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Clark's new stump speech has a quality not often found in political oratory: it is charming. He is able, somehow, to shed his brass and re-create his lonely, impoverished childhood in Arkansas: his patriotic attempt to master chemistry and build a backyard rocket after the Russians launched Sputnik; his decision, at age 5, to attend the Baptist church in Little Rock because the stained-glass windows reminded him of the Methodist church he'd attended in Chicago before his father died; his struggle to raise a family on a military salary; the car he totally rebuilt because he couldn't afford a new one. There is a careful structure to the speech. The anecdotes connect to four core values--patriotism, faith, family and inclusiveness--that Clark then turns against the Republicans. After the Baptist-church story, for example, he talks about the Republican Party's misuse of religion: "They act like they have a direct pipeline to the Lord God Almighty ... but every religion I've ever studied agrees that people who have advantages in life have an obligation to help those who don't have advantages." The emotional heart of the speech, though, is Clark's dismay over the Bush Administration's misuse of "the precious lives of our men and women in uniform" in Iraq--and that is where he will often run into problems. At times, his passion spills over into an almost Deanian imprudence. At a Texas fund raiser last week, Clark thundered, "We're dealing with the most closed, imperialistic, nastiest Administration in living memory. They even put Richard Nixon to shame. They are a threat to what this nation stands for."
Clark also has an Iraq problem. "I was always against the war," he says, but that seems to be shorthand for a more complicated position. On his second day as a candidate, Clark told reporters that he probably would have voted for the congressional Iraq war resolution. On his third day as a candidate, he vehemently retracted that statement. Last week the Republican National Committee trotted out excerpts from Clark's testimony to the House Armed Services Committee on Sept. 26, 2002--in which he appeared to support the resolution. Actually, Clark said, "I think it's not time yet to use force against Iraq, but it is certainly time to put that card on the table, to turn it face up and to wave it." He added that a congressional resolution was "required to leverage any hope of solving this problem short of war."
So he was against the immediate use of force but in favor of the resolution? Not quite. "It was clear that the Administration was determined to go to war," Clark told me last week, in an effort to parse his testimony. "I disagreed with that priority, but if you couldn't persuade the President to put it aside, you could try to work it through the United Nations ... I learned in the Balkans that diplomacy requires the threat of force--and so I favored a congressional resolution." But not the resolution that was eventually passed. He wanted Bush to return to Congress for another vote before taking the country to war. "I never favored giving the President a blank check."