For months they were in on the world's greatest secret. While other Democratic Party insiders and Internet aficionados toiled for Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and former Gov. Howard Dean (D-Vt.), they held out hope that retired Gen. Wesley Clark might enter the presidential race. No one paid them much mind. But they hung on Clark's every word, read his book, Waging Modern War, with reverent care, and extrapolated his policies and positions from casual phrases the general dropped while serving as a war analyst for CNN. When they heard rumors that Clark was concerned about his ability to build a campaign organization, they started recruiting national coordinators. When they heard that he was worried about raising money, they created an online pledge system to show him that folks would donate, if only he would run. When they rounded up media reports about him, they even used the online term for when people take famous figures and then write their own stories about them: "Fan Fic."
Then, just one day after Clark's announcement that he would seek the Democratic presidential nomination, some of them -- instead of celebrating "mission accomplished" -- started to whine.
Like cool kids angered that their favorite cult band had signed on with a major label and started churning out pop drivel, some former members of the Draft Clark movement are already charging the onetime general with selling out. His nascent campaign, they say, has been taken over by mainstream political operatives who are minimizing the influence of the draft movement, dismantling the draft sites and slowly destroying the Internet community that, for the past six months, served as an incubator for Clark's then-hypothetical presidential bid. Even more disturbingly, others charge, the professional operatives may have been planning this all along.
"They systematically dismantled the Draft Clark movement and they are running a traditional campaign, and you can already see that," says 25-year-old Matt Stoller, a blogger who helped run the United For Clark Web site and ClarkSphere.com, while also publishing the daily Clark Tribune newsletter about all things Clark.
Stirling Newberry, 36, who runs DraftClark.com, used his Web site last week to disseminate -- and decry -- reports of Clark's newfound "suckage."
"We signed on for Draft Clark, not Draft Mary," an unsigned post on DraftClark.com read Friday, referring to Clark's cry to his press aide Mary Jacoby of "Mary, help!" when asked his position on the Iraq War by The New York Times.
Two pro-Clark sites, ClarkRecruits.com and DigitalClark.com, have already been shut down, and a third, DraftWesleyClark.com, is slated to be disbanded within the month, according to its founder. ClarkRecruits.com had helped would-be volunteers link up with other Clark supporters in their areas; now volunteers have to fill out a form on the candidate's official site (Clark04.com) and wait for the main campaign to figure out what to do with them. And on Saturday, DigitalClark.com was shut down at the behest of the Clark campaign. "Our apologies -- this website, and its content, is no longer available. For information about General Clark and his presidential campaign, please visit www.clark04.com," read a message on the site. DigitalClark had provided visitors with downloadable video files of past Clark media appearances; that information is no longer available. According to Ellen Dana Nagler of Santa Barbara, Calif., who maintained the video archives, the campaign was concerned about the possibility that the site violated copyright laws and prevailed upon its managers to shut it down.
"They are destroying the parts of the draft movement that worked really well and they are transforming the draft movement into people who want to lick envelopes," says one worried member of the movement. "They are rebuilding the Kerry campaign with a better candidate."
That's not at all what the campaign intends to do, says Kym Spell, Clark's newly hired communications director who until last week, in fact, worked for Kerry. PoliticsNH.com reported that Spell left the Kerry camp after "her mentor, Chris Lehane" quit. "The general feels very strongly that his candidacy came about as a result of the very dedicated, passionate work of these people around the country," Spell said late Sunday, her second day with the campaign. "We don't have the time or the desire to build a big national campaign structure. We've got a lot of folks in various states and we're going to use them. This is not going to be a conventional campaign."
How well the campaign will work depends in part on whether Clark operatives successfully integrate the members of the Draft Clark movement into their strategy, and how receptive the campaign is to the fractious, unruly brand of politics favored by grass-roots Democratic activists. When former President Bill Clinton chided Democrats in Iowa earlier this month to "fall in love," then "fall in line," many thought he was contrasting the affection among the Democratic base for Dean with the grit-your-teeth discipline needed to support one of the putatively electable candidates.
Like Dean supporters, though, members of the Draft Clark movement have a serious gut-level affection for their candidate. They're "like stallions on steroids at the gate waiting to break," says Nagler. Even so, it's not clear that they will be capable of falling in line or willing to try. The Clark campaign faces a unique challenge in trying to corral the free-spirited energy of its grass-roots supporters without stifling them. Signs so far suggest that it won't be easy.
In Little Rock, Ark., last week, members of the two leading draft groups, DraftWesleyClark.com and DraftClark2004.com, squared off in the tiny office of Wesley K. Clark & Associates. Built for four, it was occupied by more than a dozen, while newly arrived campaign professionals were dispatched to look for a larger patch of real estate.
The tensions between the two groups had been building for months, ever since DraftClark2004.com split off from DraftWesleyClark.com late this past spring. By the day after Clark announced his candidacy, John Hlinko, DraftWesleyClark.com's founder and the man who held the keys to the single most valuable property the draft movement could bring to the campaign, was reportedly ready to walk.
Hlinko had worked since April 10 to build a package that included 40,000 e-mail addresses, $1.875 million in pledges and $30,000 to $40,000 in cash that he was now ready to hand over to the campaign, depending on what Federal Election Commission (FEC) rules allowed. He'd started the relationship between the Clark movement and Meetup.com, now 27,000-members strong; his group had paid for the radio and TV ads the movement has run; and he'd hired Zogby International to conduct a Clark-friendly "blind bio" poll to encourage the former general to enter the race. (A blind-bio poll compares candidates by résumé rather than by name.) But like many members of the draft movement, Hlinko is a little quirky. Dedicated, well-spoken and skilled at what he does, the last presidential bid he worked on was the joke campaign of actor John Cusack for president. In his spare time, Hlinko runs Act for Love, an online dating service for liberals; the site's motto is "take action to get action."
But now, after all his hard work, he found the nascent Clark campaign overflowing with territorial members of DraftClark2004.com, led by veteran campaign operative Jason McIntosh, a protégé of Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe, whose assistant he'd been for three years.
Substantial parts of the draft movement, in fact, were led not by regular citizens inspired by Clark but by public-relations professionals and political operatives with deep ties to the Democratic Party and the Clinton administration. During the past week, it has slowly dawned on some of the less politically experienced members of the Draft Clark movement that this might not be purely coincidental.
"My operative theory is that a bunch of political insiders decided to recruit a candidate and created a fake draft movement to pressure him," says Newberry. On its Web site, DraftClark2004.com describes itself as comprising "passionate Democrats with extensive political experience" who want Clark to run. "There's nothing wrong with that," says Jacoby. "They had a political background; that simply explains why they had an interest in politics."
In late July, DraftClark2004.com stated that it had "retained" Michael Frisby, a PR professional who had covered the Clinton administration for The Wall Street Journal and has since taken on such high-profile clients as Chandra Levy's parents. Hlinko's own PR company, Extreme Campaigns, specializes in conducting nontraditional offensives not unlike the draft movement; his group, DraftWesleyClark.com, was located in the offices of former Clinton press secretary Mike McCurry's Internet campaign company, Grassroots Enterprise, Inc.
Brent Blackaby, another DraftClark2004.com leader and a friend of McIntosh's since they worked together on the 1996 Clinton-Al Gore re-election campaign, says he has worked as both a high-tech marketing pro and for McAuliffe. DraftClark2004.com also brought on Joseph Birkenstock, the Clinton-era chief counsel for the Democratic National Committee, as its legal adviser. "We want [Clark] to know that if he decides to run, there are people out there willing to work for him," Blackaby told the The New York Times in July, in what was probably an advertisement of his own availability.
A number of backdoor channels of communication had been kept open between the draft movement's members and people who were close to the retired general. Josh Margulies, Hlinko's brother-in-law and partner at DraftWesleyClark.com, is friendly with Clark's son, Wesley Clark Jr., a Los Angeles screenwriter. So is Markos Zuniga Moulitsas, who founded the DraftClark.com Web site but now works for Dean. Joshua Lerner, a friend of Wes Jr.'s who spent the July 4th weekend with the Clark family, joined the DraftClark2004.com movement over the summer. During his Sept. 17 campaign announcement, Clark spoke at a lectern brandishing the name of AmericansForClark.com; that URL had been registered to Lerner on June 28, according to the domain registry Better-WhoIs.com.
AmericansforClark.com now redirects to Clark04.com, the official Clark campaign site, and Clark04.com, created Dec. 15, 2002, shifted over to Lerner's server, NS1.LOGPILE.COM, on Sept. 16 -- the day before Clark announced. Clark reportedly spent Sept. 16 meeting with members of DraftWesleyClark.com, Jacoby and other strategists, according to The Boston Globe. Other sites hosted by Lerner include Clarksphere.com, UnitedForClark.com, WesleyClarkWeblog.com, ClarkCoalition.com and AmericansForClark.com, according to the domain registry AllWhoIs.com. So were the two sites that have been shut down, DigitalClark.com and ClarkRecruits.com. Logpile.com itself, meanwhile, redirects to ClarkCoalition.com, which refers users to all the other movement sites. "Many of the sites are sitting on [Lerner's] servers," explains Paul Wilson, 37, a member of the Draft Clark movement from Albany, N.Y. "He offered space."
Jeff Dailey, a leader of DraftClark2004.com and Arkansans for Clark, is the son of Little Rock Mayor Jim Dailey and a former Clinton White House staffer. He told me in August that he joined the movement because, among other reasons, "my father has known Gen. Clark for five or six or seven years. I've always heard about him." In Little Rock, Dailey worked as a communications consultant. Clark's new Arkansas press aide Jacoby quit her post as a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times to work for Clark; Jacoby's father, Jon Jacoby, is a good friend of Clark's, according to Spell, and knows him from Little Rock, where he is a director and executive of the Clinton-allied Stephens Group, Inc. and a senior executive at Stephens, Inc., the investment firm where Clark worked after returning to civilian life. Mary Jacoby has never worked on a political campaign before -- though she did once work as a file clerk at Hillary Clinton's Rose Law Firm, subject of the Whitewater investigation, according to 1996 reports -- and has extensive experience as a political reporter.
Though the draft movement spread to locales across the country, the idea for it was first floated publicly by Clark's friends in Little Rock. "Arkansas friends of native son Wesley Clark, a former NATO supreme commander, are feeding 'Draft Clark' talk in hopes he runs for president in 2004," reported U.S. News & World Report in October 2002, more than six months before the two main draft movement organizations materialized. In August 2003, AlterNet reported, "In Little Rock, Clark confidants say that he told them several months ago he wouldn't run for president unless he was drafted. His request has definitely become a reality." DraftClark2004.com filed papers with the FEC on June 17, and DraftWesleyClark.com registered with the FEC on July 18. They are the only two Draft Clark organizations to have filed with the FEC.
Several members of the movement told me in August that they knew Clark wanted to be drafted like Dwight Eisenhower was, and, because they wanted Clark to run, they created the movement to give him what he wanted.
The suspicion that the Draft Clark movement was something less than a purely organic groundswell of support has been entertained seriously by political veterans. University of Virginia professor Larry Sabato told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in mid-August that, in the paper's words, he "suspects the draft-Wesley Clark Internet movement may have been more planned and coordinated than has been told." Sabato was directly quoted as saying, "I think the real story of this is yet to be written. I don't believe in spontaneous political movements."
Whether jumpstarted through the goading of Clark's Arkansas friends or actively fueled by more calculating minds, by the time Clark finally did announce, the Draft Clark movement had become something genuinely grass roots and broader than any of its originators. But its two main factions were at each other's throats.
The conflict, which had simmered unbeknown to Clark or to some of the campaign pros who find themselves confronting it, is finally out in the open. Tensions did not subside last week until Donnie Fowler Jr., the former field director of the 2000 Gore-Joe Lieberman campaign and -- more importantly for a nontraditional campaign a former vice president of high-tech executives' association TechNet, stepped in and smoothed the ruffled feathers. Fowler is acting as Clark's campaign manager, but has not yet been formally hired, says Jacoby.
Also suddenly exposed was the fact that the draft movement's massive hype machine seems to have oversold what it could genuinely bring to a Clark campaign. "From what I understand, they basically have an e-mail list of around 200 people," one member of the Clark camp in Arkansas says of the resources DraftClark2004.com brought to the campaign. "They claimed they had this big, pyramidal structure when in fact they had branded anarchy," says a knowledgeable movement member. The list comprises potential state coordinators for a grass-roots, on-the-ground arm of the Clark campaign. Other assets of the draft movement also suddenly seem a bit less concrete. A "New York Headquarters" for DraftWesleyClark.com is actually home to a film and TV production company run by DraftWesleyClark.com leader Maya Israel and her husband, and Locus Media Inc., a New York gallery where "The Bill Clinton Show" is set to open Oct. 16.
Indeed, the gap between the hype and the reality may somewhat explain why Clark stumbled out of the gate following his announcement.
"By the tone of the cheerleading, the inference can be drawn that they presented themselves as a readymade campaign," says Nagler, a member of Women for Clark who on Sunday held a "glorious" 60-person reception at her Santa Barbara, Calif., home for Clark supporters. But after Clark made his final decision to run on Sept. 15, little actual infrastructure was in place to assist him with his campaign.
Clark's 11-minute announcement speech, which surprised many observers -- who expected a more fully articulated vision from the late-entering candidate -- was written between Monday and Wednesday of last week by the former general and his media adviser Mark Fabiani, according to Spell.
How quickly Clark's newly hired team of campaign pros will be able to bring order (but not too much order!) to the campaign's grass-roots arm may ultimately determine how successful the whole campaign -- resting, as it does, on the nontraditional strategy of relying on these individuals -- will be. If the hype machine was a bit thin on structure, it nonetheless accomplished two things beyond anyone's wildest imaginings: First, it persuaded Clark to run, and second, it fed a massive publicity boom that allowed Clark to become a major media story for several months without garnering any negative attention or close scrutiny. Meanwhile, Clark had been laying the groundwork for a campaign by meeting with Democratic donors and Iowa and New Hampshire political figures since at least last December, according to published reports.
Since becoming a political action committee, DraftWesleyClark.com has been securing pledges of future donations. Sometime during the past week, Hlinko, now back in the fold after signing a deal giving him "fair market value" for his list of names, according to Jacoby, gently suggested via e-mail to the group's previous supporters that they pony up at the new Clark04.com site. (The New York Times and The Associated Press have published conflicting reports as to whether such an e-mail was sent out.) Regardless of whether the money came from new or previously recruited supporters, by the end of Sunday, Clark04.com had raked in $750,000 in contributions.
"It's had growing pains," admits Hlinko of the campaign, "but it's definitely come together really, really nicely." Says Spell, "If we can build the grass-roots movement, we can build the presidency."
Whether or not any of the early chaos and grumbling -- a phenomenon familiar to anyone who's ever worked with any sort of grass-roots project -- will have any impact on Clark's chances in the long run remains to be seen. So far, it doesn't seem to have done the general a lick of harm. He's shot up to front-runner status in two national polls and to 8 percent in Iowa. He's on the cover of Newsweek. If the mood in Washington is any indication -- and, admittedly, it usually isn't -- he's persuaded a significant fraction of previously uncommitted voters to come over to his side. And, most importantly, he and Kerry recently became the first Democratic challengers to top Bush in a national head-to-head poll.
"The day that General Clark became a candidate is the day his campaign began," says Jacoby. "He has an organization and these people built it and now their draft work has ceased. . . . They have wound down and come over to the presidential campaign."
Garance Franke-Ruta is the Prospect's senior editor.
