CLARK'S TRUE COLORS
Matt Taibbi  

You can see something in the eyes of most all the Democratic candidates: the pugnacity of Howard Dean, the idealism of Dennis Kucinich, even (surprisingly) the elaborate sense of humor just under the surface of Joe Lieberman.

Not Wesley Clark. His eyes are blank. Like a turtle resting on a rock in the middle of a pond, he simply seems never to move, no matter how long you stare. But then, just as you're about to pack up your picnic basket and go home, you catch him: His head pops out, and he slides off into the water...

Whitefield, New Hampshire, October 25. Four of the candidates--Kerry, Dean, Kucinich and Clark--are addressing New Hampshire and national union leaders at the annual state AFL-CIO conference. The setting is a beautiful, Shining-esque luxury hotel called the Mountain View Grand Resort and Spa, perched on a hill at the northern edge of the White Mountain range. In bad weather it would take police hours to reach the crime scene. "All that's missing is the hedge maze," cracked Gail Kinney, representing the National Writers Union.

Each candidate had a half-hour to speak and answer labor-related panel questions. Kerry went first and did so-so. Dean went later and did better. Kucinich was the star, leaving to uproarious applause; he sounded like the second coming of Sam Gompers. Last in line came the unknown, Wesley Clark. And what a very strange performance it was.

In a room full of people in satin jackets embroidered with union acronyms, Clark entered flanked by a pair of boosters dressed in shiny red VFW jackets. Seeming harried, he gave a short address that was laden with military metaphors: "I'm going to go on the warpath to stop that," "We have to attack on the employment front" and so on. As his speech went on, it became painfully clear that Clark had the idea of workers confused with soldiers. "As I stand here today, I tell you that in the Army, we knew that the unit was never any better than its parts," he said. "The generals weren't any better than the soldiers. When you're in uniform, you're part of a team..."

Heads turned in shock all throughout the audience. What the hell was he talking about? But Clark plowed on. He began to recount his biography, noting that the Army had allowed him to "be all he could be." Five minutes later, he said it again. "Every part of this society," he said, "has to get the support that they need to be all they can be."

After the conference, I chased after him in the parking lot. "General," I said. "You're not seriously going to make 'Be all you can be' your campaign slogan, are you?"

He smiled, then gave me a little nudge with his elbow, apparently thinking I was with him on this one. "Son," he said, "it is my campaign slogan."

Afterward, Arnie Alpert of UNITE laughed about Clark's performance. "Next thing you know, it'll be the Campaign of One," he said.

I went the extra mile to cover Clark, even parting with a significant amount of my valuable time on this earth to volunteer, under an assumed name, for his campaign. Desperate measures were required, because solving the Clark puzzle is a desperate problem. It is not easy to explain how a man who voted for Reagan and Nixon, was a speechwriter for Al Haig, worked in the Ford White House alongside Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and was a passionate supporter of the Vietnam War could become a darling of the liberal antiwar crowd. Thirty-five years ago, hundreds of thousands of people took angrily to the streets, universities were taken over and a sitting President was hounded from the White House because of people like Wesley Clark.

Now Clark is presenting himself as a White Knight to the modern version of that same demographic, and he is being welcomed with open arms. He appeals to roughly the same class of people as Howard Dean, with a subtle difference. The Dean crowd self-consciously sees itself as a political force. When Dean tells supporters, "You have the power!" they holler like banshees, creating a Mike-Dukakis-teach-in-meets-Who-Let-the-Dogs-Out? kind of effect. But the chief crowd ritual in the Clark campaign is that of a group of hushed, groveling supplicants staring dewy-eyed at their savior Caesar. The vibe is all about ceding power, not empowerment.

The imagery of the stalwart warrior reluctantly accepting the laurels offered by the Draft Clark movement is very consciously encouraged by the Clark campaign, and especially by Clark himself, who makes no secret of being a student of this kind of history. At a press conference in Concord in early November, Clark joked that "there hasn't been a successful draft movement since Cincinnatus."

Clark brings up Cincinnatus a lot. He was the good Roman dictator who, as a very old man, defeated the Aequi barbarians and saved the empire. Lots of obvious parallels there--if you happen to think Thomas Jefferson's United States is a place where the people ought to be longing for a benevolent dictator. That said, the Cincinnatus imagery seems to me to be a decoy. The throne Clark is really after is Caesar's. Once you've watched Clark sheepishly ascend to the podium after an introduction by a Draft Clark veteran, and shake his head and say, "They really made it impossible for me to say no"--once you've seen that act five or six times, you're not left with any doubt about where it comes from.

Snapshot from the Clark campaign. Nashua, New Hampshire, October 21. Clark had been scheduled that day to give a "major economic address," but that was scratched, so to speak, due to an illness that left him without his voice. To fill the time slot, the Clark staffers scheduled one of the classic seen-but-not-heard events so many of the candidates favor: the "downtown walk." The general was going to stroll up and down the main drag in Nashua, allowing the press to take dramatic pictures of him surveying the impulse-buy counters of local stores.

It was pouring rain when Clark arrived. After a brief handshaking scrum outside Nashua's city hall, he took off down the rainy street in search of photo ops. Three dozen journalists raced after him, in Keystone Kops fashion.

At this kind of campaign event I follow the old adage: Don't run down the hill and screw one of the cows, walk down and screw them all. When a candidate does a photo op in a store or restaurant, I go, have a leisurely lunch and then come back later and ask the proprietor to re-create the whole event as though it were a crime scene. At a diner in Claremont I even got a waitress to draw chalk outlines of Joe Lieberman's feet. In this relaxed atmosphere, your interview subject always recalls the story with more feeling.

At a Nashua bakery called Patisserie Bleu later that day, owner Jacqui Pressinger went through the motions of Clark's appearance, walking from the door to the counter. "He came in, stood right here, and ordered an 'Everything' bar," she said. "But then--he was whispering--he leaned over and told me and the girls that actually, his favorite dessert was a napoleon."

"You're kidding," I said.

"Yup," she said. "Then he started talking about West Point. He said something about eating a lot of napoleons at West Point."

"That's incredible," I said.

"Mmm-hm," she said. "I love pastry stories!"