Well, the Pete Dawkins factor has been subdued, at least for now.
While Wesley Clark was deciding whether to run for president, sources who spoke with him tell me that he wrestled mightily with the question of whether he would end up "Dawkinsed." Pete Dawkins, you might recall, was the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in New Jersey in 1988. He was a West Point graduate and a college football star. He was a Vietnam War hero. The New Jersey Republican Party circa 1987 was on the prowl for a strong candidate to take on Democratic incumbent Frank Lautenberg, considered (even then!) a bit long in the tooth and ripe for the picking; New Jersey, a Democratic state since the days of the powerful Jersey City boss Frank Hague, had voted twice for Ronald Reagan and looked very much as if it was ready to vault into the Republican camp. Dawkins' press clippings from around the time of his announcement show us a media that had bought into the Dawkins narrative every step of the way. Several pundits regarded Lautenberg as not much more than a pothole in the path of the mighty Dawkins tank, and they practically had the man sitting in the Oval Office.
Naturally, Lautenberg sailed to victory with 54 percent of the vote. Dawkins finished the campaign heavily in debt and with zero political future. Dawkins and Clark, my sources say, are close friends. So it makes sense that Dawkins' experience would have weighed on Clark's mind these last few weeks.
Dawkins' problem was a simple one: This man who had shown a dazzling aptitude for many difficult pursuits in life just wasn't a very good candidate.
Obviously Clark decided he's no Pete Dawkins. But the final determination of that question isn't up to him. Fighting in the jungles of 'Nam, heading the Supreme Allied Command of Europe and winning a war against a genocidal thug are all much to be admired, and they all surely teach a person many lessons. But do they teach a person how to be a good political candidate?
As candidate, declared and undeclared, Clark has done a lot of things right so far. He dropped his hints and chose his media interventions adroitly, letting the story of his candidacy build what seemed like its own momentum to those who weren't watching closely. He is not, conventional wisdom aside, announcing too late. Bill Clinton announced his candidacy in October 1991, and, though the electoral calendar has been pushed forward since then, it's still fine because regular voters aren't paying attention yet. As for the "lateness" being a factor in Clark's ability to raise money, forget it. He's doing it through the Web, and he'll have plenty. And he's assembled a veteran campaign team, even if it looks (suspiciously, to some people) heavily drawn from the former Clinton-Al Gore axis.
But the question isn't whether Clark's handlers are good at politics; it's whether he is. The maiden speech certainly came up well short of inspiring. He seemed, like many such rookie candidates, a bit flabbergasted to be up there. Spare and cautious, his rhetoric sounded only half-developed -- I kept thinking sentences were going to go on for another phrase or two when, splat, they just ended -- and he seemed far more intent on touching the bases his consultants told him to touch rather than expressing a theme, vision or rationale for his candidacy. Yes, it's troubling, as some of the TV commentators noted, that there weren't any specifics in the speech. But far more troubling was the fact that there wasn't any music in it.
Fine, it's just one speech. But this brings up another problem for Clark, a situation that, among all the candidates I've watched over the years, has only ever been faced in quite this way by Hillary Clinton in her New York Senate bid: Clark will have to do all his learning, and make all his mistakes, under a media spotlight so intense that every errant syllable will be analyzed and exaggerated.
And one more thing. A friend who watched Clark's announcement on FOX (I should have known, but I foolishly stuck with CNN) reports that the network showed less than two minutes of Clark's speech before cutting away to a studio audience of Murdoch shills who started bellyaching that the general had nothing to say and wasn't qualified for the job and so on. As my friend put it, "The war has begun."
I hope Clark has some grasp of the ambush that awaits him, and I hope he has a better feel for politics than his old friend Dawkins. The early signals are only partly encouraging.
Michael Tomasky is the Prospect's executive editor.
