Loser and Clark
By Steve Tefft
Here's an example of why Senator John Kerry will almost certainly not be elected president. At a recent candidates' debate, discussing his vote to authorize war with Iraq, Kerry said the following:
"If we hadn't voted the way we voted, we would not have been able to have a chance of going to the United Nations and stopping the president, in effect, who already had the votes and who was obviously asking serious questions about whether or not the Congress was going to be there to enforce the effort to create a threat."
Answers like that make President Bush sound like Shakespeare. Kerry further embellished his scrambled-egg answer by saying his vote was meant to "threaten" war, not to actually embark on it.
Here's another one: "I've never not seen a presidential race during which people are not speculating about people who are not in the field," Kerry said during a New Hampshire visit. He was discussing possible late entries into the race. At least I think he was discussing that. My 8th-grade English teacher would develop a migraine trying to diagram what may be the first quadruple-negative sentence in American political history.
This is the mess Kerry's campaign, earlier viewed as the strongest in the pack, has become. Once seen as the most articulate candidate of the Democrat "soft" Left, he's become a babbler.
A little aside to Senator Kerry: we know you served in Vietnam. We know. We know. We know. No need to tell us again.
Kerry now finds himself shoved further to the back of the Democrat pack by someone who outguns the Senator on his only strong selling point (military service): retired Army general Wesley Clark. Clark has been tabbed the savior of the party by a media ever anxious to find someone anyone who could beat President Bush next year. Clark is handsome, well spoken, and despite his complete lack of political experience, has an impressive resume( although the importance of his 1999 NATO bombing of Kosovo has been wildly exaggerated, in my opinion). The only problem with Wesley Clark is that he doesn't appear to know who he is.
One day after a quickly arranged campaign announcement speech, Clark said he "probably would have voted for" the Congressional resolution authorizing the president to take military action against Iraq. The very next day, Clark reversed himself and stated he "never would have voted for war". Such a glaring flip-flop has only two possible geneses: a) Clark received a tongue-lashing from his campaign staff, or b) Clark really doesn't know where he stands on the most important question that's faced America in the past year. Either way, it's not the best way to make a good first impression.
There are other indications Clark is unsure of himself. He told Meet the Press that he received a phone call from someone at the White House, asking him to link the September 11th attacks to Iraq. Under questioning, Clark changed his story; "someone at the White House" became someone at a Canadian think tank. And Newsweek reports that last January, Clark told two prominent Republicans that he would have declared himself a member of the GOP, "if only (presidential advisor) Karl Rove had returned my phone calls." Is his political philosophy so flimsy and malleable that it's determined by who returns his phone calls?
The more one looks at the Clark candidacy, the more it seems to validate a dark theory put forth by columnist William Safire. He suggests Clark, with his ties to Arkansas politics, is a stalking horse for Bill and Hillary Clinton. Clark, the theory goes, was put into the race to deny a victory by Vermont's Howard Dean. Dean despises the Clinton operatives who run the party (and, not coincidentally, Clark's nascent campaign) and would clear them out quickly if he won the nomination. The darkest part of Safire's dark vision holds that Clark's candidacy is meant to attract just enough support to ensure no clear Democrat nominee, paving the way for a draft-Hillary movement at next year's nominating convention in Boston. The theory seems far-fetched, until one remembers that where the Clintons are concerned, few possibilities are too far-fetched to be dismissed out of hand.
Clark reminds me of another "savior" who parachuted late into the nation's political conscience, but then flamed out amid his own contradictions and oddness: Ross Perot. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the campaign of Wesley Clark Ross Perot with a beret reaches a similar end. |
