Hillary's Favorite General

[Karl Note:  Is it not transparently clear!!  Hillary wants to win in 2008. She certainly doesn't want to run against a sitting Democratic President, so she wants Bush to win in 2004.  What is the easiest way for Bush to win in 2004? Why it is obvious, he needs only run against Howard Dean. Dean will lose the main election, for sure, even though he could well will the Democratic nomination.  So, many Democrats are seeing this truth and want to kick Dean out before he wins the nomination.  How can Hillary ensure that Dean gets the nomination?  By putting poor Gen. Clark up as an apparent Presidential candidate, but actually only to then be nominated as the VP for Dean, and thus give Dean the apparency of being electable.  A Dean/Clark team would, likewise, lose big time to Bush, but that is exactly what Hillary wants.  Will she get it?]

Wesley Clark has finally joined the Democratic Presidential race, but even more interesting are the people who are urging him on. The Democratic Establishment, very much including Bill and Hillary Clinton, is pushing the retired general as its stop-Howard Dean candidate.

[Karl:  This is, of course, the lie!  They want Dean to win!]

None of this is intended to diminish General Clark's resume, which is impressive. A Rhodes Scholar and first in his class at West Point, the general was wounded in Vietnam and went on to a distinguished military career. Many Democrats hope this biography will help their party seem more credible on national security in our post-September 11 world.

Many of them are also frightened to desperation that the liberal Dr. Dean is sprinting to the nomination and will bring the party to Goldwater-style defeat next year. In General Clark, they are calling in the cavalry. "I want to win," says New York Congressman and Clinton ally Charles Rangel. With a Clark candidacy, "President Bush won't be wearing any more flight uniforms on the campaign."

The problem is that biography is rarely enough in politics, as Presidents John Glenn and John McCain can attest. Not so long ago, Democrats were offering the same hopes about Vietnam silver star winner John Kerry, but his poll numbers have only headed south. A couple of famous generals -- Dwight Eisenhower, U.S. Grant -- have made it to the White House, but they ran somewhat larger war operations than General Clark's Kosovo bombing campaign of 1999.

Military man or not, any candidate who wants to defeat President Bush is going to have to do so on anti-terror policy. And on this point Mr. Clark hasn't been sounding much different than most of the other Democratic candidates. Before the war he was conveniently on the fence, asserting that Saddam Hussein was a dictator but saying the U.S. shouldn't depose him alone. During the war, he joined the "quagmire" chorus as the troops were stopped, for a day or two, on their record march to Baghdad. And now he is among those openly challenging a central tenet of the Bush Doctrine -- fighting the state sponsors of terror -- saying that we should be concentrating on the terrorists themselves. If they want a genuine anti-terror hawk, in other words, Democrats are better off nominating Joe Lieberman.

On domestic policy, moreover, General Clark appears to be a tabula rasa. "I imagine that I voted for Reagan at one time or another," he told the Washington Post recently, a fact that won't excite the Democratic masses. Only recently did he even declare that he was a Democrat, much less embrace the party's bellwether positions on raising taxes or national health care.

As a formal candidate, General Clark will also no longer be able to get away with such evasions as his declaration earlier this year that he was pressured by the Bush Administration to link the 9/11 attack to Iraq. He got a call, he implied initially, "from people around the White House." Later he changed that to someone from a Canadian think tank. Then: "No one from the White House asked me to link Saddam Hussein to September 11." Then it was the Canadian think tank again.

Which brings us back to the Clintons. They've reportedly urged the general to run, and their former aides are offering advice and joining his campaign. General Clark has already chosen former Clinton anti-impeachment spinner, Mark Fabiani, as his press secretary. It will also be fascinating to see if Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic Party Chairman and Clinton loyalist, opens up his fund-raising list to the general. Dr. Dean is the one Democrat who's been able to tap alternative fund-raising sources and has hinted that Mr. McAuliffe wouldn't be his first choice at the DNC.

All of this occurs amid speculation about Hillary's own Presidential ambitions. Her role in backing the general suggests that she and her husband fear that Dr. Dean's insurgency could upset her own well-laid plans for 2008. The real battle for control of the Democratic Party may finally have begun.

Updated September 18, 2003