With the Race Changing Fast, Clark Adjusts
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By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
The New York Times
January 26, 2004
nytimes.com
MANCHESTER, N.H. — It was Gen. Wesley K. Clark's turn to make his pitch to the hundreds of members of the New Hampshire Democratic Party jammed into a hotel room on Saturday night. General Clark, who declared his party affiliation only four months ago, knew that some in the audience of lifelong Democrats might be skeptical of his credentials, so he began:
"I have to tell you honestly, I haven't been a member of the Democratic Party for that long."
To the doubters in the audience, the comment came like a slow, fat pitch right over home plate. "We noticed," some grumbled. "We've heard!" one man yelled. "Yeah, we know," said another, rolling his eyes.
The moment suggested that General Clark had still not met one of the threshold tests for a Democratic candidate: convincing voters that he has a rightful claim to the party's presidential nomination.
New Hampshire was supposed to be General Clark's proving ground. And in some ways it has been. He has refined his message and continues to raise money. He expects to raise more than $3.5 million this month, aides said, and he is buying advertisements in nine states.
In fact, in the four months since he jumped into the race, General Clark has developed skills that can take years to learn. On Sunday in Henniker, N.H., for example, he parried with a hostile questioner who asked him why it had taken him so long to become a Democrat.
"When I was in the United States Army, I lived Democratic values," he responded. Explaining that when he was in the military he could not be political, he added that in the general election against President Bush, he would be able to appeal to independents and moderate Republicans. The crowd was with him.
General Clark had the stage in New Hampshire to himself for several weeks while the other Democrats fought in Iowa. His campaign aides were so excited that at one point they predicted he could finish second in Tuesday's primary here, giving him a head of steam going into the Feb. 3 states, where he hopes to win his first primary.
But while he has grown into his role, the ground has shifted.
General Clark was preparing a campaign against Howard Dean and appeared to be running to the former Vermont governor's left on issues like the war and abortion. He appeared with Michael Moore, the liberal activist and filmmaker, and George McGovern, the party's failed antiwar nominee of 1972, while Dr. Dean was endorsed by more establishment politicians.
When Senator John Kerry won Iowa, General Clark was caught off guard. While he may have benefited from the recent scrutiny of Dr. Dean, he also faced suddenly emboldened challenges from Mr. Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran, and Senator John Edwards, who like General Clark is from the South. At the same time, his campaign has faced some internal tensions and has reduced the public role of one of its top strategists, Chris Lehane.
The Clark campaign, which has no chief political strategist, has had difficulty adapting to the changed terrain. General Clark's instinctive reaction was to belittle Mr. Kerry's rank, saying on the night of the Iowa caucus, "He's a lieutenant and I'm a general." That was followed by a week in which he had to explain several comments about his position on abortion and whether he agreed with Mr. Moore's assertion that Mr. Bush was a "deserter."
"While there have been a few stumbles, they have been blown out of proportion," Matt Bennett, a campaign spokesman, said Sunday.
"He is not a politician, and he's not good, sometimes, at putting things into artful little boxes," Mr. Bennett said. "The second problem is he's relatively headstrong about the things he believes deeply in, and he's unwilling to simply acknowledge something that he doesn't believe in just for the sake of expediency. I'm not sure those are liabilities in the long run."
Still, what General Clark has to show for his monthlong encampment in New Hampshire are polls that indicate his support here has flatlined or even fallen. The polls have fluctuated, but one released Sunday by USA Today, Gallup and CNN put General Clark in fourth place.
"It was very, very cosmetic progress he was making in New Hampshire while everyone else was in Iowa," said Bill Carrick, a veteran Democratic strategist who worked for Representative Richard A. Gephardt until Mr. Gephardt dropped out of the race last week.
"There has always been a cafe society, cocktail party reality to Clark's candidacy, with people dreaming, `Wouldn't it be nice if we had a general?' " Mr. Carrick said. "But he's got strengths and weaknesses and sounds better in a résumé than he is in reality. Now he's got to figure out how to pump some life into this."
After the polls close here on Tuesday night, General Clark heads to South Carolina, where the campaign has long felt his military record and Southern background could prove a formidable combination.
His performance on the stump is much improved, but his campaign's preparation for events is uneven. Over the weekend, he drew hundreds of enthusiastic people into a packed gym in Derry, the Music Man Theater in Portsmouth and another crowded gym in Nashua. But on Friday, he held a poorly planned event that drew an anemic turnout.
In his search for a campaign slogan, he has dropped "A New American Patriotism" for "A Higher Standard of Leadership." Aides said he had directed his speechwriters to prepare a new stump speech, which weaves together his background and his values with his reasons for running for president. His delivery can be fiery and effective.
He has also formulated some guaranteed applause lines, like his criticism of Mr. Bush for wearing a flight suit and "prancing around" on the deck of an aircraft carrier.
His wife, Gertrude, whom he calls "the general's general," is taking an increasingly prominent role in the campaign, introducing him at rallies and sitting for television interviews, which she declined to do when he first entered the race in September.
But General Clark has spent much of his time here explaining controversial statements. Perhaps most damaging has been his failure to repudiate comments by Mr. Moore, who called Mr. Bush a deserter for his unexplained absence from the Air National Guard between April 1972 and September 1973.
Mr. Bush's actions did not meet the technical definition of desertion.
"President Bush was not a deserter," said Eugene Fidell, a Washington expert on military law. "To desert in wartime is a serious offense, potentially punishable by death. It requires an intent to remain away permanently."
General Clark has said that Mr. Moore has a right to free speech. But that has not stopped reporters and voters from asking him about Mr. Moore's allegation. On Sunday on "Meet the Press," when Tim Russert asked if he would disassociate himself from Mr. Moore's characterization, General Clark said, "Well, I can't use those words and I don't see the issues in that way."
In addition, the Clark campaign faces some internal tension. The campaign nearly hired John Weaver, the strategist who helped win New Hampshire's independent voters for Senator John McCain, a Republican, in 2000. But that hiring fell apart only days ago. There was an internal debate as to whether his hiring just days before the primary would look like an act of desperation or a coup.
At the same time, Mr. Lehane, who is General Clark's communications strategist, has been supplanted as the campaign's presence on television by James P. Rubin, a State Department spokesman in the Clinton administration who is serving without pay as the general's senior foreign policy adviser.
Mr. Lehane's profile was lowered after his Jan. 19 appearance on "Hardball," on which he called for Mr. Kerry, for whom he had once served as a volunteer, to release his tax records. Chris Matthews, the host, tried to explain that Mr. Lehane was "digging up dirt" on Mr. Kerry because he was angry at Mr. Kerry for firing him. Mr. Lehane said he had been an unpaid volunteer and indicated that he had not been fired.
In any case, the intense exchange was recycled on cable television, shifting the focus to the political process at a time when General Clark was trying to present himself as above the fray.
An aide said that having Mr. Lehane on television when his former boss, Mr. Kerry, was the front-runner was awkward. "He'll lie low for a while, but it's definitely not forever," the aide said. He said that Mr. Lehane had gone back to campaign headquarters in Little Rock, Ark., on Jan. 17, but said that this was part of a long-planned move.
Perhaps most troubling for the campaign is General Clark's continued inability to put to rest the questions about his position on the Iraq resolution. As recently as Sunday, on the ABC News program "This Week," George Stephanopoulos said to him, "Katrina Swett, a Congressional candidate here, says that you advised her to vote for the resolution — if she were in Congress — to vote for the resolution."
General Clark responded: "It depends on what `the' is, George. What I say is this: that I would have voted for leverage — if we were going to bring up the problem of Iraq — leverage to take it to the United Nations." |
