Retired Gen. Wesley Clark has more in common than he probably realizes with George B. McClellan, the last general the Democratic Party nominated for president during wartime.
As a warrior, Clark could point to greater success than McClellan. McClellan was such an indecisive commander that Abraham Lincoln, who complained that the general had a case of "the slows," relieved him as head of the Army of the Potomac in November 1862. Clark, as NATO supreme allied commander, led the alliance's victory over Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic in the 78-day Kosovo war in 1999. If anything, some critics in the Pentagon and other governments considered Clark too aggressive in fighting that war.
But Clark's political appeal to Democrats today has much in common with the allure of McClellan to the Democrats who nominated him in 1864, at the height of the Civil War.
During the Civil War, Democrats were bitterly divided between "peace" and "war" wings. The peace Democrats hated the Civil War and were willing to end it under almost any terms; some were even willing to let the South go. The war Democrats wanted to fight to victory and reestablish the Union.
But both sides shared a common opposition to the way Lincoln was prosecuting the war. Both abhorred its effect on civil liberties in the North. Both, to their lasting discredit, opposed making the war a crusade to end slavery (even the war Democrats were willing to accept slavery as the price of a compromise reunification). And, as the election of 1864 approached, both wings faced a common problem: How could they express opposition to the president's strategy and aims in the war without seeming disloyal to the nation itself?
For the leaders of the war Democrats, McClellan was the answer. He shared their doubts about Lincoln's approach. But as a former Army commander, McClellan offered the best shield against the charges of disloyalty that Republicans were routinely directing against Democratic critics of the war (some of whom probably deserved it.) "McClellan seemed the one man who could legitimize the Democratic opposition to the administration without having its loyalty questioned," wrote John C. Waugh in his book on the 1864 campaign, "Reelecting Lincoln."
Clark, as a critic of the Iraq war, may be in a similar position today. Does anyone really imagine that after spending most of his adult life in the Army, Clark will win the Democratic nomination because a large number of voters believe he's developed better ideas for improving school performance or covering the uninsured than former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean or Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts?
