LAST WEEK, Democratic party consultant Jenny Backus told the New York Times that Democratic congressmen and presidential candidates “don’t need to do any criticism of the Bush administration right now” because the “generals are doing that job for us.” Of all the retired rent-a-generals currently holding forth on cable TV, though, surely Wesley Clark is in the trickiest spot, because he just might become a candidate himself. The former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO during the Kosovo war has a small but growing number of Democrats giddy with hopes that he’ll run for their party’s presidential nomination next year. There’s just one problem: His current job as a CNN military analyst means that for his own sake and the network’s, he has to maintain the polite fiction that he’s not a politician.
No one else is buying it. Speculation that Clark might be a candidate began last fall, when he met with well-heeled Democrats in New York City to discuss a possible run. Though Clark has not yet registered with a party, he campaigned for a number of Democrats in last fall’s midterm elections; spoke to the Democratic Leadership Council; met party activists and gave speeches in New Hampshire; made a $1,000 contribution to Erskine Bowles’s North Carolina Senate campaign; and met with DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe in January. Clark has also been the subject of friendly profiles in the Washington Post (twice in the last month) and in the March issue of the liberal American Prospect.
It’s easy to see why Democrats might be excited. As he demonstrated during an impressive “Meet the Press” appearance in February, the 58-year-old Clark is articulate and good-looking. Like a recent president, he’s a baby boomer Rhodes Scholar from Arkansas. But unlike Bill Clinton, Clark finished first in his class at West Point and won a Purple Heart in Vietnam. In a political environment where the biggest test of a candidate’s viability may be whether voters can take him seriously as a potential commander in chief, a retired four-star army general would seem to address the Democratic party’s biggest liability: lack of credibility on national security and foreign policy issues.
At a breakfast with reporters last month, Gerald McEntee, the chairman of the AFL-CIO’s political arm, offered this unprompted comment: “If Wesley Clark gets in–with the gravitas he has as allied commander of NATO, four stars, with the war mode we’re in–it gives him a card to play.”
That’s a big “if.” Thus far Clark has followed the example of Dwight Eisenhower and Colin Powell, playing the reluctant warrior who might be cajoled into running for president if enough people beg him to. He’s issued the standard non-denial denials–“I’m not a candidate yet,” “I haven’t raised money or formed any committees”–and has said he’s merely trying to create a “dialogue,” because “I’m just concerned about the direction this country is headed.”
There’s also the awkward fact of his CNN gig. Clark is now on the air daily analyzing the Iraq war, so for at least a few more weeks he’ll be just another talking head. Though some have lumped Clark in with the likes of Barry McCaffrey, the most strident of the yip-yap TV generals, he’s actually been fairly measured in his criticism of the administration’s war plan and its execution. Like most army vets, Clark has said he would have preferred having more ground troops involved. But he has also challenged the Pentagon’s critics by harking back to his own problems in Kosovo. When Joint Chiefs chairman Gen. Richard Myers defended the Pentagon’s war plan last week, Clark said afterward:
I think Dickie Myers has a very solid point when he says, if you’re not on the inside of the plan, you really can’t understand the [diplomatic and military] tradeoffs that were done to make the plan come out that way. As we talked before [regarding] my experience in Kosovo, it’s very difficult, it’s really impossible to criticize a plan when you haven’t been on the inside of it.
Clark’s backers say that he’ll make his decision about running for president when the war ends. New Hampshire Democratic activist George Bruno, who’s been shepherding Clark around the state and encouraging him to run, says that after the war Clark will do “his assessment, as you do in the military, something called an AAR, an after-action report. I think you’ll probably see him make an AAR to the nation. And at that point, people can assess whether the kind of leadership he’s offering makes sense or not.”
Democrats I spoke with had wildly varying opinions on whether Clark has already waited too long to get into the race. Bruno and others believe the war has created a political pause that will allow candidates to enter the race later than usual–perhaps as late as September. (Bruno notes that Bill Clinton didn’t announce his campaign and begin traveling to New Hampshire until the fall of 1991.)
Clark’s supporters cite John McCain’s 2000 campaign as their template for how their man could win the nomination. Clark’s outsider status and military background will appeal to independent voters in New Hampshire’s open primary, they believe, and if he makes a good showing there, everything will fall into place. Of course, the McCain template cuts both ways–you can do very well in New Hampshire and still do poorly elsewhere.
But no matter how appealing Clark’s résumé might be, or how much free exposure he gets on CNN, other prominent Democrats believe he can’t wait much longer–especially since he’s never run for office, and still lacks the organization of the top contenders. Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, who has spoken with Clark informally several times and has encouraged him to run, has her doubts. “It’s gonna be very tough if you wait until June or July. It is wide open, it’s there for the taking,” she says, but unless Clark leaves the CNN studios “on a magic carpet and is able to put together a staff and a strategy and raise some money, then this will be just mere speculation and not serious.” At some point, she adds, “the romancing’s got to stop.”
On litmus-test domestic issues, Clark’s views are not as mysterious as some have claimed. He is on the record supporting abortion rights, and was one of nearly 30 retired military officers who signed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court supporting the University of Michigan’s use of racial preferences in admissions. He’s also taken several digs during interviews at President Bush’s stewardship of the economy, though these haven’t gone much further than typical Democratic boilerplate.
Clearly, though, his selling point would be national security. And whatever Clark’s viability as a presidential candidate, he might well be an attractive vice presidential pick for a Democratic nominee who needs to burnish his foreign policy credentials. Clark’s critique of the Bush administration’s foreign policy would certainly sound more authoritative than, say, Howard Dean’s–but that doesn’t mean it’s any more coherent.
The essence of Clark’s argument, made on “Meet the Press” and CNN as well as in a long article in last September’s Washington Monthly, is this: The Bush administration squandered an opportunity after 9/11. It should have made Afghanistan a NATO operation like Kosovo. (Clark tends to view every issue by analogy to his Kosovo experience.) Other Western leaders would then have had a political stake in the success of the war on terrorism, and we’d now have more support from them in tackling problems like Iraq and North Korea. The Bush administration’s rush to deal with Saddam–as opposed to what Clark views as the more immediate threats of al Qaeda and North Korea–has torn apart the international institutions that we created to protect our security after World War II.
Most of this is standard Democratic fare, though Clark’s military background gives him an advantage in delivering it. And while Clark has been careful since hostilities began not to unduly second-guess the administration’s conduct of the war, he’s already begun laying the groundwork to criticize its handling of the peace. Last week he said that because there is “lots of broken china so far in the diplomacy,” true victory in Iraq will be realized only by “restoring the integrity of the international institutions we went into Iraq to help protect, like the United Nations.” What Clark, like most Democrats, seems unwilling to consider is the possibility that France and Germany’s intransigence on Iraq had little to do with the diplomatic efforts of the Bush administration, and that the post-World War II security institutions might have outlived their usefulness.
And when you get to specifics, some of Clark’s other ideas seem downright absurd. Take his claim that if we had only indicted Osama bin Laden and the Taliban as war criminals after 9/11, this would have strengthened our legitimacy in the Arab world and allowed us to turn the screws tighter on Syria and “allies” like Saudi Arabia. To the contrary, an indictment would have signaled to the Arab world that America was not yet serious about taking the fight to al Qaeda. Clark also wants to “multifunctionalize” NATO to tackle terrorism, using it to enhance law enforcement ties between its members, for instance. But law enforcement ties among NATO members actually seem quite healthy. It’s NATO’s underlying, core function–mutual defense–that the organization is having trouble sustaining. NATO could barely agree to promise member state Turkey that it would be defended in the case war broke out with Iraq.
Clark’s biggest problem, though, might be that the same wartime environment that’s made him look so attractive in recent months has also prompted his preferred political party to lose its mind. With antiwar candidate Howard Dean generating the greatest buzz among party activists, it’s hard to see how a retired general can become the Democratic party’s presidential nominee. Wesley Clark just might want to hang on to his TV job.
Lee Bockhorn is associate editor at The Weekly Standard.
