I had a chance to watch Clark doing a New Hampshire radio interview a few days ago that C-SPAN broadcast last night. Considering his surge in recent polls and the increasing perception that this is becoming a two-man race, I thought this might be a good time to take a look at his progress as a candidate and his prospects for both the nomination and the general election. A few points:
--He has really started to master the issues. Comments on No Child Left Behind, immigration and other subjects showed a man who seems increasingly comfortable on domestic policy topics. After the show ended, with the cameras still rolling, the host apologized for not getting into his economic plan and Clark continued to riff for another ten minutes.
--As I'd hoped when I started to hear a lot about him last summer, Clark is truly among "the best and the brightest." It's rare that you see someone of such obvious talents running for high office, and IMO good for the country regardless of what you think of Clark himself. And I think he's making a good impression on the press... an important consideration after the stunning bias they showed in 2000.
--Clark is moving beyond his resume as a candidate. I think he strikes the best balance of "sharing" his biography and life story without gushing a la Gephardt on Dad driving a milk truck or Kerry in the gunboat. Dean does not get personal on the stump, maybe because he doesn't have a politically great story to tell, maybe because he doesn't feel it's relevant. I can respect that, but I do think voters want to feel like they have a sense of the human being behind the candidate for office. Contrasting Clark's self-made life of achievement with Bush's "fail upward" life feeds into how people want to see America.
--He shares with Dean a fearlessness toward the adminsitration and Karl Rove that I don't believe the other guys possess. Maybe this is born out of having faced much worse things than "Turd Blossom."
--For all that I and others disliked the hiring of Lehane et al, they have run a good campaign after the initial hiccups and have set out a pretty broad policy platform for Clark to run on. It's sufficiently meat-and-potatoes Dem to retain the base, and hopefully stave off a 3p challenge if he's the nominee, but not so left-leaning that it will be a major obstacle in drawing swing voters or disaffected Republicans.
My biggest fear with Clark is that since he chose to abide by the spending limits, as the nominee he would be a dead duck from late spring till the convention. I think this is avoidable through 527 organizations and maybe other mechanisms, but the thought of Bushi'ites distorting his war record and pulling out other generals to campaign against him is scary. It's a shame, because he would have been able to raise plenty of money to go against Bush.
If he does lose out to Dean (still the most likely scenario), it will be because he came in too late. If Clark had joined in spring 2003 he likely would have snagged a great deal of the energy that went into the Dean campaign. I still hope they'll both be on the ticket, with Clark in front.