THE TRAGEDY OF CLARK


There is no question that the Clark campaign, which met its inevitable doom last night, was a horrendously run campaign from a logistical and tactical perspective. There's been plenty already written about how the pros from the Clinton & Gore staffs failed to prepare their novice candidate from the pitfalls of the campaign. Just as worse, the insiders stifled the genuine grassroots energy surrounding Clark as an insurgent candidacy, focusing most of the time as presenting Clark as a "safe" Democratic option.

The tragedy is that Clark could have been so much more. Buried under media coverage of his argyle sweaters and fumbling on questions on abortion were foreign policy addresses that went past nostrums of multilateralism to flesh out concrete proposals for how to reconstruct international institutions to address the problems of a post 9/11 world. Based on his prior support for the war in Iraq and his Kosovo experience, Clark was uniquely qualified to make the Competence Critque of Bush's Iraq policy - one that focused on how Bush's inability to form effective coalitions or adequately prepare for nation-building. Such a campaign would have establish Clark as the clear alternative to Dean's pacifism and Bush's unilateralism. Was this really Clark's position? Like everybody else, I am guilty of projecting my own views onto Clark's tabula rasa, but it matches up with what he was saying before he entered the race.

Instead, as the campaign progressed, Clark increasingly drifted towards becoming Dean in combat fatigues - issuing sharply worded sound bites on how Hussein was "a made-up villain" or how Iraq "distracted from the war on terror."
In the end, the Clark campaign exemplified the Clintonian idea that the Democrats problem was the appearence of weakness on national security, as opposed to any substantive problems. Having given no substantive reason for his candidacy, Clark's campagin lost its raison d'etre with the rebirth of Kerry. And so, rather than having a real debate between an agressive multilateral approach to the war on terror and Bush's aggressive unilateral approach, the Dems instead offer their outdated, legalistic pre-9/11 approach, wrapped in the shiny package of Kerry's war record. But as Clinton himself noted, it is better to appear strong and be weak on national security than the other way around.