Wesley Clark said Tuesday he wants to avoid waiting too late to make a decision on whether to run for president -- a mistake he made in his failed 2004 bid.
The late start led to the other big mistake: the Screw Iowa strategy that worked soooo well for Gore in `88 and McCain in `00.
This gives me an excuse to repeat my John Edwards Hard Luck theory from 2004. Clark stayed in the race after winning Oklahoma by about 100 votes. The next week he split the anti-Kerry vote almost evenly with Edwards, allowing Kerry to win Tennessee with under 50%. Clark then promptly quit. Had he lost Oklahoma and bailed a week earlier, Edwards would likely have won Tennessee and the whole dynamic of the contest would have changed - perhaps Edwards vs. Kerry would have continued all the way to the convention. (This theory also involves Howard Dean's Last Stand in Wisconsin, which screwed Edwards exactly the same way.)
In any case Clark's Iowa effort consisted of one stop at the Hamburg Inn immediately after his announcement - he had a previously scheduled speech at UIowa - and some self-starters who got a tiny handful of delegates.
Clark is on the extremely low end of my 2004 list. Not much he can do to persuade me; no matter what he's saying now I just don't trust a career military guy.
Speaking of the military, a couple days back I linked to a list of top lies told by recruiters. Here's one more:
A new video game commissioned by the U.S. Army as a recruiting tool portrays the nation's military in 2015 as an invulnerable high-tech machine.
It's an impressive game, simulating weaponry the military is actually using or building, gamers say. But the gameplay is designed so it's hard to lose: The equipment holds up awfully well and the enemy doesn't learn from experience.
Nash is bothered by the fantasy the potential recruits may have that they'll end up the commander riding a joystick rather than understanding what military life means.
"You don't see the day-to-day boredom, you don't see broken legs and equipment failure," she says. "You don't see that the military is mostly grunts and only the grunts on the ground die."
Also just for fun: a list of countries without armed forces.
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