Reply #64: Fortune? [View All]

[Pastiche423]

http://www.fortune.com/fortune/articles/0,15114,480208,00.html

Clark, then, would not be an "antibusiness" Democrat should he run. His economics are garden-variety, centrist, conventional. He doesn't like budget deficits, says the recovery underway is "jobless," and of course is critical of the Bush tax cuts. Like most of the other declared candidates, he is maddeningly vague about which parts of them he'd roll back, and when. Asked about health care, Clark goes into a disquisition about the backwardness of the incentives when it comes to health insurance. The other candidates would have their press people fax you their 14-point plan, along with seven studies on why it's the best thing for America since the lava lamp. Clark, on domestic policy anyway, is trying out lines as he goes along, seeing what works, what doesn't.

It doesn't really matter. If Clark goes, he's not going because he's all worked up about those damned deficits. He would run as general, the former NATO commander coming to restore order and reason to an American foreign policy run amuck, one that has made, he argues, the country less secure, not more, since George W. Bush took over. Iraq would be exhibit A.

And there, possibly, lies a problem. As we've seen, in politics things change. Iraq, one year from now, is not likely to be the unmitigated disaster that currently seems possible, nor the stable democracy of neoconservative dreams. It will probably be either slightly more or slightly less of a mess than it is now. For Clark, no less than for the other Democrats, the issue then gets complicated.

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Clark doesn't handle that question as deftly as you'd expect. Not even close, actually...

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At some point during this answer, the image of gravitas that a general and NATO commander has begins, shall we say, to fray a bit. It's fine to argue that the Iraq invasion was wrong. Clark may be right about that, and whoever's elected next year will have to pick up the pieces. We'll see. But a lot of people well to the left of George W. Bush—led by Tony Blair—would argue that the statute of limitations stuff is dubious. And suffice it to say that the "guys" running China now are not the same leaders who killed the students in Tiananmen Square. The recently departed General Secretary Jiang Zemin, to take but one example, was promoted from mayor of Shanghai to succeed Deng Xiaoping in part because he avoided bloodshed during Tiananmen. Yes, China's still more or less a police state. But have you ever heard of Saddam promoting someone because he avoided killing somebody?