This is my first time posting at dkos, though I am an avid reader. This is a paper I recently wrote for my rhetoric class. (I'm a senior at SCSU, its in St. Cloud, MN) I was supposed to evaluate some decision that I had made recently, so I chose to evaluate my choice of who I would support for President in 2004. enjoy:
Why I Support Wesley Clark for President
There are currently ten people running for President of the United States. As a good Democrat, I would probably support an inanimate object or some kind of plant life before George W. Bush. That effectively leaves me in the position of choosing between one of the nine Democratic contenders. My decision to support Wesley Clark is based on two premises: Any one of the nine Democrats would be vastly superior to the man currently in office, and Clark is in the best position of the nine to defeat Bush in the upcoming 2004 general election. My support for Clark is not based on his stances on the issues in comparison to the other Democratic contenders, but rather his `electability.'
That is not to say that the issues in this election are unimportant to me, just the opposite, actually. I find President Bush's positions to be abhorrent and reprehensible to the degree that I am willing to throw my enthusiastic support behind someone who is merely closer to my positions on the issues. This is a departure for me politically. In the 2000 election, I did not vote for Al Gore because I was nineteen and far too idealistic to vote for the `lesser of two evils.'
Before George W. Bush took office, I did not consider myself a Democrat. During his administration I became a Political Science major, which put me in a position in which I could carefully observe the systematic dismantling of almost everything progressive our government has done for the last thirty years. I watched him mislead the American public into supporting an unnecessary war. I watched his nomination of right wing ideologues to the federal bench. I watched corporate cronyism in the form of no-bid contracts to Halliburton and Bechtel for the rebuilding of Iraq. I watched John Ashcroft say that dissenters are giving "aid and comfort" to the enemies of the United States. As I watched all of these things happen to my country I became angrier and angrier and eventually decided that I would support anyone who could realistically defeat the President in 2004. Ironically, George W. Bush made me the partisan Democrat that I am today.
During the 2000 election, Green Party candidate Ralph Nader made that argument that there was no real difference between the Republicans and Democrats. After 8 years of the centrist Clinton Administration this actually seemed like a compelling argument. His argument was assisted by Bush's hijacking of Democratic language (i.e. `compassionate conservative,' `No Child Left Behind,' `humble' foreign policy). The fact is that the policy doesn't match the rhetoric. Anyone who has read a newspaper in the last few years knows that Bush's foreign policy could be described as almost anything besides `humble.' If Nader does decide to run again in 2004, I expect that he will find his support all but gone in a wave of anti-Bush sentiment.
So what is it about Wesley Clark that makes him the best candidate to defeat George Bush in a general election? Well, the Republicans will try to make this election about national security because that is consistently a good issue for them and also because their domestic record is very poor. The Republicans are not making this strategy a secret as we can see by their plans to hold their 2004 convention in New York City near ground zero. The Republicans are doing whatever is necessary to distract voters from their domestic policies, because the American people simply do not favor rolling back environmental regulations and giving tax cuts heavily weighted towards the super-rich. What makes Clark different from the other eight candidates is that even $200 million in attack ads painting him as a wishy-washy liberal weak on national security won't stick. Clark is a former four star general, former Supreme Commander of NATO forces in Kosovo, first in his class at West Point. On national security issues he cannot be effectively marginalized by the Republicans. Conventional logic says that Republicans win races about national security and Democrats win races about domestic issues. But Democrats don't usually run candidates with Wesley Clark's national security credentials.
The front runner in the race for the Democratic nomination is former Vermont Governor Howard Dean. Dean will be presented in Republican attack ads as a Northern elitist liberal who supports gay civil unions and making the United States weak militarily and vulnerable to terrorist attacks. Dean is a Northern liberal who was and is a vocal and belligerent opponent of the war in Iraq. Personally, I have no problem with that, after all, I am a Northern liberal who was and is a vocal and belligerent opponent of the war in Iraq. The problem is that Republican attacks of `weakness' on national security will stick to Dean, at least more so than they will to Clark. The last two Northern liberals to win the Democratic nomination were Dukakis and Mondale, and we all saw how they preformed in the general election. And how thier campaigns were completly irrevevant in the South; Northern liberals simply can't win elections in the South anymore. It follows that Dean is not going to play well in Southern states; he may not be able to win a single one of them.
Clark can defeat George W. Bush and that is reason enough for me to support him. However, it is hardly the only reason to do so. Clark is an intelligent, responsible leader. He was a Rhodes Scholar, and he holds Master's Degrees in philosophy, politics, and economics. He uses big, cool words like `recalcitrant' and 'intelligencia.' He is, in the words of one of his supporters, "the President we were promised as children." In other words, Wesley Clark is all the things that George W. Bush is not.