Well it had to happen eventually. I disagree with Joan Walsh, Salon's sharpest thinker and my occasional boss over there. Till now, it was almost scary how she seemed to publish column after column stating exactly what I was thinking, often crystalizing thoughts I was still groping to pull together.
But this weekend, she took on the very troubling question of Wes Clark's bad day. I agree with her on one big thing. It's highly troubling how little thought the general appears to have put into some pretty basic questions:
What was the retired general spending his time on in the last three months, while the world knew he was only his wife's blessing away from declaring his candidacy? Wasn't there a minute to catch up on the Brady Bill . . . It wasn't the political positions Clark stated that were disturbing as much as the apparent lack of thought behind them.
I had the same reactions. I was very embarassed for him, a little embarassed for myself for defending him. But like her, I'm not ready to write him off for one bad day. (Though she seems a lot closer than I am. She says more than once that she's tempted. I'm not.)
But I strongly disagree with the gist of the piece, particularly the way it was framed and the criteria she and the rest of the media are clearly imposing upon him.
Here is her lead:
I'm not ready to declare Wesley Clark's candidacy doomed after his embarrassing afternoon of free-association with political reporters Thursday, and his flip-flop on Friday, but it's kind of tempting. It's tempting because Clark's melange of candor and equivocation and "probablys" and "I'm not sures" captured in the interviews, most notably on the enormous and divisive issue of Iraq, showed he's not ready for prime time. And it's tempting because it would just feel good, in a way. A dead-in-the-water Clark candidacy would be a great rebuke to party big shots who are trying to foist him on Democrats because he's more "electable" than Howard Dean or John Kerry. We're going to see about that. It should be interesting.
The rebuke to party leaders gives me the shivers. More so because I've heard echoes of that sentiment all weekend. Here I am celebrating that for the first time in my lifetime a single party has spawned not one--rare enough--but two leading candidates, either one of whom I would be thrilled to see in the White House, and each of whom has the potential to beat the pants off the jackass in there now. And journalists are ready to ritually sacrifice one of them three days into his campaign just to stick it to the party bosses.
I enjoy sticking it to party bosses as much as the next guy, but keep your hands off our candidates. And don't think Joan Walsh is alone. The media has wasted no time in focusing on Clark as the answer to the party bosses' prayers. Many of them are jumping up and down over a fresh answer to Dean, but so what? The "top-down groundswell behind [Clark]" that Joan mentions is a johnny-come-lately response to a bottom-up groundswell underway for months. The Draft Clark campaigns were not organized by party bigwigs as far as I can tell, and the 25,000 people registered for Clark meetups didn't get there because the DLC told them to. I went to a Clark meetup early this month, and it was all self-appointed volunteers, virtually all political neophytes, putting an organization together on their own just like at the Dean meetups I've been to.
I have been watching the Clark movement slowly build for probably six months now, and I have a pretty good idea of how it developed. And it was not some Eleventh Hour wet dream some cigar-smoking hacks conspired to stick us with in some smoky back room.
One quick visit to meetup.com tells you most of what you need to know about the origins of this movement. Wesley Clark had nearly double the meetup numbers of any other candidate except Dean (who is way ahead) before he even declared. That's astounding. And it has nothing to do with party leadership.
Wesley Clark is a man many of us have admired for many years. I personally remember seeing him on TV during the Kosovo war, being repeatedly taken aback by the wisdom and candor of what he was saying, and thinking, "Why couldn't somebody like that run for president?" And then saying it to people.
I don't know why so many of us had the same thought about someone so unlikely to run for the office, or how it managed to combine with enough receptivity on his part to gather enough momentum to snowball into this, but it did.
I am so sick of windbag bullshitters like Gephardt and Kerry, and have been so refreshed and impressed every time I hear Dean speak and I feel exactly the same way with Clark. Both movements came from the people, and one of them scared the shit out of party bosses, the other did not, so they have jumped on the second one to stop the first. Fine, that's their prerogative. That doesn't make him theirs.
I see something higly revolting underway right now: The media stepping in to hijack a people's campaign and rechristen in a Party Boss campaign. What a load of crap is that? The media seems poised to project the entire Clark campaign through the preposterous lens of The Insider's Answer. He may be the answer to their prayer, but he is not their creation.
(And though Joan and many others late this week published before the Newsweek poll showing Clark vaulting all the way to first in a national poll, those also indicate broad grassroots support. It wasn't party leaders telling those poll respondents no to name Clark. It's unlikely many of them even knew The Bosses were starting to gather behind the man. These are presumably people who have been watching Clark on TV for years, maybe reading his book, and finding him wise and trustworthy.)
So now we get to watch Big Media take on Big Party Politicians in a grudge match to see who controls the candidate-screening process, using the Clark campaign as the proxy? Fuck that. It's disgusting enough already watching those two groups and a few others effectively hijack the political process so that most of the candidates are effectively pronounced dead before most voters even catch sight of them.
Go out back and wrestle in the actual mud if you want to stick it to the party bosses. Just keep your hands off our candidates.
That's problem one with the piece--and the general media response to Clark. The other is much more fundamental:
We've got this somewhat assinine process for picking presidential candidates, much of which consists of running the gauntlet of journalistic grilling. I have never been convinced that it is an effective way to winnow the field, and the public nearly always seems disgusted with the results, but it has proven harder the change than campaign finance reform, because the people with the power would sooner die than reliquish it. And the people with much of the early power are the press.
They got a little bolder about it this year with repeated references to The Russert Primary. Great. That mypoic middlebrow egomaniac is exactly who I would pick to grant extra-constitutional authority to screen out candidates who don't conform to his idiotic ideals. And don't think for a minute that little "joke" wasn't dead on. They started referring to The Russert Primary precisely because he and his brethren--but especially him--have come to see themselves as the screening committee.
(And while they never manage to get their darling in, they nearly always manage to eliminate anyone they think "unelectable" simply by making him invisible, though this time Dean made an end-run around them through the internet.)
This process has grown so ingrained that we don't even question the logic of Joan's piece--and of a bit of my own commentary in the past few days: If Clark can't run the press gauntlet effectively, then "he's not ready for prime time."
What? This ridiculous press-gaunlet thing has become so ingrained that we have come to treat it like the third requirement in the constitution: Must be 35 years old, a native-born American, and able to successfully navigate the press guantlet.
Who the hell decreed that that's the third requirement for president?
I think it's particularly relevant in this case, because we have someone stepping in from outside the usual system. Thank God! We could use a few more. If Ross Perot had not been a little paranoid--and maybe even with the paranoia--he might have really shaken things up in the White House. I think we really missed out when he chose not to join a major party and give himself a real shot. (Though I imagine the press would have gazed into their same retarded crystal balls, judged him incapable of clearing all the conventional hurdles in all the conventional routes to the nomination and written him off before he had a chance.)
I'm way too far from NY to assess how Bloomberg has been doing as mayor there, but the skills and perspective he brought in from the outside seem to be working tremendously to his advantage there. David Brooks wrote a highly persuasive commentary in this month's Atlantic, as to while members of Congress make such lousy presidential candidates (and why 49 of the last 49 have lost). I think it's great to have someone further outside the process than a governor running. Especially when it's someone as wise and insightful and honest as Wesley Clark.
It's refreshing to find someone other than a hardened, sold-out, trained-bullshitter politician running for president. I don't buy in for one minute that the only capable leader of the country is someone already ground down to spineless bullshitter by a decade or more inside the vile system. I think a lot of people feel that way! I think that's one big reason Clark is polling so high so soon. A lot of people are looking for someone very different, from a different background.
So guess what: he's not yet trained as a bullshitter, who will pretend he has all the answers and that they're all black and white. Should we be surprised by a little equivocation? Granted, we got a mouthful on Thursday, but so what? He's used to considering both sides and wrestling with them, and that's healthy. What I saw Thursday was a guy who's more used to honest intellectual discussion where he admits that he's highly conflicted on a complex issue. I like bringing a deep thinker like that into the white house.
The key is, he can't stay that way. He is going to have to make a transition as president, because he's going to need to speak with one voice and sell the country on a clear agenda. I'm sure he did get those four stars by being afraid of making a decision. What is vastly different about army command was that it was not such a marketing job. The pres has to be Spokesperson In Chief, rallying the country behind him without giving orders. He's not going to rally anyone by changing his mind back and forth.
So fine, he has a transition to make. But why do we expect him to make that transistion on the second day? We're dealing with a different kind of person with a different kind of background. Don't cut him off at the knees because we got what we asked for.
And if he's anything like Bush, he's not going to spend much time running the press gauntlet as president. He will be able to be conflicted in the oval office and the cabinet room and speak his mind and debate the issues and confess his fears with his national security staff. God, how refreshing is that? And he will have people like that press person Mary who's assistance he called for to help him figure out how and when to present that message to the people.
Are we really selecting a president on the basis of how strong his marketing instincts are? How instinctively well he knows how to deal with the press? I'm sure it feeds the press ego to no end to choose that way. But I have watched this man for many years, seen him in a varitey of different situations and heard him speak on a wealth of different issues. And I'm might impressed and so are a lot of other people, and we are going to be damn pissed if the press pronounces him dead and squeezes him out of the process just because he didn't play it's game well.
Dutton (Penguin) in early 2009. 
