The 11th Candidate?
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 18, 2003; 8:29 AM
You'd think reporters would have plenty to do, trying to juggle Hurricane Wesley, the Dean surge, Chris Lehane's bailout, the on-and-off California recall and a real-life hurricane.
But as they spin a hundred different scenarios and bring in the porch furniture, some journalists haven't abandoned hope for Hillary.
It isn't enough, apparently, that General Clark has started his march to the White House, that Howard Stern has endorsed Arnold, or that a Category 2 hurricane is threatening to obliterate life as we know it on the East Coast (at least according to the breathless news reports). Those stories are so Wednesday. The new parlor game is whether we can entice the former first lady into the '04 fray, regardless of how many times she insists she will keep serving the people of New York.
By the way, did you catch Clark's Little Rock announcement speech yesterday? (CNN, where he was a military pundit, aired the whole thing, while Fox and MSNBC broke away after the opening minutes). It was -- how can I say this politely -- devoid of content. An utter lack of specifics. The blankest of blank slates.
You'd think a guy who is a) little known to the country, b) just discovered he's a Democrat and c) getting in late would want to lay out some proposals about where he would lead America. But that was not in the war plan.
What about the morning show interviews? On foreign policy: "I think we need to look at the regional framework," he told the "Early Show." On why he's running: "This is a really important time in American history," he told "Today."
Maybe Clark will flesh out his positions, but he's got to understand that running for president isn't like doing a series of five-minute segments on CNN. Every candidate has to answer the "where's the beef?" question, and Clark doesn't have the luxury of time.
Back to Clark in a moment, but first to the Hillary hullabaloo, kicked off by this New York Sun piece:
"President Clinton stoked speculation that his wife, Senator Clinton, will run for president in 2004. Asked by his former chief of staff, Leon Panetta, whether there was 'a chance' that Mrs. Clinton would run for president next year, Mr. Clinton left the door open.
" 'That's really a decision for her to make,' he said at a public forum in Monterey, Calif. The former president also said he believed many New Yorkers would have no objection to her breaking her pledge to serve a full six years in the Senate. 'I was impressed at the state fair in New York, which is in Republican country in upstate New York, at how many New Yorkers came up and said they would release her from her commitment if she wanted to do it,' Mr. Clinton said. 'But she said . . . she just doesn't understand how to walk away from that. So I just have to take her for where she is right now.'"
Sounds like he's leaving the door wayyy open! Is this part of a carefully calculated strategy? Or is Bill just sort of freelancing in his inimitable fashion?
Fox tried (and failed) to drag Hillary in through a different door:
"While sources told Fox News earlier that New York Sen. Hillary Clinton will serve as Clark's campaign co-chairman while numerous other Arkansas-based supporters of her husband, former President Bill Clinton, were also lending a hand in the campaign, the senator's office told Fox News late in the day that she had not agreed to serve on the campaign. Clark aides later said they had miscommunicated with Clinton's office and no determination had been made about her participation."
Everyone's got a take on Clark, starting with the Los Angeles Times:
"Though Clark's 12-minute speech outside a Boys and Girls Club in Little Rock offered few specifics, the former NATO supreme commander began clarifying his views on a wide range of issues during a barrage of media interviews.
"He said he supported legalized abortion and civil unions for homosexuals (though not gay marriage) and would roll back only the provisions of President Bush's 2001 and 2003 tax cuts that benefit the affluent. . . .
"Clark's opposition to the war in Iraq -- which he reaffirmed in interviews today -- should prove appealing to the Democratic on the left. On most issues, though, those around Clark expect him to take relatively centrist positions similar to Clinton."
USA Today says Clark has been plotting all along:
"While playing coy for months, Clark actually has run what amounts to a stealth campaign to go forward, which means he is not as far behind in the nuts-and-bolts of running as someone who simply walked in from the street. A draft-Clark effort on the Internet has been going on for months and has reportedly come up with more than $1 million in donation pledges. Clark has assembled a team of advisers that includes many veterans from the last three Democratic presidential campaigns run by Bill Clinton and Al Gore."
The New York Times envisions a general with no divisions:
"Gen. Wesley K. Clark will be seriously handicapped in his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination because of his late start, many political strategists in both parties and students of elections said today.
" 'The problem you have getting in this late is you have no field troops, you have no ground operation,' said Bill Dal Col, who ran Steve Forbes's campaign for the Republican nomination in 1996 and 2000. 'Without the troops, it doesn't matter how good your logistics and planning are.' "
The sniper fire has begun, reports the Philadelphia Inquirer:
"Among Democratic skeptics, there is a widespread suspicion that Clark's chief mission - supposedly encouraged by Clinton and backstage party leaders -- is to block the momentum of Dean, the former Vermont governor who has ridden his antiwar stance into the top tier but who is viewed by skeptics as a landslide loser against Bush.
"Indeed, some Democrats said yesterday that Clark diminishes Dean, that an ex-Pentagon war planner who opposes Bush on Iraq trumps an ex-governor with no track record on national security. . . .
"But his rivals are looking for flaws. Kerry's campaign manager, Jim Jordan, noted Tuesday that Clark had no domestic policy experience. Clark sought to defend himself yesterday, telling a TV interviewer that he once worked in the White House budget office, but, according to his resume, that was in 1975, when he was a White House fellow."
Now that's a stretch.
The Note has plenty to say on the Clark phenomenon:
"We know that the media interest in his candidacy proves the political press is bored with the field as is.
"We know that the Democratic elite interest in his candidacy proves that many of them -- including members of Congress -- are apparently underwhelmed by the existing nine candidates and are willing to support someone about whom they know shockingly little. . . .
"We know that those of you who failed to realize that there was a lot of Clinton-Gore talent out there who hadn't signed on with any of the existing horses weren't really paying attention.
"If you are John Kerry, Dick Gephardt, Joe Lieberman, John Edwards, Bob Graham, or (even) Howard Dean, you have to ask yourself as you watch these officeholders, operatives, and fundraisers sign up with Clark (and, believe us, there are more eye-catching names coming), what the heck is wrong with me?
"Am I too weak? Do I have too much the stench of the loser? Why are they signing up with someone they don't even know, when they could have me, me, me?"
Hotline has a great stat on how the CBS, NBC and ABC evening news covered Tuesday's Edwards announcement versus the Clark leak:
"Total combined Clark time on the three major broadcast news shows: 5:45. Total Edwards time: 2:10."
In Slate, David Greenberg isn't exactly saluting Clark's candidacy:
"Slate's Michael Kinsley once described the early Al Gore as an old person's idea of a young person. Similarly, you might say that Gen. Wesley Clark is a peacenik's idea of a wartime candidate. It's easy to suspect that the groundswell of enthusiasm for his Democratic presidential campaign springs from the belief that he alone can risk a bold antiwar stand because his military stars would inoculate him from being Dukakis-ized.
"But to dismiss Clark's candidacy as a liberal delusion is to misread the appeal of generals as presidential candidates. The 10 generals (six of them notable) who have become president have typically won support by styling themselves not as candidates of war but as candidates of peace. . . .
"Wesley Clark, as pundits have noted, faces many obstacles if he wants to be president, including the lack of a campaign team and a late start in fundraising. But he has mastered the two historical requirements: He doesn't act as if he needs the job, and he doesn't act as if he wants war."
A Washington Post editorial questions whether Clark is a good party man:
"Asked whether he had voted for Republicans along the way, Mr. Clark said, 'I don't even remember.' Had he voted for a Republican for president? 'I imagine that I voted for Reagan at one time or another,' he said. It will be interesting to see how that plays with Democratic Party activists."
Do we really believe he doesn't remember?
"On a number of key issues, he sounds like a work in progress. On Social Security, for example: 'I'm not prepared at this point to address a specific proposal' but 'I'm not particularly in favor of raising the retirement age.' "
Clark is the epitome of a bad candidate, declares National Review's David Frum:
"Wesley Clark for president of the United States is all wrong. Democrats think they can inoculate themselves from the charge of being weak on national security by hiring a general to express their weakness for them. . . .
"If any one figure sums up the illusions and errors of the 1990s, it is Clark. Clark was the general who led the U.S. into a purely humanitarian war in Kosovo {ndash} at exactly the moment that the Clinton administration was disregarding the gathering threat to the United States from Middle Eastern terrorism. Clark has criticized the supposed and alleged errors of U.S. planning in Iraq {ndash} notwithstanding that his campaign in Kosovo was based on an unending series of errors, above all his claim that his air campaigns could destroy Serbian military capabilities without harming the Serbian civilian population.
"Beyond that, though, Clark epitomizes the great Democratic miscalculation of 2004. The miscalculation is that they can win the election by running against President Bush on national security {ndash} and that their anti-security agenda will be enhanced by finding a man in striped pants to promote it."
Salon's Joe Conason predicts a right-wing pincer movement:
"The radio gabbers and the Internet nutcases will smear Clark because they and their master Karl Rove fear him. It will be interesting to see how much of this the Republicans can perpetrate before their tactics start to backfire. But their real problem is that they don't know any other way to win an election -- and their sinking numbers could soon give rise to panic. The more they attack Clark now, the more obvious it will become that he is the nominee of their nightmares."
This Dick Grasso debacle has been a classic media morality play, with the press hammering the story until the NYSE chief's inevitable resignation yesterday. The greed factor -- the spectacle of a man taking $140 million, approved by a board stocked with the corporate chieftains he's supposed to be regulating -- proved to be too much.
"The forced resignation of New York Stock Exchange Chairman Dick Grasso could usher in a new age for the world's largest stock market," says the Wall Street Journal.
"Mr. Grasso, 57 years old, was pressured to step down yesterday after a public outcry over a $139.5 million retirement-pay package that he had built up over 36 years at the NYSE. . . .
"The resignation, after an emergency NYSE board meeting yesterday, followed calls for Mr. Grasso to resign in recent days by a growing chorus of Big Board directors, floor traders, institutional investors and politicians. Critics were especially furious over his pay package because the markets are just now recovering from an unprecedented period of corporate scandal that included shockingly high compensation for some executives."
David Callaway of CBS MarketWatch suggests more heads should roll:
"The clubby world of Wall Street, under fire for more than two years now for its role in fleecing the average American investor during the bull market of the late 1990s, has been cut open and laid out for all to see by the revelation of Grasso's $140 million pay package.
"When the institution that symbolizes the integrity of the U.S. financial markets is exposed as a conflicted, chaotic, cash machine for its leader, the only way to even begin to restore credibility is to completely clean house at the board level."
The New Republic applauds some good 'ol Senate obstruction:
"It's a low point in Senate history when the only way for the minority party to get the president's attention -- much less cooperation -- is by stonewalling his nominees. John Edwards joined Hillary Rodham Clinton and Joe Lieberman in their promise to stymie Bush's nominee to run the EPA, Utah Governor Mike Leavitt. (Unlike a filibuster, blocks on executive-branch nominees take just one senator). All three senators have said they would refuse to allow Leavitt's nomination to reach the Senate floor until the White House answered a series of questions -- Clinton and Lieberman want a straight answer on whether the administration misled the public on post-9/11 pollution levels in lower Manhattan, and Edwards wants a response to his call for an analysis of the health effects of Bush's Clean Air Act (CAA) New Source Review -- which, among other things, allows energy producers to renovate old facilities without having to comply with Clean Air Act standards. All three senators should be commended for their stands, but Edwards deserves particular praise."
Somehow we don't think the magazine would have been as excited over GOP senators blocking Clinton appointees.
Tackling the recalled California recall in American Prospect, Sean Wilentz tries to hang the Supremes with their own judicial rope:
"The court's decision creates some powerful ironies for the GOP, as well as for its supporters who have argued that Bush v. Gore was correctly decided. During the Florida debacle, the U.S. Supreme Court, led by Justice Antonin Scalia, justified its halting of the vote count and its virtual declaration of George W. Bush's victory on the basis of the rights of voters and equal protection under the law. But now, on the basis of those exact same principles, the 9th Circuit has ruled that the California recall vote must be delayed.
"Enraged Republicans, with their radio talk-show minions out in front, are now in the position of opposing, at least in theory, the basis on which the Supreme Court handed the presidency to Bush.
"But the ironies, and their importance, run deeper than that. If the Supreme Court decides to accept an appeal and then voids the 9th Circuit's stay, it will become more obvious than ever that, for a majority of the justices, the naked exercise of power takes precedence over coherent constitutional principles. If the high court decides not to hear the case, or upholds the 9th Circuit's stay, it will strongly suggest that the Court has become embarrassed by Bush v. Gore and wants to avoid revisiting the relevant issues less than three years later -- and with a new presidential election looming. Either way, the political outcome will almost certainly favor the Democrats."
Finally, the Smoking Gun finds a journalist actually invading J.Lo's (ex?) flame's privacy:
"A People magazine correspondent was arrested Sunday and charged with criminal trespass after sheriff's deputies found his car stuck in the mud on a private road near actor Ben Affleck's 83-acre Georgia estate. The reporter, Don Sider, was booked briefly into the Liberty County jail and hit with a misdemeanor count." |
