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Wesley Clark - Future Star

Mulling a run for President, Wesley Clark has emerged as a player in national politics. But is he ready for prime time?

By Bill Powell

It was back around the time George W. Bush kept an aircraft carrier loitering in the Pacific so that he could make a top-gun landing and effectively declare the Iraq war over. Nothing—or so it seemed—could save shell-shocked Democrats. Half a year earlier the party had been routed in congressional elections, despite a lousy economy and history's dictum that the out party is supposed to gain House seats in off-year elections. When Bush then "won" the war in Iraq in 26 days, you could divide Democrats into two camps: those contemplating suicide and those wondering how they would get through the next six years until Hillary presided over the Clinton Restoration. In the depressed Democratic mind, there was no hope. The possibility that a candidate straight out of central casting—say, an intelligent, handsome war hero—might save them never entered their consciousness. A guy like Wesley K. Clark wasn't even an afterthought. Wes Clark? General Wes Clark? Aren't generals—well, aren't they Republicans?

The 2004 election campaign, which hadn't even begun, was over. If you doubted it, all you had to do was look at the Democratic field. The most "presidential" was, God help us, a liberal from Massachusetts (that would be Senator John Kerry). The best known, former vice presidential candidate Joe Lieberman, was a soporific campaigner who backed Bush on Iraq. (What was the point of voting for him?) The most venomous of them, former Vermont governor Howard Dean, was from a tiny, rural state. On occasion he seemed almost to have a faint soft spot for one of the most murderous thugs of the late 20th century. ("It's a good thing we got rid of Saddam," he said once, "I guess....") Throw in the trial lawyers' candidate, Senator John Edwards (who looked as if he were about 16), the historically incompetent ex-mayor of Cleveland, and you get the picture. "It was enough," says one primo Democratic fundraiser in Washington, "to give you a hangover without even going near the liquor cabinet."

Things, you may have noticed, change. The war in Iraq—surprise, surprise—wasn't really over. It had just taken a different form, and our guys, as any number of experts had publicly warned, were becoming daily casualties in something that occupied the deadly space between...

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