Standing before a packed auditorium at Phillips Exeter Academy here earlier this month, retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark suddenly turned away from the lectern and grabbed hold of a U.S. flag hanging from a pole at the back of the stage.There they go again.. Dems accuse pubbies of saying they're unpatriotic...which the pubbies have never done (in public, anyway)."You know, the American flag doesn't belong to the Republican Party," he said. After asking the veterans in the audience to stand, he continued, still clutching the fabric. "That's our flag. We saluted that flag. We served under it. We fought for it. We watched brave men and women buried under it. And no Tom DeLay or John Ashcroft or George W. Bush is going to take this flag away from us,
Clinton started this little rhetorical trick...accuse opponents of saying or doing or standing for something nefarious. Then repeat it often enough until it becomes accepted fact. I swear, there's a seminar somewhere that teaches Dem candidates how to do that.
But Clark said in a recent interview that his military background is proving to be a mixed blessing in the Democratic race. "If I were a Republican, it would be real easy," he said in an interview. "Republicans would say, ah, general, we had Eisenhower, we like generals. Big authority. Democrats aren't like that."First I've heard of that. They think pubbies like the military because of its "rigid authority"!Democrats, he added, "want to look through that uniform. And they have trouble with that uniform because a lot of them marched [against the Vietnam War] and a lot of them, they're not authority oriented and the military seems like rigid authority."
Clark has little more than a month to change those perceptions and turn the promise of his candidacy into a reality.