Check out Al Gore's REVIEW of Cast Away.
Posted on 09/14/2003 10:59:54 AM PDT by madprof98
Washington --- In the classrooms at West Point beginning in 1962, the back of Wesley Clark's head was a common sight for most of the cadets.
That's because at the United States Military Academy it is the practice to seat cadets in the order of their class standing. And Clark was always at the head of the class, graduating at the top in 1966.
But if Clark joins the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination this week, as he is widely expected to, he will start halfway to the bottom of the field --- fifth in a field of 10, according to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll.
Not bad, though, for someone who, unlike the other candidates, has not been campaigning for more than a year.
Not bad, either, for someone who has no political campaign experience, no political organization and no money in a campaign coffer.
"There's room for a 10th candidate in this field," independent pollster John Zogby said in an interview last week as speculation was rising about Clark's future. "There's at least a third of Democratic primary voters still undecided, so that gives him an opening."
To have any success, Zogby said, Clark is going to have to run on his biography, much as Sen. John McCain of Arizona did in the 2000 Republican presidential campaign.
Zogby did some of the initial polling for McCain, whose compelling biography of heroics as a combat pilot and prisoner of war, political independence in the Senate and "straight talk" campaign style made him a formidable challenger to George W. Bush in 2000.
Clark has "a terrific biography" and a "great story to tell" should he decide to join the ranks of the Democratic presidential contenders," Zogby said.
And leaders of the Democratic Party, seeking more credibility for the party on national security in the wake of terrorism reaching the shores of America, are eagerly welcoming Clark to the campaign.
''I think it would be very good for the Democratic Party to have a four-star general travel around the country talking about the Democratic Party, talking about the differences with and the failures of the Bush administration," Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe said last week.
Clark is a military officer who once occupied the same NATO command post as Dwight D. Eisenhower. Still, he is relatively unknown, certainly when compared to Ike.
"Wes Clark is no Eisenhower," Hudson Institute research fellow Alan Dowd recently wrote in the conservative National Review. "Ike returned from Europe as a conquering hero, the general of generals, [while] if it weren't for extensive time served as an armchair general, [Clark] would barely be known outside the Beltway."
However, former President Bill Clinton recently pronounced Clark one of the Democratic Party's two "rising stars," along with the former first lady, Sen. Hillary Clinton. And other former Clintonites are poised to back Clark's campaign, including former White House assistant Bruce Lindsey and Skip Rutherford, president of the foundation that is overseeing construction of Clinton's presidential library in Little Rock.
And only now, amid his flirtations with a career in politics, is the political world trying to get beyond Clark's official military biography, to understand what it means politically for him:
> To be the Southern Baptist-turned-Catholic son of a Russian Jewish immigrant.
> To have grown up in the racially segregated Arkansas of the 1950s and '60s.
> To have graduated No. 1 in the class of 1966 at West Point.
> To have been a Rhodes scholar.
> To have suffered four wounds in a single firefight as commander of a mechanized unit in Vietnam, wounds that required a year of physical therapy.
> To have been married to the same woman, Gertrude, since 1967, with a son, Wesley, 33, a screenwriter in California.
> To have risen to the four-star rank of Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, to have prosecuted NATO's first war, "Operation Allied Force," which drove the Serbian army out of the Albanian-populated Serbian province of Kosovo, without any NATO or U.S. deaths.
> To have so annoyed the Pentagon brass --- Clinton Secretary of Defense William Cohen once issued this order to him: "Keep your [expletive] face off the television!" --- that he was forced into an early retirement after nearly 34 years in uniform.
Clark has continued to spend a lot of time on television, mostly as a military analyst for CNN during the military conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
To be found very wrong and very stupid in all his gloom and doom scenarios about the war in Iraq.
Go Clark go... to be crushed in the 2004 election if he ever wins the nomination of the Democrats.
Furthermore, Clark was in my father's class at Command and General Staff College at Ft. Levenworth in the '70s. Yes, ol' Weasely was the honor grad there, too, but Dad says he was the biggest political a** sucker he saw in his 31 years in uniform...and that included Dad's time at the Pentagon. Clark was such a cheese eater, the class actually booed him when he accepted his award at graduation.
Unfortunately, none of that will matter, because no one ever asks the soldier about the quality of his leaders. Perception is everything, symbolism trumps substance, so the 'Rats and the criminal, liberal, mainstream media will make this guy out to be the Second Coming. If America elects a ticket that Weasely is a part of, we deserve anything and everything we get.
Scouts Out! Cavalry Ho!
Check out Al Gore's REVIEW of Cast Away.
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