Handicapping Clark - I'm not

Handicapping Clark - I'm not of the opinion that Wesley Clark is either:

• The anti-christ
• not better than the Nine Dwarves.

I also don't think he's going to be a threat for the nomination, much less the Oval Office.

Ben Domench does a fine job of explaining why. Here's a good excerpt:

Clark fills a needed niche for the Democrats, but I also believe that he's doomed to lose this race for the nomination, for a couple of reasons:

-Clark is bad on the stump. He's wooden and looks short. He has all the marks of an inexperienced candidate, and he's doomed to make mistakes (the same kind he made as a talking head) when he has to respond to other wannabes.

-Clark has a genuine dislike for domestic policy. He just doesn't care that much about it, and he strikes me as a guy who will hate kowtowing to the activist groups that already love Dean and Gephardt naturally. And in the end, this campaign is not going to be about the war: it's going to be about the economy. On that ground, Dean is strongest (as an outsider with budget balancing experience), and he'll win every time they go toe-to-toe. The last time anyone won an election on foreign policy issues was (arguably) Nixon in 1968 - Reagan had the domestic policy villains of Carter and Mondale, Bush I had Dukakis' Massachusetts plan, Clinton had "the economy stupid," and Bush II had tax and education reform. War or no, recession or no, 2004 is not going to break the trend, and that's bad news for Clark.

Also, Clark is no Ike. While he's a relatively moderate, Catholic/Baptist/Jewish southerner, he has no lock on the military:

-Clark has made many, many enemies inside and outside the military. He has no natural base among military personnel, and there are a lot of four star generals who are retired now that will come out of the woodwork once Clark gains steam to criticize him and his skewed view of Iraq.

Finally - and this is from the "Truth Hurts" department - Domenech hoists Clark by the same petard that my own quixotic hope, Condi Rice, is on:

-Finally, the Presidency is not an entry-level political job. The last time we elected someone President with a resume devoid of elected politics was Ike - and Bosnia was not Normandy. We don't elect resumes, otherwise Dick Lugar and George Mitchell would've been elected President a long time ago. As much as we on the right like to gab about Condi Rice, the fact is that she wouldn't survive a race for President at this point. She needs to win something else first. Clark is the Dem version of Condi - a very smart person with an atypical and astoundingly good resume. But he'll end up facing the same result as McClellan [Union general George McClellan, who ran as a Democrat against Abraham Lincoln in 1864] in the electoral field.

Read the whole thing.

Posted by Mitch at September 19, 2003 06:02 AM