Even the liberal Will Saletan is critical of Clark in this short note. Matthew Continetti is even more critical of Clark’s views on Iraq, and at greater length. I saw Clark with Katie Curic this morning and I was not impressed. He is a dodger and a trimmer, it turns out. Furthermore, he is hyperventilating on Bush: Bush is no leader and he can’t be trusted. Clark even averred that Bush is somehow--it was unclear exactly how, even though Curic pushed him a bit--to be held responsible for 9/11. On the other hand, he was unable to offer any suggestions regarding how to make things better, save for the old standby that the UN should be more involved, or any international body or coalition should be more involved because (he so implied) anyone else is more trustworthy than Bush (or, if you like America). It was not a good show. At every opportunity Clark is revealing himself to be dull and even robot-like and oppportunistic and now entirely predictable. He has simply jumped on the beat-up-on-Bush-on-all-things bandwagon with the rest of the Demos. They have painted themselves into a corner by arguing (ad nauseam) that Bush is untrustworthy and even full of treachery and Clark has joined them. He, along with the others, will not be able to escape from that corner. I had thought that Clark would not do that and thereby end up serving both his party and his country well by making some positive arguments how he would do things differently from Bush. I was wrong.
How many of Clrak’s words are his own and how many are his handler’s? I wonder how any strings the Clintons are pulling with this guy.
Somehow I think that if Clark was getting his lines from handlers, they’d be better lines. Or maybe he has lousy handlers. Or maybe he’s lousy at delivering lines.
The fact that he would sign up for a party in such dire straits - careening desperately and self-destructively out of control after the immediate post-9/11 loyal opposition stance got it nowhere in ’02 - is to my mind already strong proof of his poor judgment.
I guess there’s some cost-benefit calculation supposedly justifying his candidacy, just as there’s probably some way that Arianna Huffington has convinced herself that her gubernatorial race was good business. Or maybe Clark’s just too much of an egotist to be satisfied with a future of armchair generalship.