Clark calls it quits on 'fabulous' endeavor
LITTLE ROCK, Arkansas -- His brown eyes were bloodshot and glistening yesterday afternoon, after he made the final speech of his presidential campaign. But as retired Army General Wesley K. Clark lingered in the back of a hotel ballroom, he made it clear that his first-ever political race, as bruising and deflating as it sometimes could be, had given him an appetite for more.
"It was fabulous. I loved every minute of it, including going out and trying to get those people to vote for me yesterday in Memphis," Clark said, recalling what was hardly a campaign high point: the hour he spent outside a polling place in the chilly West Tennessee dusk, searching the crowd for voters, maintaining his ceaseless candidate's grin.
Yet something about the experience had clicked. In an interview, Clark said that when he gave a goodbye speech in his hometown yesterday, pledging his devotion to the Democratic Party and urging his supporters to keep fighting, "it felt like the end of the beginning."
Clark's presidential bid ended almost exactly as it began, with a decision long expected but delayed. Five months ago, Clark kept his Internet-based band of "Draft Clark" supporters waiting for weeks as he flirted with a run. On Tuesday, he decided to withdraw from the race at a late dinner, only after final Tennessee returns showed him in third place behind John F. Kerry and John Edwards.
Yesterday, minutes after he formally conceded defeat in his hometown, Clark reflected on how hard it had been to enter the race: "My wife and I never talked about it until 30 days before, because she didn't want to contemplate it. She did not want to do it. But finally, the pressure became overwhelming."
The decision to leave, he said, had been easier to make.
"We pretty much knew what was going to happen," he said. "You know these races have a momentum, and this race had a momentum."
Still, Clark said he had no regrets, and no ill will toward his rivals, the press, or the political process that, a week earlier, his son, Wesley, had derided bitterly in Oklahoma. In the end, he said, there turned out to be few differences among most candidates' platforms, and he accepted the unpredictable arc of the campaign.
"I went into this to make a difference. I sincerely wanted to be president of the United States, too, and I would have been a good one," Clark said. "But so would other people in the race. And I'm happy I had my chance."
Clark began the race with great fanfare but significant hurdles. He entered in September, dramatically late by election standards, with few policy positions and no staff -- just a cadre of advisers with ties to Bill Clinton, and a resume many supporters believed was made-to-order.
From the first days, political observers said, his inexperience proved a liability. On day two of his campaign, on a tiny jet from Little Rock to Fort Lauderdale, Clark gave reporters a rambling, thinking-out-loud response to a question about Iraq, concluding that he probably would have voted for the congressional resolution that authorized war.
Clark spent months afterward responding to that answer and trying to explain how it happened. Aides said the experience made them realize that, despite the hours he had spent talking to reporters in Kosovo or discussing military strategy on CNN, Clark had no idea how to face the press as a political candidate.
Likewise, Clark's longtime coyness about his political affiliation -- in the months leading up to the race, he seemed reluctant to choose a party -- remained an issue throughout the race.
"To me, the key to Clark is that he never understood what it meant to be a candidate in Democratic primaries," said Marc Landy, a political science professor at Boston College. "He had to anticipate the kinds of things that would come up in a Democratic primary -- (a) that you're a Democrat and (b) that if you're such a clear thinker about foreign policy, you would have an answer to the most important question that's on everybody's mind, `Do you support the war?' "
Landy and others have speculated that Clark might have fared better in a presidential bid if he had cut his teeth on a smaller stage.
Clark did improve as a candidate over time, developing a smoother stump speech, a slicker delivery, and a knack for winning over voters in small settings. But he also continued to make mistakes, perhaps most notably his reaction on CNN on the night of the Iowa caucuses, when former senator Bob Dole quipped that Kerry's Iowa win had demoted Clark from a general to a colonel.
"With all due respect," Clark shot back swiftly, "he's a lieutenant, and I'm a general." The Kerry campaign wound up capitalizing on the statement, which dogged Clark for a week.
The fatal blow for Clark's campaign, though, came from circumstances largely out of his control. In early January, Clark seemed well-positioned to be the chief alternative to Howard Dean, who then led in polls. But Clark skipped the Iowa caucuses, insisting he had entered the race too late to build an organization there.
When Dean fell dramatically in Iowa, and Kerry emerged with unexpected strength, Clark scrambled to change his strategy midstream, to try to out-veteran Kerry and out-Southern Edwards.
On a nearly daily basis, Clark's message seemed to change. He was the candidate best placed to deal with national security issues, then the candidate with Southern roots, then the candidate who grew up poor. By last week, he had a new pitch: He was a businessman.
As the campaign continued to flounder in its final month, insiders acknowledged a growing rift between Clark's close-knit family and his staff. The divisions apparently extended to the question of when the campaign should end; on the night Clark pulled out a narrow win in Oklahoma, some senior aides urged Clark to leave the race, but his family encouraged him to stay in, a campaign source said.
Yesterday, though, Clark and his wife, Gert, were all smiles, thanking staff and supporters who had gathered to see them off, and professing their good fortune. When she introduced her husband, Gert Clark told the crowd to "say goodbye to the Clarks in their early political career," and then gave the room an oversized wink.
"Someday, we may be getting together again," she said. "Who knows?"
Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com. 