He’s still unconventional: a sudden declaration that Russian President Vladimir Putin is not a Christian here, quirky wrist-curl photo ops there. But that’s overshadowed by Clark’s engaging stump speech, a fluency with domestic issues and an ease with his traveling press corps that’s nearly on par with George W. Bush’s election-winning charm offensive. Clark can even nail, night after night, his dramatic finale, the often-tear producing tale of a young man with big hands that Clark met in a Haitian slum who wouldn’t let go of the general’s hand. It’s Clark’s tale of the greatness of America, land of opportunity.
This is not insignificant. On paper, General Clark is potentially dangerous: combat-tested soldier, Southern boy, potential swing-vote magnet (like Ronald Reagan, Clark has experience with both ends of the political spectrum). But only a good candidate can cash in those credentials. Ask Clark how he’s taken giant steps toward becoming that skilled grip-and-grinner, and he’ll tell you he’s just being his old self. In fact, he’s learned like any good military officer: he used after-action reports to incrementally improve every campaign stop. “He would say, ‘Tell me what I’m doing wrong’,” said a Clark advisor, “and sure enough he’d never make that mistake again.” He’s got some distance to go, however. The 59-year-old’s schedule isn’t grueling, although a veteran of sleepless war campaigns could handle longer days as long as his voice stays strong (his body is toned to 5 percent body fat owed to swimming five days a week).
Whether Clark will face Bush depends on what wins out, Clark’s after-action reports or his political naivete. Kicking back on his campaign’s press bus Thursday night, Clark played hand-slap with a network TV “embed” and talked about the hour of “Lord of the Rings: Return of the King” that he’d just watched (he got a DVD of the film from a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences). I pulled him back to reality to ask him whether he planned to succinctly answer the Iraq question dogging him. “You mean talk in sound bites?” he snarled. The Republican National Committee’s effective attack this week was a shot over his bow, I said, something to put the general on notice. It was clear that the RNC intended to muddy the waters on whether Clark supported Bush’s effort to immediately remove Saddam Hussein from power.
But Clark, the West Point debate team captain, insists on responding to those attacks by teaching something of a college short-course on the difference between “pre -emptive” and “preventative” war. On the campaign bus, he tried it again and landed on a slightly better definition of why Bush’s war was a preventative war and why it was dangerous. He urged common sense by evoking the Vietnam-era talk of destroying a village in order to save it. “The whole idea that we should have a war now so we don’t have to fight one later has always struck a lot of people as really bad,” he said. “It’s a case of logic overriding common sense.” That was part of a sound-bite answer that voters could digest and his opponents would find more difficult to demagogue. But whether his after-action reports can further distill his pre-war thinking on Iraq is another matter.
