Clark on the campaign trail. Good writeup. Wall Street Journal.
DOROTHY RABINOWITZ'S MEDIA LOG
Glory Road
Wesley Clark tries cooking up a miracle in New Hampshire.
Wednesday, December 24, 2003 12:01 a.m.
Five weeks before the New Hampshire primary, Wesley Clark stands over a stove mixing batter, the star attraction at one of the quadrennial pancake breakfasts to which all the candidates find their way. Intent on the task at hand, Mr. Clark rattles smoothly on about the way this is supposed to be done--the trick is getting the little bubbles just right and the thickness can't be excessive, for various reasons he'd clearly be prepared to go into at some length, if anyone cared. Even at this fun enterprise the candidate's powerful didactic streak is on display, as is his pleasure in this occasion packed with friendly faces and fans lining up for autographs.
A number of local veterans are here, along with old friends from the military who show up wherever he speaks. All of them are useful counters to the image of him issuing from former colleagues and superiors, portraying the former general as a self-seeking narcissist whose character deficiencies were such that he had to be bounced from his NATO post--stories that have haunted Mr. Clark's campaign from its beginnings.
That hasn't been his only problem, or even one of the more important ones, as was clear from the early debates. There was something distinctly off-putting about the debate performances of the man considered the last best hope of the stop-Dean forces. The fervor of his charges against the president, which echoed those of most of the other candidates, came in tones distinctly shrill and whiny. Americans aren't disposed to like whininess in their generals, active or retired; or, for that matter, in any aspiring leader, which may be one reason Mr. Clark's campaign never took off.
Still, it isn't over yet. In New Hampshire, an energetic Wesley Clark poses cheerfully with fans who want pictures. While posing with one family group he notices that the flashbulb never went off. "That didn't work, come on, take it again," he urges the man with the camera, who is clearly concerned about troubling the distinguished guest too much. But in these circumstances, there is, of course, almost nothing that is too much trouble--not for this candidate, who has had his first taste of the campaign trail and who has now set foot in the primary state where, one hears, anything can happen.
His stump speech here contains all the usual elements: George Bush misled the nation, launched an unnecessary war, has turned a blind eye to the plight of workers and minorities. In the course of this speech, covered by C-Span, somebody mentions that a crew from Fox News is present--an observation that sets off a ripple of boos which Mr. Clark quickly shushes. He's not crazy, this is big media. "It's all right," he assures the crowd, "I enjoy arguing with those people."
He seems in no hurry to end conversations with people plucking at his sleeves, no small talent, considering the number of conversations he manages to have. He has lost that deer-in-the-headlights look to which he was prone, earlier in the campaign, when confronting difficult questions--the kind, for instance, asking him if he might supply a detail or two of the great social and economic programs in his plans for America. Or the more difficult question about why he had given wildly varying responses on his views of the Iraq war. Asked about the latter, he now says, simply, "I bobbled the question." It's a semi-apology that says nothing, but a merciful improvement, nonetheless, over all those tortuous accounting sessions in which Mr. Clark explained, publicly, what he knew and didn't know and when he didn't know it, a litany that might have come straight from a Jackie Mason routine.
For front-runner Howard Dean, apologies don't come easily if, indeed, they ever come at all. On the Dean campaign train there are no stops for backtracking other than for the occasional emergency like the Confederate flag flub. It's been, comparatively speaking, a combative week for the Democrats, thanks to the front-runner's announcement that that Saddam Hussein's capture did not leave Americans any safer than they were during Sept. 11. For this Mr. Dean took considerable flak from his competitors in the race.
Then there was the matter, now haunting him, of an early December radio interview in which he raised what he called "an interesting theory"--namely that George Bush had received, from the Saudis, prior warning of the Sept. 11 terror attacks. In the weeks that followed, he gave various changing explanations, all ending with the same suggestion: that he himself didn't believe the theory, but, as he told Fox's Chris Wallace, we don't know and it would "be a nice thing to know." No backtracking. Mr. Dean knows his constituency, a part of which, at least, would have no trouble believing that the president had decided to allow the terror attacks to take place. Finally on this theme, a New York Times dispatch reports, Mr. Dean told journalists last week that the president and vice president had themselves put forth many theories about the threat from Iraq, and that many of these were not true. The difference, he noted, was that "I acknowledged that I did not believe the theory I was putting out."
It requires no long study of this fantastic explanation to grasp that it could only have come from a man of enormous confidence--confidence in his powers and agility, in his capacity to turn any argument around. He could, yes, even represent himself as the victim in this mess, morally superior because he had been willing to acknowledge that he didn't believe the theory he had put out about Mr. Bush's foreknowledge of Sept. 11, whereas the president and the vice-president had done . . . what?
That confidence is Mr. Dean's great strength, as is also, in the primary anyway, his determination to yield nothing. After Saddam's capture, he allowed that this was about "one very bad man." We are in the realm of children's story book locutions here. A very bad man--perhaps one who would send his daughter out into the woods in winter to find strawberries.
His competitors have tried emulating that yield-nothing stance, without much success. Tone matters. Compared with, say, Sen. John Kerry's regular suggestions portraying America as an abyss of want and general despair, Mr. Dean's crisp recitals of all the high crimes chargeable to the Bush administration can seem positively sunny. Following Saddam's capture Sen. Kerry offered forthright praise, but, as he told an interviewer, there remained the problem of the administration's failures in prosecuting the war on AIDS.
Back in New Hampshire meanwhile, his stump speech done, Mr. Clark is confronted by a man who tells him that he gave a "flaky answer" on pharmaceutical prices. The candidate's face tightens perceptibly. He didn't give any flaky answer, he informs the man emphatically, three times. The annoyance passes quickly. It's been a wonderful event, a friend tells him. The candidate feels the same way. The campaign road to glory holds tortures, snares and bitter disappointment. But it has its moments of sweet hope--anything is possible--and on a recent morning in New Hampshire, Wesley Clark caught a taste of one.
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