Clark, Like McClellan, May Hoist Party’s Antiwar Banner

Retired Gen. Wesley Clark has more in common than he probably realizes with George B. McClellan, the last general the Democratic Party nominated for president during wartime.

As a warrior, Clark could point to greater success than McClellan. McClellan was such an indecisive commander that Abraham Lincoln, who complained that the general had a case of “the slows,” relieved him as head of the Army of the Potomac in November 1862. Clark, as NATO supreme allied commander, led the alliance’s victory over Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic in the 78-day Kosovo war in 1999. If anything, some critics in the Pentagon and other governments considered Clark too aggressive in fighting that war.

But Clark’s political appeal to Democrats today has much in common with the allure of McClellan to the Democrats who nominated him in 1864, at the height of the Civil War.

During the Civil War, Democrats were bitterly divided between “peace” and “war” wings. The peace Democrats hated the Civil War and were willing to end it under almost any terms; some were even willing to let the South go. The war Democrats wanted to fight to victory and reestablish the Union.

But both sides shared a common opposition to the way Lincoln was prosecuting the war. Both abhorred its effect on civil liberties in the North. Both, to their lasting discredit, opposed making the war a crusade to end slavery (even the war Democrats were willing to accept slavery as the price of a compromise reunification). And, as the election of 1864 approached, both wings faced a common problem: How could they express opposition to the president’s strategy and aims in the war without seeming disloyal to the nation itself?

For the leaders of the war Democrats, McClellan was the answer. He shared their doubts about Lincoln’s approach. But as a former Army commander, McClellan offered the best shield against the charges of disloyalty that Republicans were routinely directing against Democratic critics of the war (some of whom probably deserved it.) “McClellan seemed the one man who could legitimize the Democratic opposition to the administration without having its loyalty questioned,” wrote John C. Waugh in his book on the 1864 campaign, “Reelecting Lincoln.”

Clark, as a critic of the Iraq war, may be in a similar position today. Does anyone really imagine that after spending most of his adult life in the Army, Clark will win the Democratic nomination because a large number of voters believe he’s developed better ideas for improving school performance or covering the uninsured than former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean or Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts?

If Clark takes off -- still a big if -- he will almost certainly do so by convincing Democrats that he can express their hostility toward Bush’s national security strategy and repel Republican efforts to paint the party as weak or unpatriotic. In that sense, Clark’s hole card looks a lot like McClellan’s.

This analogy, of course, only extends so far. McClellan and his supporters placed themselves unambiguously on the wrong side of history by failing to recognize the importance of ending slavery; history’s verdict on the Iraq war won’t be in for some time and isn’t likely to ever be so unequivocal. Yet, like McClellan, Clark has the potential of bridging a war-torn party by expressing views mostly acceptable to the doves from a background attractive to hawks.

Clark joins the race facing many hurdles. He starts far behind his nine rivals in organization and fund-raising. Clark’s brief, and mostly bland, announcement speech didn’t inspire much fear among his opponents. And he’s not nearly as well-known as other celebrity generals of recent times, such as Colin L. Powell; one poll this summer in New Hampshire found only a third of Democrats knew enough about Clark to express positive or negative opinions. Besides, the Democrats haven’t nominated a general for president since Winfield Scott Hancock, who flopped in 1880.

But Clark has assets too. He’s attracted formidable political talent, including so many confidants of Bill Clinton -- whom Clark served under as NATO commander -- that some Democrats are privately wondering if the former president is pulling strings for Clark’s campaign. Intimates of both men say the answer seems to be no, though Clinton is apparently praising Clark as effusively in private as in public. “Let’s put it this way,” said one Clinton ally on board with Clark, “there wasn’t discouragement [from Clinton].”

But the greatest asset for Clark may be the way in which he most directly echoes McClellan. No one should underestimate how much Democrats will like hearing criticisms of the war with Iraq come from the mouth not of a politician, but a general. Imagine a liberal derided at work as a wimp for denouncing the war. It’s one thing to tell your co-workers that Howard Dean also considers the war a mistake. It’s another to say that’s the verdict of a retired four-star general with a Silver Star and Bronze Star at home.

One uncertainty is whether the antiwar Democrats potentially most receptive to Clark’s overall critique of Bush’s foreign policy will consider him pure enough on Iraq itself. The day before Clark’s announcement last week, the left-leaning group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting issued a report saying his shifting comments during the war belied his claim to have opposed it.

Clark himself further muddied those waters Thursday when he told reporters that while “in retrospect, we never should have gone in” to Iraq, he “probably” would have voted for the congressional resolution that authorized Bush to use force.

Even after Clark retreated back toward opposition Friday, his position on the war sounded more like Kerry’s perpetual ambivalence than Dean’s unstinting criticism.

It might comfort Clark to know that purists plagued McClellan too. Peace Democrats saddled him with a party platform denouncing the Civil War. McClellan repudiated the platform, but it complicated the already formidable task of unseating Lincoln as the Union marched toward victory. McClellan lost, competitively in the popular vote and by a landslide in the electoral college. To beat Bush next year, Democrats may have to do a better job of controlling their passions -- even if they install another general atop the ticket.

Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Monday. See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ Web site at www.latimes.com/brownstein.