Clark Update 2
By Andrew Dobbs
Jeez... if I wanted a war hero who'd vacilliate on the most important issue of the day- whether it was worth the 6,000 American casualties to remove Saddam Hussein- I'd have stuck with John Kerry. After the earlier post where the New York Times showed Clark saying he'd support the war the AP is reporting thus:
Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark backtracked from a day-old statement that he probably would have voted for the congressional resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq, saying Friday he "would never have voted for this war."
The retired Army general, an opponent of the conflict, surprised supporters when he indicated in an interview with reporters Thursday that he likely would have supported the resolution. On Friday, Clark sought to clarify his comments in an interview with The Associated Press.
"Let's make one thing real clear, I would never have voted for this war," Clark said before a speech at the University of Iowa. "I've gotten a very consistent record on this. There was no imminent threat. This was not a case of pre-emptive war. I would have voted for the right kind of leverage to get a diplomatic solution, an international solution to the challenge of Saddam Hussein." ...
In the interview, Clark sketched out a checkerboard of positions, saying he would leave in place a tax cut for middle-income Americans and indicating his support for gun rights, although he supports a ban on assault weapons.
Okay, so he was for the war when he spoke to the New York Times yesterday but against it when he spoke to the AP today, and even when he was talking the NYT it took some help from one of his handlers to decide what his actual position was in the first place. In the past he has supported gun control but now he is against it and apparantly he wants to keep the middle class tax cuts. Most pundits have been saying that it would take a clearer laying out of his platform for Clark to gain ground but it looks like he'd rather waffle on almost everything. Add to that the fact that he said he would not be at next week's debate, then said he would.
Already he is getting blasted in the media. A USAToday column by Walter Shapiro says:
In a presidential campaign, no speech is more emblematic of a candidate than his formal announcement. So Wednesday afternoon in Little Rock, retired general Wesley Clark ended a year of suspense about his political intentions by delivering a cliché-filled 11-minute oration that brought to mind the Peggy Lee ballad, Is That All There Is?
So much for being the savior of the party. Clark's lack of solid ideas, waffling on important issues, indecisiveness as to the direction of his campaign and the negative reaction early on sets a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths. I still think he has plenty of time to fix some of these problems but mother always told me that first impressions are the most important. Clark is starting a couple of notches down and is going to have to play catch up when he ought to be making his name.
Posted by Andrew Dobbs at September 19, 2003 05:33 PM
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