too late to the party to raise funds and build support, co-founder Josh Margulies trots out the practiced answer: "The last time a Rhodes scholar from Arkansas announced against an incumbent named Bush who had just won a war in Iraq, he did okay. And he declared in October."
Clark himself, in an appearance on CNN last week, said, "I am approaching a time when I am going to make a decision," adding: "I think one of the principal rules of making decisions is, you never have to make a decision before it's time to make a decision. And it's not time to make this decision."
Vacationing with his wife in California, Clark was unavailable for comment yesterday on his unsolicited faithful. But a curious aide could not resist asking, "Those Draft Wesley Clark people -- what do they look like?"
In Washington, the 60 Clarksters who show up look like this: Mostly white, ranging from their early twenties to the two old friends from the Class of '48 at Yale Law School. Folks with their government ID badges still hanging from their necks, folks in shorts and shirts, suits and ties, a young woman with good pumps and an Ann Taylor bag, a middle-aged lady with artisan silver jewelry, a pair of neighborhood guys with their big gym bags by their sides, a young black couple who just moved into the District from Maryland.
They sound like this: earnest, well informed, worried about the direction of the country, not kooky. Oh, there are the blowhards, and you can hear their voices droning on above the general murmuring of regular people having beers after work. The blowhards say things like "another interesting statistic in the Franklin Pierce College poll" and "based on my analyses" and "back when John Anderson ran in '80." The other Clarksters nod politely and never get a word in edgewise. That's just Washington. Live here, and you deal with it.
Then Hlinko climbs up on a chair, clinks a pen against his Corona bottle and promises that the evening will be "an extravaganza felt by all. It will be fun, wacky, wild and exciting." He promises a toast to Wesley at 8:04 p.m. -- "that's 20:04 in military time, 2004, get it?" -- and an auction of dinner for two, which consists of MREs, a Draft Wesley mug and a dessert of Clark bars. "Do you know how hard it is to find Clark bars?" muses Hlinko. "My cousin spent the entire day online, and he finally found a distributor in Pittsburgh." Apparently, they speculate, Clark bars have been eclipsed by Butterfingers. This may be because they taste like "chocolate-covered barley," says Hlinko.
In addition to these raucous political festivities, the Clarksters break into four groups and brainstorm on juicing up the Web site, getting media attention, getting all the volunteers something to do and fundraising creatively. There is no speech touting Clark's position on the issues, to the disappointment of a pair of Howard Dean supporters, who wonder how to distinguish him from Clark. "We're trying to figure out what he stands for," Rick Parker says as his wife nods. Told that there are no issues, because there is no candidate, they look bewildered.
"I love Howard" Dean, says Pam Helton, 43, a professional clarinetist from Laurel, "and then it hit me like a brick wall: The man is totally unelectable. But then I heard the general on 'Diane Rehm,' and that was it. The man is absolutely it."
DraftWesleyClark.com was born three months ago in Otello, an Italian restaurant in Dupont Circle. Hlinko, 36, a veteran of several campaigns, was eating lunch with David Wallace, 37, a media relations manager. They were talking politics and bemoaning the lack of a galvanizing Democratic candidate. They talked about Clark, who at the time was all over CNN, commenting on the Iraq war. He seemed perfect: statesmanlike, articulate, smart. In his 34 years in the military, Clark had always dutifully answered the call to serve. Perhaps he would answer theirs.
Next day, they bought the domain name. They sent out feelers through Meetup, a cyber meeting ground intended to connect people who wanted to talk about cocker spaniels and Dungeons & Dragons. Dean's campaign already had begun to exploit the Internet's potential to build a new kind of grass-roots operation, and the Clarksters ran with it. They have never had a conversation with Clark about it. "It would seem like collusion," says Hlinko.
Maybe Clark will get in. Maybe he won't. "Please declare already," Hlinko says Monday, flecks of Clark bar on his lip. "I gotta get my life back." |
