A Left Turn FOR CLARK

Even with big money & media he never took off, except in the minds of the pundits. Warner was the darling of the beltway pundits for 6 straight months. Why was that? Maybe it's because so many of them live in Virginia that he was sort of a National favorite son candidate for them, who knows?

I never saw a one term Governor with no experience on the national stage ever hyped that much for President so far ahead of the Primaries before. "Smart money" almost always ranked him in the top three or four contenders. No doubt Warner was an excellent Governor and maybe he could have made an excellent President, I am only commenting on politics here, but his campaign never took off. He ranked in the low single digits in every national poll I saw, (and always below Wes Clark's support, whenever Clark's name was included that is). Warner maxed out at 5% at best, but he continued to be talked about as a probable Clinton alternative for the big prize up until the day he withdrew.

Frequently candidates with relatively little national exposure don't begin their rise in the polls until after the actual race is well under way. But in Warner's case it had to be disappointing, because he poured large amounts of money into his unofficial campaign from day one. Witness his notorious extravagant Yearly Kos party for one petty example, or the full service web site he ran for another. Despite his modest polling, the pundits kept talking Warner up.

And then one day he was gone.

As soon as John Kerry was denied the Presidency in November 2004, Wes Clark shifted his focus to the 2006 Congressional mid term elections. I had the honor to briefly be on a group phone call with Wes Clark early in the Summer of 2005, and he was already heavily stressing the importance of these elections back then. Here are some of the things Wes Clark has already done to help turn these 2006 elections into a major Democratic victory.

Wes Clark helped recruit strong Democratic challengers in States and districts that typically went Republican, candidates like Jim Webb and Eric Massa and many of those now known as "the Fighting Dems". Clark did this for several reasons. First and foremost he knew that Democrats could no longer afford to cede supposedly safe races to Republicans, we had to make Republicans defend districts that they normally took for granted. There are several reasons that Clark saw for that:

1) Clark overall believes in Dean's 50 State strategy, and the only way to ever implement that is to begin to implement it now.

2) Clark foresaw that Bush Administration policies in Iraq and elsewhere were likely to be exposed as disastrous prior to the mid term elections, therefor credible Democrats had to be "pre deployed" so to speak, to be in a position to take advantage of that when it happened.

3) Clark knew that, following their 2002 and 2004 playbooks, Republicans would try to win in 2006 by stoking fear in the public, stressing Bush's "War on Terror ", and calling Democrats weak on National Security and unwilling to protect America from our enemies.