General Dynamic

I hope that the Democrats face up to the reality that national security is going to be the foremost issue in the coming Presidential campaign and find a way to deal with the fact that we are considered to be complete losers on the issue. This is a HUGE problem and it's not going to magically disappear no matter how badly they manage to fuck up the economy. They are going to keep asserting that the economy is in the ditch because of the "war" on evil and there is nothing to be done but to keep cutting taxes and invading countries that might threaten us someday. They are committed to this and they aren't going to budge.

And we are going to lose if we don't find a way to answer the charge that Democrats are pussies.

I like Dean's feisty iconoclasm and I've always thought that Kerry is a good man. Hart is one of the smartest politicians, ever. But, all of these guys are going to be going up against a guy whose hagiography has turned him into a cross between Winston Churchill and Stonewall Jackson. It's bullshit, but you have to picture the flagwaving, near hysterical cheering crowds that will be seen every single day on the whore media for the next two years as President AWOL begins his re-election campign in earnest. And they will consistently portray him as resolute, strong, manly, etc., etc., etc., while Kerry will be seen as a creature of the Senate debating society and Dean as an obscure northern Governor with no foreign policy experience. Hart = Monkey Business.

And, to ignore the importance of the southern constituency at a time when the public is very evenly divided is folly. As Michael Lind pointed out in his fascinating article called "America's Tribes", the martial tradition in the south is a fundamental, defining issue in american politics and we Democrats ignore it at our peril.

I have held off really looking closely at this guy until now because I had no idea of his domestic positions and I wasn't sure if he was going to be a reliable Democrat. This article , called "Mr Credibility" by Michael Tomasky went a long way toward allaying those concerns, at least in the short term. (I also noticed that he has quite a bit of education and some political experience ('75-'76 White House Fellow OMB) in economics.)

Think Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) looks good because he fought in a war? Well, check Clark out. Clark, now 58, fought in Vietnam, too, of course, but that was just his stretching routine. He won a war. He was NATO commander during the Kosovo operation. Granted, this may not be the military equivalent of beating back Adolf Hitler. But it arguably is something of a moral equivalent in that it led to the downfall of a Hitler manqué in the person of Slobodan Milosevic. It was, however sliced, a successful, multilateral mission that largely achieved its objectives, both military and political. And the Kosovo campaign was merely the most recent in a long line of Clark's feats. After graduating from high school in Little Rock, Ark., in 1962, he went to West Point, where he finished first in his class; after that, to Oxford University, where he earned a master's degree in philosophy, politics and economics as a Rhodes Scholar (an Arkansas Rhodes Scholar, eh?); to Vietnam in the late 1960s; thence up the ladder, all the way to NATO command, which Bill Clinton bestowed on him in 1997. Although both from Arkansas, Clinton and Clark first met, Clark says, at a 1965 student leadership conference while both were in college. Since then, Clark has won the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, a Silver Star, a Purple Heart, and more accolades and decorations than Secretariat.

So there's all that. And there's this: He votes Democratic. In Arkansas most voters enroll with no party affiliation; you show up on primary day and select the ballot of whichever party you want to support. Clark told me he voted in the Democratic primary in last year's state elections. He seriously considered seeking the Democratic nomination for governor of Arkansas in 2002, challenging Republican incumbent Mike Huckabee. He told me in an interview that he favors both abortion rights and affirmative action. We spoke just after the Bush administration filed its brief against the University of Michigan's admissions policy, and Clark said he was "surprised and dismayed" by the president's decision. He has "tremendous regard" for the Clintons. And, just as a little sweetener for the culture department, he quotes Bob Dylan toward the end of his book, Waging Modern War, and writes affectionately about the protest folk music that he used to love to listen to as a young man.


A lot of this is still sketchy, but I am gravely concerned that we are going to be in a campaign framed as if it is between John Wayne and Michael Jackson and if that is so, we are going to be in deep shit.

I think he could be the one --- and I mean at the top of the ticket, not the bottom.