Fire in the Belly
Is Clark His Own Man?
by Tamara Baker

Sept. 17, 2003 -- SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA (APJ.US) -- So, who is this Wesley Clark guy?

Yeah, I know -- he was the head of NATO during President Clinton's time in office. But really -- who is he?

Does he have his own thoughts, his own views, his own philosophy on how a nation should be run? Is he running because he, Wesley Clark, really wants to become our next President?

Or is he not really his own man, but just the last gasp of the elitist Democratic Leadership Council's "Stop Dean" brigade?

A hint can be found in Eric Boehlert's recent Salon article , in the words of MoveOn.org's Eli Pariser: "I think part of what you're seeing is a split between the Democratic elites and Democratic base. Elites are less comfortable with the candidates we have now."

And they're especially not comfortable with Howard Dean.

Why?

Well, the officially-stated reason is that "Dean's too liberal to win" -- a statement that is laughably amusing, in view of the large numbers of independent voters drawn to him, as well as the non-stop attacks made on him by Dennis Kucinich. And this reason, as even former Dean-hata Ruy Teixeira admits , has become non-operative in the face of Dean's excellent campaign work and his astounding ability to raise cash.

In other words, the real issue isn't whether or not Howard Dean is electable. Dean obviously is very electable, because he's the only one of the Democratic candidates who draws support -- and money -- from non-trivial numbers of sensible Republicans and the previously-apolitical, as well as energizing the party's base. (Go to a Dean Meetup sometime and ask everyone there if they'd ever been involved in a Democratic political campaign before this year. Chances are good that 50% of them will say "no.")

What Dean is not, however, is someone who was bought and paid for by the elite conservative-Republican-emulators and insurance-industry flacks over at the DLC.

Their candidate is Joe Lieberman, the same no-hoper who dragged down Gore's ticket in 2000 and who is currently sinking like a lead balloon in all the early primary states. Because of this, Lieberman's anti-Dean rhetoric has achieved a Karl-Rove-like vicious disingenuousness, as he attacks from the right while Kucinich attacks Dean from the left.

In the past, when high-ranking military men have run for the presidency, the irony is that these men, so strong and proven on the battlefield, have all-too-often been reduced to weak political pawns by their backers (Grant being the prime example) or are simply too honorable to fight and win against dishonorable men (McGovern's loss to Nixon being a case in point).

To judge from what I've seen and heard about General Clark's lack of fire in the belly, and his ambivalence about entering the race -- an ambivalence that, so the scuttlebutt goes, is rooted in his wife's dislike of Washington political games and her fear that the inevitable mudslinging will rip apart their family -- he, not Dean, may be the real McGovern in the 2004 race.

Politics, especially at the national level, requires fire in the belly. You have to WANT the office for which you're running -- you can't just be running because your well-connected friends want you to run. History has shown that when candidates don't have the fire in the belly, they either go down in ugly defeat like McGovern, or their administrations are riddled with corruption, like Grant's and Shrub's, as their friends take over the reins of power from the candidates and use the power to line their own pockets.

So far, there's only one candidate who has that fire in the belly, and his name's not Wesley Clark.