Pardon my provincialism,
but part of Gen.Wesley Clark's hometown appeal is the opportunity
his candidacy gives Arkansans to beat Texas
again. The David & Goliath aspect of the Razorbacks
vs. Longhorns sports rivalry provides a
window into the Arkansas soul. I must have talked to half a
dozen people at Clark's Little Rock announcement
of his presidential hopes who compared it to
the Hogs recent 38-28 victory in
Austin.
"We do this every 12
years," somebody joked. "It's an Arkansas tradition." Indeed it was on
a
similarly perfect autumn day in October
1991 that my wife and I encountered Bill and Hillary Clinton
at a pre-game party outside War Memorial
Stadium.Clinton was engaged in his faintly risible statewide
tour asking voters to let him drop his
promise to serve a full term as governor to seek the presidency.
It was one of the
oddest days in recent Arkansas history. That morning, we'd learned that
the
venerable Arkansas Gazette had folded,
replaced by the implacably Republican Democrat-Gazette.
That afternoon, the last Arkansas-Texas
football game in the old Southwest Conference was played.
After the Razorbacks won, players, band
members, cheerleaders and fans lingered on the field,
celebrating and lamenting the end of an
era.
At the pre-game
party, Diane, a Pryor loyalist and no big Clinton fan, had given the Big
Dog a hug
and told him to go for it. Raised and educated
in Arkansas, the prospect of a homegrown president
meant a lot to her. I remember asking Hillary
if they'd lost their minds. Didn't she realize, I asked, that
their private lives would be laid open
like a fish on a cutting board? We had a brief, animated exchange
that taught me a lot about her fear and
loathing of the press. I've often thought about it since that day.
Seeing both Clintons
as life-sized figures, I failed to comprehend the magnitude of their ambition.
Nobody who spends as much time alone with
books and animals as I do possibly could. Nor could
anybody have anticipated how gaining the
White House would turn them into symbols: media-magnified
projections of the hopes and fears of millions.
Nor how far Washington political journalism--pushed by
right-wing, Daddy Warbucks cash, and pulled
by the lure of the kind of sublunary fame available to
pundits in the cable TV era--would descend
to the tabloid ethics of the cult of celebrity. (I've an essay
on this theme in the October Harper's Magazine.)
Clark's campaign
could well hinge upon how well he understands the Washington press. So
far,
he's played shrewdly upon his media image
as a Democrat whose credentials in the post-9/11 era
might have been dreamed up by Central Casting:
first in his West Point class, Rhodes Scholar,
decorated Vietnam Vet, four-star general,
NATO Supreme Commander, handsome, articulate,
self-confident, straight as an arrow, etc.
If Clark wins the nomination, we won't be seeing any TV ads
showing President Junior prancing across
the USS Abraham Lincoln in his tailored flyboy costume.
Clark clearly understands
that trashing that impeccable image would be Job #1 for the GOP.
He told an Esquire interviewer "the
ultimate consideration for anyone running for president against
George Bush [is] 'how much pain you can
bear.'" His enemies will try to portray him as a real-life
equivalent of Gen. Jack D. Ripper, the
loony megalomaniac from "Dr. Strangelove." Even before
Clark announced, the Washington Post ran
a profile featuring some extraordinarily venomous
quotes--all anonymous--portraying him as
tempermental, vain and manipulative.
"I have watched
him at close range for 35 years, in which I have looked at the allegation,
and I
found it totally unsupported," responded
Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey... "That's not to say he isn't
ambitious and quick. He is probably among
the top five most talented I've met in my life. I think
he is a national treasure who has a lot
to offer the country."
Evaluating this
stuff, it's helpful to remember the sheer nastiness of Pentagon infighting.
When it comes to office politics, soldiers
are worse than professors.
The alternate GOP
line of attack advanced by New York Times columnist William Safire --that
Arkansan Clark is merely a stalking horse
for Hillary Clinton's conspiratorial plotting--will get them
nowhere. Besides conflicting with the mad
ambition theme, Clark's too clearly nobody's puppet.
But where Clark
can go badly wrong is by trusting the self-promoting stars and starlets
of the
Washington press. As a presidential candidate,
he's dealing with a different breed than monthly
magazine writers who've composed admiring
profiles. No more open-ended conversations, or
thinking out loud in the presence of reporters
like the ones for the New York Times and
Washington Post who turned his perfectly
consistent--if imprecisely expressed--thoughts about
Iraq into a widely-hyped "flip-flop" last
week.
Sad to say, he needs to keep them at arms length and feed them nothing but soundbites.