Dream Team
Given the quagmire in Iraq and the sputtering economy at home, the race against Bush is a victory in search of a candidate. Could Hillary Clinton or Wesley Clark be the one?
By Michael Wolff
There are suddenly multiple versions of the presidential race: In the first, the presidential bus with its long-booked parcel of candidates—the first-tier Dean and Kerry; the second-tier Gephardt, Lieberman, and Edwards; the dark-horse Graham; and the entertainment-value Moseley Braun, Kucinich, and Sharpton—left the station as much as a year ago. There is no catching up to it. In four months, the primaries begin. And, arranged to get a winner sooner and to avoid undue intra-party fractiousness, the primaries come fast on each other’s heels. It may be depressing that people would actually run this long—exhausting themselves as well as our interest in them—but that is the cruel fact of modern electioneering. No political professional would tell you otherwise.
In the alternate reality, the political world is in the midst of a revivifying transformation. It began in May with the president’s over-the-top appearance in full pilot regalia onboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, when he pronounced the war over and done with, and reached a certain critical apogee with his bear-any-burden $87 billion speech last week. At the very least, the speech was a grotesque mismanagement of expectations and, quite possibly, political folly of historic magnitude. The turning point for the Bush administration was all but official—and his undoing went into high gear.
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