By the time this column hits the press, retired four-star Gen. Wesley Clark is expected to have announced his candidacy for President of the United States, running on the Democratic ticket.
My first thought was that this would mean there would be a Democrat who brought up his military service record even more than John Kerry, but then I realized that's not scientifically possible.
So, I figure this will make the average American voter care about the Democratic candidates a little bit more, simply on the grounds that they couldn't care any less.
It's practically old hat to mention this by now, but polls have revealed that two-thirds of the American public can't name a single Democratic candidate. Talking heads generally try to blame this on the unusually large amount of candidates (at this time four years ago, it was really only two candidates per party), or on a sudden and inexplicable public apathy for the political process.
Well, not so inexplicable to this talking head. Democrats are able to accept any number of explanations as to why the public doesn't like their candidates, except for the one that makes sense: The people might not like their party.
The Democratic Party has become, essentially, the anti-Bush party. It doesn't rightly know what to do with the country, except that whatever path the president takes is certainly the wrong one. For instance: America not helping many of the millions of downtrodden people in the world on the basis that such action would cost both billions of dollars and many American lives. That used to be the stuff that liberals attack us heartless conservatives for saying. Now, the left has flip-flopped and whines daily that Iraq costs too much.
And liberals actually wonder why the voters don't trust them.
Back to the point: Aside from changing jokes about there being nine boring candidates to there being 10, Clark's potential candidacy will likely change nothing.
Barring some last-minute savior for Democrats to truly rally around (whose name might or might not rhyme with Cillary Blinton), the party has two choices: go with a more moderate/non-threatening candidate like Lieberman, or drive as far to the political left as possible with a raving lunatic like Howard Dean.
The former might give the party something resembling a snowball's chance in heck of winning, but the latter has never worked in presidential elections.
Every time liberals run as true liberals, they lose ... badly. George McGovern's brilliant campaign of driving the party to the left landed him a whopping 17 electoral votes to Nixon's 520; Walter Mondale did him even better by winning 13 votes to Reagan's 525.
You'd have to go back to 1936 if you wanted to find a Democrat giving a Republican a comparable shellacking.
Running to the left doesn't work, but with Dean's gradual emergence as the great white hope, Democrats still don't seem to understand that. The left has, after all, long had an obsession with what it thinks should work (e.g., hate crime laws, gun control) rather than what does work.
Besides that, its sputtering bewilderment at Bush's success has turned its campaign plan into "Operation Say The Opposite of Whatever Bush Does," a childish antic that didn't work last year and won't work this year.
The Dems have put themselves in a position where they must constantly be the polar opposite of an optimistic and energetic president, a situation where they can only look good if America fails. If this continues, they won't even be thinking about the White House; they'll be too busy struggling for relevance.
Eric Spratling is a journalism senior. Reach him at eric.spratling@asu.edu.
