Lest any Deaniacs are coming by today and thinking I've jumped ship, let me make it clear:

I am now supporting two candidates, both enthusiastically: Howard Dean and Wesley Clark.

I would be thrilled to have either as the nominee, ecstatic to have either president. And that is a wonderful thing. I can't remember ever facing a primary season with two candidates I was so crazy about. It's often hard to scrape up one. (Last year it was just John McCain, and that was in spite of his conservative voting and alliance with all those evil Trent Lotts and Tom DeLays.) This is really something.

I imagine this straddle will piss off a lot of people from both camps. But I don't see any reason to enter a camp. It's not like I'm a blood relative. I'm not on staff with either. I have made no committment to either. And it's still early in the season and they both have a lot to prove. If Dean fizzles or Clark never takes off, I see no reason to go down in flames with one or the other when we've got another great choice. My primary allegience is to getting a great president, and I will literally be jumping up and down on election night if one of them kicks that horrible shrub out of the oval office.

So I'm sticking with both of them for now. At some point, if I should be so lucky that it comes down to a two-man race between them, and it's still undecided when our little caucuses begin in Colorado in April, I'll have to make a choice. Maybe events will turn in such a way that I'll feel compelled to choose one before then. But still that's a long way off I expect.

And whichever one gets the nod, I sincerely hope he chooses the other to run with. Both of them in the white house, that would just be too heavenly to imagine.

So Wesley Clark finally made the big speech. As usual, I loved everything he had to say. But not exactly rip-snorting on the delivery. I'd give him an A on content, C+ on delivery. He comes across a little bit meek--a little bit little? a little bit slight?--at the podium. Oddly enough, I can imagine him a lot better addressing us from the oval office, than rally a division of troops for battle.

I can picture him in the oval office, but I hope he has the vitatity to get him there.

I have little doubt the guy would make a spectacular president, but I do have a lot of doubts about spectacular campaigning. So finally we'll get some answers on that. Will he set the electorate on fire like Howard Dean, or bore them to tears like John Kerry? (I still think his biggest handicap in the late start is lacking the time to learn how to campaign. Presidential candidate is a very weird job that almost nobody ever starts out good at, regardless of how many times they've run for other offices. Candidates really do get much better, at least the ones that end up going anywhere. He doesn't have much time to learn.)

We've already got a good idea how he comes across one-on-one, or in interview situations--assuming he maintains the same demeanor he has in the past: wise, articulate, insightful. He can match and possibly beat Howard Dean on that score. And it's always hard to know how somebody will do on TV ads, but I'm betting he licks that one. (From what I've seen so far, Edwards blows everyone away on that score, Dean needs a bit of work, Kerry and Gephardt are hopeless as always. And Lieb, who are you kidding?)

The big questions are debates and out on the stump, rallying the troops to want to come home and work for him. Not an auspicious start on the rallies, and I have a feeling it will never be his strength. Oddly enough, I see a lot of paralells to Dean there, too. Dean seems weakest in front of large groups (from what I've seen). Doesn't really project to a crowd that size, seemed swallowed up by the NY crowd last month, but if you sat down and listened to him, the words continued striking home and he won the crowd over in spite of a few oratorical deficiencies. Clark, I expect, will have to shoot for the same effect. From what I saw today, and what I've seen before, he'll be wearker with the big crowds than Dean. He just doesn't have the command voice, ironically. And he doesn't project the anger that Dean does. He has a bit of the Kerry/Lieberman problem, saying he's angry at the Bush administration, but his body language shouting "Nice guy!"

Debates are a huge unknown. You would think he would acquit himself well, but it's a balancing act: he could hold back to much, or come off petty and shrill. There's really no telling till he gets there--and gets a few under his belt to get his style down.

The main thing, I think, will be to continue talking as straight as he has so far. It's the McCain appeal, the perot appeal, the Dean appeal: smart things to say, unafraid to say them, and none of the mind-numbing politician double-talk swallowing up the impact.

That approach was in full force today. That's his appeal, and that he has to hang onto. If he can keep hold of that and get just a little better at projection, debate well, and hit the right notes in his TV spots, he could give Howard Dean a good run for his money. If not, say hello to the Democratic nominee, Dr. Dean.

I'm not convinced either way, but I'm still cautiously optimistic he can pull it off. And I'm just overjoyed at the prospect of having two strong candidates in competition for the nomination.

General Clark just finished his kickoff speech, and then CNN cut to some pathetic twit newsmodel (Kyra Phillips) at the "anchor desk." Naturally she began with a quote from his speech and an obvious question: "Now, how will he do?" And the next words out of her mouth:

"We know the military side already, but the rest of Wesley Clark is pretty much a mystery." She lifted her hands, twisted her palms up and out in that gesture of complete puzzlement.

How can a network billing itself--laughably--as a serious news outlet hire someone so ignorant? It just makes my blood boil when I hear such extreme stupidity out of newsmodels. Is it too much to peruse one of the myriad websites that has grown up around him? There is a huge public record on this man. He has written and spoken on not all, but the bulk of the issues being debated in the campaign.

I looked around the web one time for about 30 minutes a few months ago, and learned where he stood on most of the major issues. I went to one Clark meetup this month, where they went through about 30 slides detailing his positions on most of these issues, exclusively through direct quotes from the man. I put almost no effort into it and learned a great deal. If she has no reportorial skills whatsover (does she not even know how to use google?) do they not have a staff for this? (And as Ben points out in the comments, they have had the guy on as a paid consultant for their own network relentlessly, and she still doesn't know anything about the guy? It's not like the man has been living in seclusion, or he was some stranger who just dropped in unexpectely with this announcement out of the blue.)

It's ignorance beyond compare. And there she sits at one of the biggest news networks, making the rest of the country more ignorant with her. But she sure does look good.

If you think General Clark has no experience on domestic issues, then you've never served in the military. That's not an attack on your patriotism, just an explanation of how you got duped.

The biggest surprise most people discover when they first sign up with the army, is that hardly anyone inside it fights. Roughly ten percent of the army is a fighting force. The other 90 percent exists to create an entire subculture/subeconomy, to provide for nearly every facet of human life: food, housing, education, health care, even religious services.

Interested in healthcare reform? Guess who runs one of the largest single-payor systems in the world? The army builds its own network of hospitals, hires its own doctors, nurses and administrators, provides much of their training and runs the entire operation.

Public housing? They've got hundreds of thousands of men women and children under their roof, a system rivaling all of HUD.

Concerned about crime? They've got an entire court system of their own: judges, juries, prosecutors, defenders and an entire military police force. I'm pretty sure General Clark will be the only candidate in the field to have served as a judge.

General Clark is best known for foreign policy, but his biggest single concern actually appears to be education. He has very strong positions and very deep experience on education because that's one of the biggest businesses the army is in. He's had far more experience with it than shrub ever did as Governor of Texas. The army runs an undergraduate university at West Point, a graduate "War College," an airborne school, ranger school, infantry school, dozens of other major schools developing tens of thousands of cadre of instructors for basic training, dozens of advanced training schools in nearly every major area of human endevour, and constant continuing education programs for close to a million soldiers. They also build, maintain and run elementary and secondary schools on most of the large posts for children of servicemen. It is quite likely the most expansive and diverse educational system in the world. Of course Clark did not preside over the whole thing, but it is a top priority for the institution, and a central concern of every commander, which Clark began facing as platoon leader and company commander decades ago. As a four-star general, he has been emeshed in the system and responsible for portions of it for decades.

(More soon. He's speaking now.)

I wrote about this Dean Corps awhile back. I think it's a great idea for public service and for getting volunteers involved doing something. Whether it will really affect perceptions of a candidate in a big way, I'm pretty skeptical. But this Des Moines Register columnist says it's working. Stay tuned:

Howard Dean may well be the next president of the United States because of people like Eliot Williamson, Megan Scott, Sally Troxel and Dick Stater. They are part of something called the "Dean Corps" in Iowa, and they are taking politics back to the future by organizing campaign work around community-service projects.

The Democratic presidential hopeful has volunteers who are doing such things as collecting school supplies, participating in river clean-up efforts, building homes with Habitat for Humanity, collecting native prairie seeds for preservation, chopping firewood for a youth camp, banding birds and collecting supplies for food banks. It gives volunteers something to do besides make pestering phone calls to other Democrats, and it's having a big political payoff.