General Wesley Clark on MSNBC. He gets it.

[Tom Rinaldo]

22. Just a friendly rejoinder...

Clark's low point as a Presidential candidate was in early December 2003, after his campaign got off to a rocky start to great media expectations of him. He had fallen far in the polls as a result, but a funny thing happened. He went to New Hampshire and started connecting with people at Town Hall meetings and such. He began to rise in polls again, expecially in New Hampshire. Except by then the national media was ignoring him. Joanne Woodward's Inside Politics show, for example, refused to even mention his name once for well over a month lasting well into January - (it was fact checked at the time). People were shocked when Clark raised the most money of any Democratic candidate (Dean included) from a grassroots funding campaign in January - but they still didn't give him the time of day.

Clark came from well behing in NH to tying Kerry for second place in the polls there. In 2004 no one was giving credit to Democrats who had to compete against Dean and Kerry who were based in neighboring states to New Hampshire and who had been getting tons of free media coverage inside of NH for years (Kerry for example got beamed into NH of MA TV stations). THIS year everyone acted like it was natural to assume Romney was untouchable in NH because of his neighbor state advantage and pundits only looked to see who would come in second and third to him.

Anyway Clark had been moving past Kerry in January and was closing on Dean when a strategic error (pushed on him by the skilled politicos while Clark was still very much a novice) bit him in the ass. Due to his late entry in the race Clark skipped competing in Iowa. 2004 became the year when the 24 hour news cycle covered Iowa as if it were the Democratic Convention - giving scant attention to New Hampshire in the run up to the Ipowa caucus. Kerry bet all his marbles on campaigning in Iowa where he would not be facing Clark and he bet well, cornering the national security minded voters in Iowa during a war year campaign. Kerry won Iowa which polished up his his NH star, and Democrats there who had mostly always liked Kerry returned to him with new confidence.. The media went gaga over John Edwards for coming in second over Howard Dean in Iowa, and they devoted lots of press to mocking Dean.

The final week before the NH primary the media was all over Dean fading and Kerry and Edwards rising. They ignored Clark except for when Clark refused to throw Michael Moore (who had endorsed Clark at a NH rally) under the bus for saying Bush was a a war evader when he was in the National Guard. The media was in love with John Edwards. So when the NH results came in two New Englanders came in first and second, Kerry and Dean. Clark came in third, Edwards came in fourth. That changed nothing. The media never missed a beat and continued to cover the race as if it had shrunken to a two man race; Kerry and Edwards, with whatever other coverage space left devoted to ridiculing Dean and his "collapse."

Clark fininshed second to Kerry in New Mexico and I think Arizona (ahead of Edwards, Dean, Lieberman etc) the next week but Edwards rode home field advantage and wind in his sails home to victory in South Carolina. The media gave Clark no credit, and never did thereafter even though he came in second in some other primaries and won Oklahoma - all while being written off and ignored by the press.

Clark may not have set the world on fire as a candidate in 2004 (or in late 2003 to be more precise) but he had a steep learning curve and was doing pretty damn well out there on the campaign trail once January hit Iowa and the media fascination with John Edwards killed is chances, but he his race was not in any way a disaster. Clark ultimately did better than Dean, Gephardt, and Lieberman (who back then was still viewed as the Democrat who had run with Al Gore for VP) He was not a flash in the pan candidate like a Fred Thompson or Rick Perry.