The Ike standard

AN INNOCENT QUERY has just triggered . . . the Lloyd Bentsen rebuke. Stephen Hess, a senior fellow in governmental studies at the Brookings Institution, worked for Dwight Eisenhower as a speechwriter.

So the logical question arises: What does Hess make of General Wesley Clark, former NATO supreme allied commander, who on Wednesday joined the race for the Democratic presidential nomination?

"I knew Ike," quips Hess. "Ike was a friend of mine. And Wesley Clark ain't no Ike."

That's not meant to disparage Clark, Hess quickly notes, but as a simple statement of fact: Kosovo, Wesley Clark's conflict, was a far, far cry from World War II.

Further, when Eisenhower, the last military leader to become commander in chief, ran for president in 1952 after having led allied forces in Europe, he was the most admired man in the nation. Clark, by contrast, is largely unknown to the public.

Now, former generals have enjoyed a good deal of success as candidates: 10 have been elected president. Unfortunately for Clark, their elections were largely 19th-century phenomena.

Yes, George Washington was our first military man turned president, but the trend toward general electioneering didn't really take off until 1840. That year, the Whigs dressed up the gently born, mediocre military man William Henry Harrison as a their log cabin candidate, an Indian-fighting frontiersman of the people.

The electoral value of epaulets firmly established by "Tippecanoe and Tyler too," there followed a spate of candidacies by military men.

Indeed, one such campaign brought New Hampshire's only president to office. In 1852, when the Whigs selected "old fuss and feathers" -- by his proper name, General Winfield Scott, the US commander during the Mexican War -- the Democrats tapped New Hampshire's Franklin Pierce. Pierce, a politician-turned-soldier, had sought glory in the same conflict, but displayed an unfortunate faintishness under combat conditions. His past taste for spirits, moreover, led to him being lampooned as the "hero of many a well-fought bottle." Yet a Northern address plus acceptability in the South brought about his election.

Despite their numbers, only four of the generals elected president could truly be called career military men, says Hess: George Washington, Zachary Taylor, Ulysses S. Grant, and Eisenhower.

"And it wasn't just that they were generals," notes Hess. "They were generals in wars that were terribly important to Americans at the time."

That's a standard Clark clearly doesn't meet. He is neither a name known to one and all nor a general associated with a war indelibly etched into American consciousness. One more discouraging note: Apart from Eisenhower, no other general was nominated by either major party in the 20th century, notes Garrison Nelson, a political scientist at the University of Vermont.

But if Clark is in some way bucking a trend, what his domestic-details-to-come campaign does represent is an accumulation of qualities currently in short supply on the Democratic side: a figure with recognized national security credibility who was essentially -- though certainly not consistently -- skeptical about the Bush administration's approach to war with Iraq. And who hails from a region that could lend the Democrats Southern comfort.

Whether that spells success, however, will depend on something quite apart from Clark's military background: his political skills.

There, Clark's career offers contradictory clues.

Despite a reputation for prickliness and the occasional egregious public-relations blunder during his days in Europe -- at one point, Clark, in gesture of friendship, swapped hats with General Ratko Mladic, the infamous Bosnia Serb military leader -- Clark seemed reasonably adroit in keeping a querulous coalition together during the Kosovo conflict.

And yet he clearly wasn't adept enough at politics to prevent the Clinton administration from pushing him out of a job he loved.

But then, as Grant once lamented, "war and politics are so different."

Indeed they are. A huge chasm separates the well-ordered military milieu from the chaos of campaigns.

So can the general find his footing on challenging campaign terrain? His tome "Waging Modern War" underscores the necessity of adapting tactics to the times. Wesley Clark will now see his ability to do just that put to the political test.

Scot Lehigh's e-mail address is lehigh@globe.com.