Clark adapts to superior officers
GOFFSTOWN, N. H. -- Such are the indignities of the presidential campaign trail: You might have commanded battalions and led armies into war, but today, you're bagging groceries at Sully's Superette and asking strangers, brightly: "Plastic or paper?" Or you're manning the drive-through at a Dunkin' Donuts in Derry, with 15 cameras whirring and snapping as you make change.
If this is a jarring transition for Wesley Clark, he doesn't show it. He wears a permanent grin, gripping every hand he can find -- even of an aide or a reporter. At the Dunkin' Donuts early Friday, he seemed intent on learning how to work the drive-through's sliding glass window, and he seemed reluctant when aides tugged him to leave his post and work the interior.
"Go back to the line?" he said. "I want to say `Hi' to this woman!"
The man who has never run for office quickly mastered the art of looking relentlessly cheerful, at town hall meetings, meet-and-greets, even tense encounters with press.
More slowly have come the more nuanced arts of a practiced politician: how to speak off-the-cuff about issues, how to defuse a damaging news cycle.
Aides say Clark is surprised by the length of his days, which often start before 7 a.m. and end close to midnight. Car rides are filled with radio interviews, briefings by staff, conference calls with strategists. He carries a satellite phone so he can keep working through the many pockets of New Hampshire out of cellphone range.
And the retired general is now accustomed to taking orders: Aides have been telling him where to go, when to stop talking, whether he could take a break to ski (no).
Still, there is Army in the man, and it shows. It's in the tendency to stick to his script, the way he uses bureaucratic language, as in: "We're the party that works those issues."
It's in his clear respect for authority: Last week at a Portsmouth event, someone announced that the local welfare office was going to tow cars from its lot. When one woman grumbled, Clark said into the microphone, "Rules are rules, and they have to be obeyed."
On the campaign trail, of course, rules don't always exist; the expected order can seem a little topsy-turvy. Look strong, and you're bound to be challenged. Give a short answer, and you're inevitably going to be pressed on the details.
Not to mention the fact that your underlings don't have to be deferential. Clark's aides have commented on his less-than-rhythmic clapping and have mocked him for his music preferences, which tend toward 1980s power ballads. One joked that if Clark were still in the Army, his subordinates would probably have wound up in the brig.
No such luck here, but Clark has showed he can give it back. Yesterday, in frigid Portsmouth, he mocked a (male) reporter's wool cap: "It looks like something a Playboy bunny would wear."
Where he's uniformly sweet -- and genuinely enthused -- is when he talks to small children. On the trail, Clark has critiqued preschoolers' coloring and has picked up moping toddlers. In Nashua on Friday, he sat with a group of kindergarteners and drilled them gently: "Who knows how to swim? Now, who knows how to ice skate?"
In a "Tonight Show" interview he taped yesterday, Clark demonstrated how to kiss babies: Quickly is the key, before they know what hit them. With adults, he tends to linger a bit longer, and to get positive responses -- though not always exactly the ones he expects.
In a country store in Epping yesterday, a woman shook Clark's hand, smiled, then gave a reporter her assessment: "He's got great teeth."
