| Wes Clark was the first, and maybe last, Presidential candidate I ever really believed in. I came into politics in 2002, first blogging on Dailykos back when it was a moveable type site, and then on my own site which I set up to put out more of my own thoughts with a college roommate. I was at the time working at a small software company as a product manager, wondering what I was going to do with my life while also slowly understanding that the political shock I had first seen in 1998 - the impeachment - was just the first of many shocks to the system I had believed in. After the 2002 midterms, which I half-expected would be a Democratic victory, I figured I would try to have an impact.
Living in Boston at the time, I marched to the John Kerry for President office where I began phone-banking along with all the other volunteers. Mostly the New Hampshire yelled at me about one of two things, John Kerry's vote for the war or why I was calling them a year before the primary. The operations were in shambles, and it was clearly the province of people who were in politics because they would have jobs in the White House and had not a further reason to be where they were, with the possible exception of gravity. My conversations on the blogs were much more exciting and interesting, though at the time I still didn't consider them 'real', whatever that was.
As I continued to phone bank, and go to New Hampshire on weekends, I realized that we weren't making any progress, that the Dean campaign, which no one took seriously, had busloads of volunteers and a compelling message. More than that, the Dean campaign functioned as an umbrella under which thousands of people could discover and grow themselves politically and ideologically. If the staid and stale atmosphere of that Kerry office was epitomized by a 22 year old volunteer director yelling at me not to go off script when talking to a New Hampshire voter, the Dean campaign seemed to be about 'yes'. Want to set up a website? Go for it. Want to organize a trip? Sure. Want to beat up Kerry at the Massachusetts Democratic Party Convention? Make it happen. Anything seemed possible for the Dean campaign, even as my memos were forwarded to the IT department, where they languished with the well-meaning, intelligent, and powerless Kerry people.
So I quit. For a few months, I started working on the Draft Clark campaign and the Kerry volunteer gig at the same time, but eventually the Kerry stuff tapered off. I couldn't get into Dean, but Clark appealed to me as an intellectual who thoughtfully disagreed with the invasion of Iraq out of a sense of coherent strategic principle. I read his Waging Modern War and Winning Modern Wars, and took away from it a sense of vision, one he obviously has. Clark has always been a much more progressive figure in the Democratic Party than anyone else in major party politics. He speaks out constantly about Iran, and has criticized AIPAC. When asked how he would pay for his proposals, he would answer something along the lines of 'I'm going to cut the military budget; I know how to do it and the Generals know I know how to do it'. That just doesn't happen in the Democratic Party, the announcement of a rollback of the military industrial complex. He believes in universal health care because it worked for him and the people he commanded, not out of a sense of polling or academic insight. He is the shift of the professional and military class towards the Democratic Party, a Jim Webb type figure with less of an economically populist capacity for messaging. And he has also commanded the military during the last war that America won.
Anyway, Clark ran a terrible campaign, but in retrospect that's not a surprise. Campaigning is a skill, being a politician is a skill, and he was an amateur at it. He's much better now. Still, the campaign and messaging he ran did allow the umbrella of experimentation, the yes quality, that the Dean campaign also had. Many Clarkies became innovative internet political organizers, including Lowell Feld, who went on to help Jim Webb, and the founders of Actblue.
So Clark announcing for Clinton matters to me, because I trust his judgment and his capacity for vision. I don't support Clinton, I don't support her policies, and I don't expect to support her candidacy in this primary. But if Clark believes that she can meet the challenges necessary to be a President who can help America, then that is something I have to take very seriously. Moreover, should Clark hold a cabinet level position or a VP slot, it would show that Clinton is moving in a much more progressive direction, and that is something I would be quite pleased to see. |
