Democrats line up Gen Wesley Clark as their best hope of winning against Bush
By Julian Coman in Washington
(Filed: 24/08/2003)
telegraph.co.uk
In this era of the War on Terrorism, senior Democrats have decided that the best - possibly the only - way to beat George W Bush in the 2004 presidential elections is to put up a soldier against him.
A retired general, Wesley Clark, the supreme commander of Nato during its successful campaign in Kosovo, is widely expected to announce his candidacy for the White House in the next few days, backed by powerful members of the United States Congress.
In an open field, where none of the nine current Democrat candidates has established a clear lead, a late entry by Gen Clark would have an electrifying effect. The Vietnam veteran has never stood for elected office. Since his retirement, however, he has become a familiar face on CNN television, frequently criticising President Bush's policies on Iraq.
He is believed to have stood aside from summer campaigning, waiting to see if anyone emerged as an obvious winner of the party's nomination. Now, according to Donna Brazile, a top Democratic strategist and the campaign manager for Al Gore during the 2000 presidential elections, Gen Clark "will announce his plans to run for president by the end of the month".
The man who would be the first general to become president since Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 has little political experience, but many Democrats believe that in an election likely to be dominated by national security and terrorism, a four-star military man would be uniquely equipped to attack President Bush's foreign policy.
For his part, Gen Clark already sounds like a man in the middle of a campaign. Challenged about his political experience in a recent interview, he put up a spirited defence. "My political experience is in dealing with governments. I dealt with 19 governments in Nato. I have held high positions of authority and dealt extensively at political and diplomatic levels with major issues," he said.
In the same interview, he proved he could also talk about domestic concerns, roundly criticising President Bush's recent tax cuts and calling for fresh investment in public education. This month's Esquire magazine devotes nine pages to the former Rhodes Scholar and West Point graduate, emphasising that the 58-year-old would at least be a match for President Bush in terms of fitness. Like the President, Gen Clark exercises vigorously every day.
Behind the scenes in Washington, too, a discreet groundswell of support is building for an eleventh-hour entry. A campaign network is already in place across the United States, while a Draft Clark campaign has raised $550,000 (£350,000) and collected 30,000 signatures in anticipation of a declaration.
"In 2000, Gore was getting close to 40 per cent support at this stage," said John Hlinko, who runs the Washington branch of the Draft Clark campaign. "In this race, the frontrunners are struggling to get 20 per cent. Wesley Clark would stand every chance of getting the nomination."
Mainstream Democrats believe that Howard Dean, the current frontrunner in a field of nine Democrat candidates, is too liberal to win over the American heartlands in the first election since the September 11 attacks. The other candidates have failed to make an impact after a summer on the stump.
In Congress, the two most senior Democrats, the House of Representatives' minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, and the Senate's minority leader, Tom Daschle, have both privately supported Clark.
"Howard Dean can beat up Bush on Iraq and do well among ordinary Democrats," said one Democrat official, "But he can be dismissed as a weak-kneed liberal. Wesley Clark can say the same things, but there isn't the same comeback. He would be a strong candidate and a credible opponent for Bush on national security."
So far, the Republicans claim not to be flustered by the prospect of a Clark campaign. A senior official at the Republican National Committee said: "It's interesting that a man who is not even a registered Democrat is being drafted by voters of a Democratic Party which already has nine candidates, including five sitting senators and a former governor. What does that say about the desperation of the Democrats, even at this early stage?"
A fierce critic of White House policy on Iraq, he recently said: "The case [for war] was, to put it mildly, weak. The Iraqi threat to the US was not significant. The threat was not imminent, in so far as any evidence has established."
Gen Clark has already given up his CNN role and last week said that Democrats, "have an enormous hunger for leadership. I think the Draft Clark movement is evidence that this hunger is still out there, despite the number of candidates in the race".
If he does run, Clark supporters will point to at least one happy omen. His campaign headquarters will be based in his home town, one familiar with rises to political stardom. Gen Clark comes from Little Rock, Arkansas. |
