Clark's poll numbers are in the 1% range and this for a candidate who has been running for president since the last election.

He just doesn't gain any traction with voters.

He didn't in 2004 and he isn't now.

He would have been better off to run for Congress in his home state, demonstrate some electoral appeal, over the last four years.

I don't think he's even attractive as a VP candidate because he has no demonstrated electoral strength.

It is actually the exact opposite.  Clark has NOT been running for President since the last election, and that, in a narrow sense, perhaps has cost him.

A person who keeps running for President might campaign over a dozen different times during 2006 for the same small handful of Iowa candidates before a mid term electon where the entire balence of Congress could potentially be changed by winning enough seats in districts all around the country.  

A person who keeps running for President might travel around the nation all last year sucking up donations by the tens of millions for her own Senatorial campaign where she had no real opposition, when many good Democratic candidates were dying on the vine from lack of fiscal watering.

A person who keeps running for President might scatter around broad hints that he planned to run in 2008 on a weekly basis where no one could fail to notice them rather than shutting down all speculation by actually acting like all he was trying to do for the moment was elect a Democratic majority to Congress rather than promote his own canidacy to inside players.

Clark did exactly what he said he would do, he campaigned in Alabama at least as much as he did in New Hampshier, because the Democratic Party needed him in Alabama at least as much as it did in New Hampshire.

And for what it's worth your figures are misleading.  There are some candidates who routinely score at 1% in polls or below, but Clark is usually at 2% to 4%, though I know if you look hard enough you can find him at a point below or above that spread.

And if you look closer you will also find the following. Clark does at least as well as anyone else in the field who never ran on a national Democratic ticket or who wasn't on the front cover of Time magazine while being hyped by Oprah.

At this stage in the 2004 race Joe Lieberman was the front runner and John Edwards was pulling poll numbers like Wes Clark, and Bill Richardson, and Joe Biden, and Chris Dodd, and Tom Vilsack are now.  You may also remember that most of the announced candidates got a bounce in the polls and media coverage when they went through their formal song and dance announcements, and Wes Clark has not yet done so.

I'm agnostic on Clark, except for two things. One, he supported Lamont. That narrowed my preferred candidates for 2008 to two: Clark and Kerry. (And I understand Edwards offered to make himself available, but wires crossed or some such: not sure what that story is.)

This isn't because I'm such a Lamont partisan, but because supporting Lamont proves that a candidate (or potential candidate) 'gets it.' It's one thing to talk tough; it's another to put yourself on the line for a real Democrat running against a CfLer.

Two, why the hell didn't Clark declare his candidacy months ago? I understand how early this is ... but others haven't waited. Why has Clark? What does that buy him but headaches, and people like me wondering if he learned anything about playing politics, last time around?

Finally: my biggest concern for our nominee is that she or he aggresively act to undermine the conservative infrastructure while reinforcing the progressive infrastructure. To be most effective, this requires a real asshole, a cut-throat politician. I understand that Clark is a warrior in the actual sense, but is he one politically, too? Oddly enough, I'm afraid he really is too honest and upstanding.

Of course, I'm probably the only guy in all the blogosphere pining for a Kerry candidacy ... (If I can't have me some Gore.)

Actually, he goes much beyond making them ring hollow. Wes Clark embarrasses them, and with it their lack of vision, coherence, and even fundamental interest in being minimally credible representatives worthy of public trust. Their blindly partisan embrace of the federal disaster area in the White House already disqualifies the party as a whole, I'm not sure Wes Clark could add significantly to that.

By that I mean that Wes Clark doesn't make them ring hollow - they already do on their own.

What Wes Clark does, however, in a very poignant way, is to both remind and embarrass the electorate that supported the GOP in 2004, that they did so in a proven misguided and even betrayed belief that by supporting what was presented as a "different" agenda shouldn't have critical scrutiny, instead handing over a brainless "mandate" that by far exceeds, in real terms, the purported "damage" they sought to "undo" with their insane Republican Revolution.

Wes Clark is not "just" a reminder that things can be done much better: he is the living proof that things can be done right.

And his measured, cogent, nuanced and reflective approach is something other which further unsettles the hapless "conservatives", who instead prefer to rant and rave to the loony tunes of the Limbaughs, O'Reillys and Scarboroughs, extolling the virtues of blind allegiance to cardboard ideas, instead of putting patriotism in practice.

Wes Clark, in effect, obsolesces that other party.

There are no Republicans: only hacks, operatives, and cheerleaders who cloak themselves in the colors of a Party they long ago hijacked. That, and the sad group of supporters who, against better judgment, persist in marching on to mirages - out and further into the desert.

Wes Clark is a reminder of what common sense and competent leadership looks like combined.

The façade of what at one point was the GOP is just an enormous empty cardboard box holding a ragtag collection of shattered dreams and broken promises - thank goodness we have the General to kick in the walls of that eyesore, and inspire us to remove the trash.

We don't need a clear view of reality: we have it. We need the resolve to get Wes Clark in a position to do the job we need him to do, which serves us all best: in the White House.

It's time to mop up the mess.

Great diary!

And it appears that Wes Clark has been doing plenty work behind the doors, not all public and photo op like!

According to Maxine Waters on Hardball today, Wes Clark has been warning the Congress on Bush's push towards Iran for quite some time.

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http://video.msn.com/v/us/msnbc.htm?f=00 &g=100d1b29-b00e-4078-a9b7-6e66af6ea cfd&p=Source_Hardball&t=c1150&am p;rf=http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036697 /&fg=

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Maxine Waters comes on at 7:17
Talks about Iran at 8:00 when Chris Matthews asks her specifically about Iran.

I got a great feeling about Clark the first time I saw him speak in a seminar broadcast on C-SPAN in 2003. I supported him in 2004 and will again this time if he chooses to run. National security will still be a major issue in 2008 and, despite Hillary's obvious aptitude for the subject and Richardson's diplomatic background, Clark is the only top- or mid-tier candidate with enough direct military experience to drive his points home. I also think he'd make a great ticket balancer for Edwards - the equivalent of what Cheney brought to the Bush candidacy, but in a good way this time.

This will likely (and thankfully) be the last election involving candidates that came of age in the Vietnam war era and it would nice to send that generation off into their sunset years with a great guy like Clark.

ANd yet, he won the primary. Clark has a chance to win the primary too even if it looks hopeless now.

I've made it a practice to ask people who follow politics closely who they supported in 2004 and pretty much every single time, half the people at the table will say, "Clark".  

I think, like me, people who pay attention saw Clark on CNN - on the run-up to the Iraq War and then after it started - talking about Iraq in the only terms that made any sense.  Everyone else had either drunk the kool-aid or were just following along drooling over the fireworks.  

Then we learned more about him - his integrity, his incredible personal heroism and thoughtfulness, his degree in Economics and . . .

Then, after he withdrew, his continual fighting for good candidates through 2004 and then 2006.

BUT this timing thing. . . Clark (and Gert) have got to get right!

I was at YearlyKos when Markos introduced Clark at Clark's party by saying that he and Jerome were backing Clark prior to their backing of Dean.  They finally had to switch over because Clark wouldn't get in.  

Can you imagine what the world would have been like if Clark had gotten into the 2004 race earlier with the backing of Kos and Jerome?  

That is the key point.  The Republican Party went after Clark very hard and very early when he announced, because they feared a Democratic military leader who opposed Bush on Iraq would most undermine Bush running as Commander in Chief during a war.  Many of the swiftboating technicques that were later used against Kerry were tried out on Clark first.  

Republicans were trotted out to say that they had had phone conversations in which Clark allegedly said things to them that undermined his public statements.  A joke Clark made about what it would have required for him to become a Republican instead was spun as a deadly serious statement.  

Al Gore set a tone of bipartisanship with his amazingly gracious concession speech after the Supreme Court settled the 2000 election, trying to help heal the nation and put divisions behind us. He pledged his full support to George Bush as America's President and urged other Democrats to do so also. Many Democrats said nice things about Republicans Bush appointed to his cabinet during Senate confirmation hearings.  

But because Wes Clark was a political unknown to most Democrats when he declared for President, Republicans tried to exploit that lack of knowledge of who Clark was as a person and Democrat. They spun an innoculous nice opening comment Clark made early in 2000 about some in the then brand new Bush Administartion, presented in the same spirit as Democratic positive comments made in Senate confirmation hearings of the same period that overwhelmingly supported all of Bush's appointments except for Ashcroft, out of context.  

Of course by late 2003 almost all Democrats had shifted to openly attacking those men, so "revealing" anything remotely "nice" said by about any of them at that point was an effective political attack, because Clark couldn't draw on a long Democratic track record that would insolate someone like Gore, Kerry, Kennedy etc. from being doubted as a Democrat because of any prior postitive comment about anyone in the Bush Administration.

A key Republican attack meme used against Clark immediately after he announced was that he had poor personal character, the most famous example of that was the Shelton smear.  Republicans tried to paint Clark as a self serving ambitious man who would climb over his mother to get power, as an oopportunist in other words, because they hoped that by so doing they could stir up fears among Democrats not to trust a General.

I could write a whole lot more about this, but this is as good a stopping point as any for right now.