I think his political talent have been underplay simply because he isn't a politician...so yeah, he doesn't pander and lie, BUT he did quite well in his first run, regardless of the corporate meme put out on him (just remember that Howard Dean was "angry" and John Kerry was "most" electable")
I think it’s worth noting that Clark never really got his due as a candidate. The Times said he “struggled to master the difficulties” of being a presidential candidate, while Scheiber said Clark failed because he “turned out to be a pretty lousy politician.”
I followed Clark’s campaign pretty closely in 2004 and
I remember things slightly differently.Indeed, looking back, I think the conventional wisdom is that John Edwards excelled as a candidate, while Clark never really caught on with voters. That’s not quite what happened.
After the Iowa caucuses, which Clark chose not to compete in, the four main Democratic candidates — Kerry, Dean, Clark, and Edwards — met in eight primaries. Kerry won six and effectively wrapped up the nomination in the first week of February 2004. But taking a closer look, Clark did pretty well, particularly if you compare him to Edwards.
In those eight primaries, Clark finished ahead of Edwards in five (AZ, NH, NM, ND, and OK), while Edwards bettered Clark is just three of the eight (DE, MO, and SC). If you include Iowa, Clark still outperformed Edwards in five of the first nine contests.In fact, in those first eight post-Iowa primaries, if we look only at top-two finishes (candidates who came in either first or second), Kerry had seven, Clark had four, Edwards had three, and Dean had one.
But the media was unimpressed. A day after Clark and Edwards each won their first primaries, and Clark outperformed Edwards in a majority of the mini-Super Tuesday contests, news outlets praised Edwards and dismissed Clark. Salon, for example, ran a major feature, taking a look at the race for the nomination. The headline: “And then there were two.” A big picture accompanied the article with Kerry and Edwards. The article said Clark “posted disappointing numbers in the seven-state primary” and “may not be long for the game.” Again, this was a day after Clark actually did slightly better than Edwards.
I also recall that Clark delivered a pretty solid speech at the DNC that year, widely considered one of the better speeches of the convention.
Clark got into 2004 very late, had very little money, a small staff, and no experience to speak of. But he still managed to do surprisingly well. He “turned out to be a pretty lousy politician”? That’s not how I remember it. http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/9242.html#more-9242 And just what did you do in the class war, Senator?Wesley Clark dropped out of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination this week, and before he fades from our view it would be useful to take a good look at just what he brought to the race.
There were those who, concerned more with party credentials than the public interest, challenged Clark's right to run as a Democrat. At candidate debates he was asked to justify his recent decision to be a party member. But what defined Clark as a Democrat was not longevity of membership but fidelity of principle. There was a time when tax fairness virtually defined the Democratic Party. It no longer does. The party is so wired into corporate corruption that it is a betrayal of everything for which it once stood. If a Democrat steps out of line long enough to support the poor and middle class, she or he is likely to be attacked by "leaders" like Joe Lieberman, who last year attacked Al Gore for Gore's halfhearted economic populism.
Clark tried to reverse that. Where other candidates tinkered with tax "reform" (every screwing of the public in the last 40 years has been done in the name of tax reform) he proposed a bold stroke to "restore progressivity to the tax system." A family of four with an income of up to $50,000 a year would have been exempted from the income tax altogether. A single parent with one child making up to $28,000 a year would also have been exempted (with a sliding scale to cover other circumstances).
snip
The tax code is shot through with these kinds of loopholes, thanks to the Democratic Party, which in the war on the poor has gone over to the other side, rejecting the view that money made by money should be taxed at the same rate as money made by workers.
Remember that this fall when we see the imitation Democrats chasing after corporate campaign "contributions" while trying hard to forget Wesley Clark, who made the mistake of reminding them of what a real Democrat represents.
http://www.pahrumpvalleytimes.com/2004/02/18/opinion/myers.html
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