Whereas various blogs seem to be reporting and commenting full-time on the unfolding primary race in New Hampshire, I’ve been posting here even less frequently. In the time since last week, a once wide-open race now seems determined, not only for this primary but for the whole nomination. (I’d be happy to be proven wrong.) I’ve been leaning toward Clark; it doesn’t look like he’ll be faring that well today, but since I promised my reasons to support him, here they are:
1. Clark is the only one who gets the class politics of personality right, enough to match Bush’s folksy Midland schtick. Yes, Edwards is a Southerner, son of a mill worker, but his accent is that of a well-to-do North Carolina lawyer, not salt of the earth. And yes, Howard Dean is a blunt spoken, thrifty Yankee, but if people think that the qualities which signify “ordinary” in New England are going to play across the country, they’re sorely mistaken. And repackaging Kerry as salt of the earth is hopeless. One can only use “well, I’m a veteran” as a response so many times. Class, accent and personality aren’t everything, and I’m not sure these other candidates are doomed, but the superficial selling points mean a lot.
2. Clark’s candidacy brings more to foreign policy than simply a weighty resume. A number of pundits (e.g. David Brooks) have argued that 9/11 has changed the political landscape but that Democrats don’t get it. Judging from Edwards, they don’t. I can’t help but Kerry is the choice of those who want expediency, to say “see we have a candidate with foreign policy credentials” without having to address what vision of foreign policy. Clark, however, articulates a vision of which is at once internationalist and muscular. He’s able to take the Republicans on by attacking their lack of instrumentality in foreign policy - they seem to choose reasons to match their actions, rather than the other way around. Other Dems, like Dean, have made a similar point, but the electorate, perhaps rightly, tends to suspect that the party has no instrumental vision of foreign engagement of its own other than inertia and defensiveness.
3. Clark knows economics. If foreign policy were his only field of knowledge, that would not be enough. Clark has taught and clearly understands macroeconomics. He’s able to launch a critique of Bush’s economic policy that doesn’t begin with political consultants isolating how to package tax cuts for “middle-class” Americans, etc. He avoids the facile protectionism of Dean. And his numbers tend to add up a little better than Kerry or Edwards, who are promising everything but the kitchen sink without reversing broad tax cuts.
4. Clark is able to communicate complex ideas in simple terms. Unlike Dean or Edwards, whose strategy was to disguise centrism as populism, Clark has been able to take issues like tax progressivity or global politics and speak about them plainly, without dumbing the issue down. It’s a rare ability, and it’s something the Democrats should be looking for.
5. Opponents blast Clark for his recent conversion to the Democratic party - and it would make me nervous were his positions not liberal - but as Tom Oliphant has pointed out, Democrats should be welcoming recruits: ultimately swing voters are going to be more impressed by someone who weighed the direction the Republican party was going and opted out. Do we really want to impose a litmus of three decades of party loyalty?
Of course, this may not matter, if by the third round of primaries (March 3 - Massachusetts primary day), Clark is out of the running. But I’m not alone in thinking that this new coalesced conventional wisdom behind Kerry and Edwards might be premature. As Noam Schieber puts it,
The media (see, for example, yesterday’s “Meet the Press”) has also pushed the line that Dean’s challenge has strengthened Kerry as a candidate–Dean is now credited with everything from livening up and shortening Kerry’s stump speech to the Kerry campaign’s increased organizational efficiency. But the reality is close to the opposite: If Kerry wins the nomination, the practical effect of the Dean candidacy will be to have made Kerry the beneficiary of an almost an unprecedented confluence of favorable circumstances, which allowed Kerry to win the nomination without ever being tested.
It’s a testimate to a front-loaded nomination process which seems out of whack, but which no one seems to know how to correct. It’s quite possible our state primary won’t matter, the candidate having been decided by fewer than 10 states.
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