With President Bush’s support slowly sliding, more and more focus finds itself on the Democrats competing for the opportunity to unseat the rather extreme conservative president.
Bush has repeatedly demonstrated his inability to keep up with reconstruction in Iraq and loses voters every day.
Perhaps it is time for the calm after the storm; America wants and needs moderation in the White House.
Wesley Clark, that darling of West Point, cleanly oozes moderation, and if he plays his cards right and keeps up his funding, the water just might be right for a President Wesley Clark.
If we all agree that extremism, stubbornness and the inability to compromise help ruin society then we can conclude that moderation contributes to the opposite.
World War II and the collapse of the League of Nations resulted from a lack of compromise and a failure to moderate.
Our current president is nowhere near a moderate conservative, and the climate is right for someone not to balance him out completely, but to move the scale over considerably.
Sure, it would be nice for Howard Dean to be president. It would also be fascinating, primarily because it is something that will never happen. Believing that a liberal’s liberal will win the White House four years after we elected a billionaire’s billionaire is not only fallacy but also ignorant of our own history.
In Clark, moderate Democrats and Republicans have a candidate pitch-perfect for what they want. He’s Rhodes-scholar smart. Democrats will probably like his relative social liberalism and liberal economic plans (i.e. hiking up minimum wage).
He held the rather superfluous title of NATO Supreme Allied Commander for a number of years, and Republicans will want his military expertise, which seems to become more and more important every day.
He voted for Reagan. He was also against the Iraq war, which continuously boosts his popularity. He’s a moderate’s moderate.
He’s also made headway in finances. According to the New York Times, Clark raised over $3.5 million dollars in the first two weeks of his campaign.
A burst of cash comes with every contender’s entrance into the field, and whether or not he retains the stability of continuous financial support is questionable, yet if he keeps up the money flow he’ll soon rival Dean as the leader in finances.
Just because he’s sailing smoothly now doesn’t mean he won’t hit bumps, though. As of Tuesday, Clark’s campaign manager quit his job, citing difficulty coordinating Clark’s Washington advisors and his hometown campaign team, based in Little Rock, Arkansas. According to CNN, those who created a petition to initially bring Clark into the race (www.draftclark2004.com) have butted heads with his advisors, and the desires of both sides conflict. But it is still early enough in the race for Clark to recover and then some.
I remember some years ago when the world’s oldest person died.
He was Japanese (and unlike Americans, the Japanese honor their elderly and respect their opinions). As always, there was a newspaper article on his death, containing a few quotes from the old man about how he managed to live so long.
What kind of foods did he eat? “Everything in moderation,” he said. What sort of exercise had he tried? “Everything in moderation.”
For the most part, moderation, it seems, is one key to success.