Word: clarks
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...Clark also has an Iraq problem. "I was always against the war," he says, but that seems to be shorthand for a more complicated position. On his second day as a candidate, Clark told reporters that he probably would have voted for the congressional Iraq war resolution. On his third day as a candidate, he vehemently retracted that statement. Last week the Republican National Committee trotted out excerpts from Clark's testimony to the House Armed Services Committee on Sept. 26, 2002--in which he appeared to support the resolution. Actually, Clark said, "I think it's not time...
...against the immediate use of force but in favor of the resolution? Not quite. "It was clear that the Administration was determined to go to war," Clark told me last week, in an effort to parse his testimony. "I disagreed with that priority, but if you couldn't persuade the President to put it aside, you could try to work it through the United Nations ... I learned in the Balkans that diplomacy requires the threat of force--and so I favored a congressional resolution." But not the resolution that was eventually passed. He wanted Bush to return to Congress...
Maybe not, but Clark never had to take a vote on the issue, and there is an antsy quality to his tap dancing that is not reassuring. It reinforces other eruptions of loose talk--statements that weren't very statesmanlike, rumors he has reported as fact. Last fall, for example, Clark stated without equivocation or any proof that Donald Rumsfeld had leaked his own "long hard slog" Iraq memo. This sort of carelessness is strange in an obviously disciplined military man. If foreign policy is a character issue, the general is in danger of appearing...
...least Clark is talking about national security. Not every Democrat is. Dick Gephardt and John Edwards hardly mention foreign policy in their speeches. Both voted for the war, but they seem to have done so as a matter of convenience--to get the issue "off the table" so they could concentrate on populist economics. An Edwards adviser told me the Senator wasn't emphasizing foreign policy because "that's not what people are interested in." That seems myopic. The Edwards ascendancy has been stunted by the Senator's youthful appearance--he could use the opposite of Botox--and there...
That leaves--in addition to Clark--Senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman as the only plausible foreign policy candidates in the Democratic field. Both Kerry and Lieberman are solid men; both have emphasized their foreign policy expertise--and both have serious problems with the Democratic electorate. Lieberman's problem is the more serious: he is an inveterate hawk with a reliably neoconservative--if not quite unilateral--view of America's role in the world. Most Democrats disagree with that. Kerry's problem is political. He voted for the war resolution, but it seemed a tactical vote, taken so that Republicans...