Brief Lives - Force Multiplier - Wesley Clark is not Haig and not Eisenhower. And some Democrats are hoping he won't be Cuomo
by Joshua Green
The Atlantic Monthly | October 2003
In many presidential campaigns a moment arrives when disappointment with the declared candidates sets in, and a dream candidate emerges—one who seems to personify all that is missing from the field. Colin Powell was once such a figure for the Republicans, and Mario Cuomo for the Democrats. Often a candidate's very unavailability is a large part of his appeal. The paradox is that the hold on the imagination that attractive outsiders have from afar often disappears when they enter the race, and suffer the same scrutiny and attack as any other candidate. Perhaps for this reason few of them actually declare themselves. Howard Dean, who started out as this kind of outsider, still enjoys something like this hold, even though he declared early. The person playing the role of Hamlet candidate is Wesley Clark—a retired four-star general, a former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, a Rhodes scholar, a war hero, and, in every meaningful way save actual registration, a Democrat.
Over the past year Clark traveled the country delivering speeches notable for their strident criticism of the Bush Administration's prosecution of the war on terrorism and, recently, its handling of the deteriorating situation in Iraq. At the same time, he encouraged speculation that he would seek the Democratic nomination; as this piece went to press he signaled that he was on the verge of making a decision. Many Democrats believe that Clark could be a Promethean figure for a party deemed profoundly insufficient on the very subjects—national security and military issues—likely to dominate the 2004 campaign. "Clark has the ability to single-handedly reverse three decades of weakness by the Democratic Party in the area of national security," Timothy Bergreen, the founder of the think tank Democrats for National Security, recently told me.
Although the odds seem long that he will be the first general to become the Democratic presidential nominee since Winfield Scott Hancock, in 1880, Clark is an obvious choice for Vice President. In fact, one reason that many Democrats (including the head of the Democratic National Committee, Terry McAuliffe) want him to get in the race is their hope that some of his military credibility will rub off on the party.
Like earlier outsiders (and like Howard Dean), Clark has a kind of bracing forthrightness guaranteed to attract notice in national politics. When I first went to see him, in his Washington office last December, Clark was working as a military analyst for CNN and had just begun to emerge as a political figure. Wiry and self-assured, with neat gray hair, he has the bearing of one accustomed to being in charge. Behind a lectern or on television this bearing is less fierce. But in person he is often so intense it seems that anyone who leaned forward and touched him might get an electric shock.
Clark's military career culminated when he led the nineteen-member NATO coalition that drove Slobodan Milosevic out of Kosovo in 1999. That experience, Clark told me, instilled in him an unshakable belief in the power of working through alliances, and it is the foundation for his criticism of the Bush Administration's foreign policy.
As Clark argued in Waging Modern War, his 2001 memoir of the Kosovo campaign, NATO's action against Milosevic provided a blueprint for how future wars should be fought. At the time of the action many nations, the United States prominent among them, had doubts about a military campaign. By waging war through NATO, Clark gained the assurance that the governments of all nineteen member nations had a political stake in the campaign and thus a commitment to victory. Working with NATO required extraordinary diplomatic efforts; every nation theoretically had to approve a strike on any target. Nevertheless, Clark concluded that having allied support for America's use of force sent a powerful message to the enemy and imparted crucial political backing for the military campaign—benefits that far outweighed any tactical restrictions.
Clark believes that working with allies is more than a diplomatic necessity —it makes a military power stronger; he calls an alliance a "force multiplier." Even though other candidates take similar positions, Clark can explain his in commonsense terms that elude them, and with the authority of someone who won a war. He is likely to find an increasingly receptive audience if the news from Iraq gets worse.
"I would have first aligned the United Nations and NATO against al-Qaeda," he told me in December. "Then, when it comes time to work against Iraq or Iran or North Korea, you've got a strong, committed group of allies." The order of threat, he believed, was al-Qaeda, North Korea, and Iran—and then Iraq. Clark did not oppose intervening in Iraq; he simply thought the Bush Administration's military decision was premature, and reckless in its unilateralism.
As we spoke, his cell phone rang. "We're off to CNN," he announced. What followed was typical of Clark's life as not-quite-candidate. He found himself the victim of a friendly ambush by the host of Inside Politics, Judy Woodruff: "General Clark, it's known that you've been meeting privately, quietly, with big Democratic donors ... You've been talking to reporters in Iowa, the first caucus state. Just for the sake of credibility, isn't it a good idea now for you to say openly that you are thinking about whether to run for President?" Clark's answer—one he frequently repeated afterward—showed that he had already mastered the noncommittal political response: "Judy, I'm not a candidate. I haven't declared a party. I haven't taken political money." Off camera, Clark feigned dismay at the question. Yet in the same breath he jokingly complained to Woodruff that her husband, Al Hunt, had neglected to include his name in a Wall Street Journal column that day listing the Democratic front-runners.
When we returned from CNN, an aide stood waiting beside a rental car to ferry us to another appointment. Clark, who still runs his life as though he were conducting a military campaign, grabbed the keys, nodded for the aide and me to climb in, and shot out into rush-hour traffic. The aide took a halfhearted stab at briefing his boss while Clark—slouched low, cell phone cradled to ear—tore across Independence Avenue in view of the White House, weaving in and out of lanes. As we approached the Old Executive Office Building, Clark, seeing nowhere to park, glanced at his watch and then at me. "Listen, I'm late," he said. "Do you have plans?" I shook my head. Without another word he pulled over, tossed me the keys, and disappeared into the building, his aide scrambling to keep up. I found a parking space. A few hours later Clark called to get the keys.
ver the nine months I observed him, part of Clark's strategy as shadow candidate was to make great drama of asserting his nonpartisanship while simultaneously issuing winking, present-tense-only denials of his candidacy. He had, after all, given lectures for the better part of two years, put forth a foreign policy, cobbled together a center-left domestic policy, and established a not-for-profit organization with a name—Leadership for America—that smacks of presidential ambition.
Clark seemed to feed on the positive attention. One reason I believed him to be serious about formalizing his candidacy was his reaction to critics who called him a one-dimensional candidate, fluent only in the particulars of military and national-security affairs. Clark responded to this—one of the few criticisms he received—by developing positions on a host of domestic issues, positions that deepened and broadened with each passing month. He favors rolling back the Bush tax cuts. He describes himself as pro-choice. On the issue of gays in the military he says that "Don't ask, don't tell" isn't working, and favors a more relaxed approach—though he says he would leave the decision on how to liberalize policy to military leaders themselves.
In order to speak credibly about domestic affairs, he has borrowed a tactic frequently employed by businessmen and governors who seek high office: he invokes his experience of command—in his case military, where they tout their leadership of a company or a state ("In Vermont, we ..."). Earlier this year, when Clark joined other candidates in criticizing the Bush tax cuts, he went a step further, pointing out that the lack of responsibility Bush displayed in enacting the cuts would never be tolerated in the U.S. Army. Clark has used the Army as an analogue, often quite persuasively, to address many of the issues most important to Democrats. He supports affirmative action, noting that the military pioneered racial integration. He cites improvements that he helped implement in the Army's education, health care, and housing as models for what is needed in civilian society. He has even used his military experience to establish his environmental bona fides: last April, during a Leadership for America conference at Georgetown University, I witnessed the unlikely spectacle of a former NATO commander speaking movingly of the pride he took in receiving plaudits from the Audubon Society for his Army base's stewardship of the desert tortoise and the red-cockaded woodpecker.
Clark's greatest accomplishment over the past year has been to bring the candor and level-headedness with which he speaks about military affairs to the full spectrum of political issues. When I last met with him, in late July, he articulated a shrewd analysis of the two parties—one that happened to cast him as the solution to the Democrats' problems. Republicans, he said, would naturally focus on their favored issue of national security, but for obvious reasons would avoid discussing the economy. Democrats would hammer away at the economy, but lacked the credibility to effectively challenge the Republicans on national security. "Today," Clark said, "Americans understand that national security is personal security, and will only elect a leader they're confident can provide it." Though he didn't say so, he appeared to be of the mind that no one in the Democratic field fit that bill.
lark exhibits another characteristic common to white-knight outsiders: difficulty making up his mind about whether to run. For all Clark's appeal, the recent record of generals who have run for office is not encouraging. "The most difficult part of the transition from military to public life is going from a system where you basically give and receive orders to one where you're constantly asking—asking for money, votes, and support," says the Democratic senator Jack Reed, of Rhode Island, a West Point graduate and a former Army captain. This difficulty was exemplified by General Alexander Haig, a former NATO commander himself, who sought the Republican nomination in 1988. Early one morning Haig stationed himself outside a factory in New Hampshire to shake hands with arriving workers. When one rebuffed his advance, Haig, stung by the indignity, turned to the assembled media and snapped, "Every once in a while you meet an asshole." Soon afterward he withdrew from the race.
Clark is no Al Haig, but during our time together I began to suspect that he might have difficulty switching from general to candidate. When discussing whether he would run, he spoke often of "seeing if people want me"; he seemed to have in mind the candidacy of another former general and NATO commander, Dwight Eisenhower, whom the Republicans drafted in 1951. Although Clark has fans in the Democratic establishment, he has nothing like Eisenhower's stature in his party, and there is no chance that a similar draft movement will arise from the Democratic leadership. His hope that there might be one hints at a certain lack of political acuity, which could become evident if he runs. Though he is a talented, even inspirational, speaker on issues dear to him, Clark's manner when he's probed about subjects he'd rather not discuss is very much like that of a general at a military briefing—he's curt, sure of himself, and not overly concerned about the impression he leaves.
Clark is particularly thin-skinned, still bridling at slights from Republicans and fellow military officers during the Clinton Administration. A polarizing figure in the military who often drew the ire of the brass, Clark was forced to retire early when Secretary of Defense William Cohen and members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff organized a coup to replace him. One night, over drinks in a Capitol Hill bar, he told me that he believed himself to be "the most maligned general since William Westmoreland." Perhaps imagining the criticism he would have to endure as a candidate, many of Clark's admiring friends with whom I spoke confessed in protective tones that they hoped he wouldn't run.
Nevertheless, he seemed eager to try. He does bring an important asset to a field long on names but short on stature: an animating purpose tailored to the moment, a purpose that could galvanize a Democratic electorate desperate to defeat Bush. Clark himself time and again levels the charge that Bush is ruining the foreign policy that the United States has developed and used effectively over the past sixty years; he sees restoring international alliances as the only way to win the war on terrorism. At least three "Draft Clark" Web sites have sprung up since January to persuade him to run. The 7,300 supporters and the $465,000 they had pledged by early August suggest that—in style, if not yet in scope—Clark has the basis for a Howard Dean-type surge of grassroots support.
Clark has a talent for creating excitement in those who hear him speak, particularly about foreign policy. This sort of excitement is common to all successful campaigns—and uncommon in the current field of Democratic contenders. On its own it is not enough to transcend the sorts of mistakes that any novice candidate is sure to make—particularly one running for the presidential nomination. But if terrorism and threats abroad become the focus of the campaign—and Bush and the Republicans will try to ensure that they do—Clark may indeed find himself cast, if not drafted, as the dream candidate.
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