Beating Texas One More Time

     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.


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