The Little Spark In Clark

By Joe Klein

Could I ask the veterans in the audience to stand, please?" Wesley Clark asked last week at a town meeting in Exeter, N.H. As the applause swelled, Clark walked over to the American flag at the rear of the stage. He took the flag in hand and unfurled it, almost wrapping himself in it. "That's our flag," he said lovingly. "We saluted that flag. We served under it. We fought for it. We watched brave men and women buried under it." He was shouting now: "And no Tom DeLay, John Ashcroft and George W. Bush is going to take it away from us!"

It appears that General Clark is beginning to figure out the politics business. He used the flag bit at every opportunity last week, and his audience cheered each time. This is not to say that he has become Demosthenes on the stump. He wanders through his speech, taking obscure and prolix detours into blind alleys. His delivery is halting, as if he's afraid the next words out of his mouth will explode in his face (an experience he suffered on the first day of his campaign, when he said he would have voted for the Iraq-war resolution--an inconvenient admission for an antiwar candidate). But after several months lost in the political wilderness, the Clark campaign is beginning to show a wispy flicker of life.

In two vaguely reliable New Hampshire polls last week, Clark moved into third place, just a few points behind the formerly formidable John Kerry, although both men trailed Howard Dean by 30 points. The Clark presidential "success strategy"--to use one of his favorite phrases--proceeds something like this: He supplants Kerry as No. 2 in New Hampshire. The race tightens--a good bet, since 20% are still undecided and New Hampshire voters love last-minute political melodrama. Clark finishes better than expected, then surpasses Dean on Feb. 3, when the race moves to more amenable turf for a moderate: South Carolina, Oklahoma, Arizona, North Dakota and others. John Edwards and Joe Lieberman have similar dreams and much more polished campaign styles--but the notion of a four-star antiwar general from the South is catnip to the Democrats. The knee-jerk redoubts of West Los Angeles and the Upper West Side of Manhattan are in mid-swoon.

Clark's progress, such as it is, has come out of Kerry's hide. As candidates, they are doppelgangers--war heroes, foreign-policy and national-security experts, awkward campaigners with staff problems. Kerry has a much deeper and more nuanced sense of the issues; he delivered an excellent foreign-policy speech at the Council on Foreign Relations last week (Clark bombed at the same podium a few weeks earlier). But the Massachusetts Senator has been cautious to the point of rigor mortis, and he has never overcome his tactical vote in favor of the Iraq-war resolution. Kerry's stump style is sharper than it was, but the revival may have come too late. In fact, the Senator's sell-by date seems to have passed in New Hampshire. A well-known neighbor, he has been carefully vetted by that state's hyper-sophisticated electorate and found wanting. Certainly, in a year when passion rules, Kerry hasn't shown a fraction of Dean's incredible vigor.

Enter Clark and the American flag. The choreography, the physical embrace of Old Glory, is both compelling and weird. There is an over-the-top intensity to it that is a Clark signature trait. The man is so tightly wound that he seems to be an ambulatory tourniquet. But he is wildly intelligent--and intellectually adventurous. His stump discourses on economics are as sophisticated as his sense of military strategy--if often a bit too sophisticated for his audience. Asked in Nashua, N.H., last week about the trade deficit, Clark noted in the course of a dense reply, "Those of you who studied economics will remember Adam Smith's case of Portuguese wine wrapped in English cloth." He peered at the audience, searching fruitlessly for a nod of acknowledgment. Receiving noneperhaps because the wine-and-cloth analogy was David Ricardo'she added incomprehensibly, "Well, we're a long way from that."

If Clark suffers intermittent spasms of goofiness, he also shows some courage on the trail. He has been as unabashed as Lieberman in support of free trade; he favors lifting the trade embargo on Cuba. (Dean has skittered away from both positions.) His least satisfying position is on the issue he says is most important: the war. He says he has a "success strategy," but he doesn't sound much different from the other Democrats. He wants NATO in charge of the military operation and the United Nations in charge of civil affairs, though neither NATO nor the U.N. has shown any appetite for these roles. He has been studiously vague about increasing or decreasing troop strength. I asked Clark if it is possible that there is no plausible "success strategy" in Iraq, if it is just a hopeless mess. He replied with admirable, if distressing, candor, "Yes, but I'm not prepared to concede that yet."

Not prepared is Clark's peculiar state of grace at the moment. His clunky candidacy survives only because Dean has boggled all comers--and the general, a latecomer, is hoping to be the last available option.