When the world last left Wesley Clark in early 2004, he was a streaking meteor of a presidential candidate. Still fresh from leading NATO in the Kosovo war, he arrived as a savior for the left, who saw a bulletproof patriot that the rest of America could believe in; hero of the netroots, beloved by Michael Moore and Madonna; hope of the Clintonites, delighted by such a clean ideological slate.
Alas, after five blazing months, Clark for President flamed out. There are the conventional explanations: He got in too late. He didn't play in Iowa. Being the anti-Dean stopped working when Howard Dean himself collapsed. All are true--but, ultimately, Wesley Clark just wasn't a politician. "This was Michael Jordan playing baseball," a Democratic strategist told this magazine in 2004.
With his quest to be a twenty-first century Eisenhower kaput, Clark hit the speaking circuit and penned the occasional op-ed, keeping alive a skeleton PAC to track his public profile. He hadn't given up the presidential dream, though: "I think about running every single day," he told Politico in 2007. After endorsing Hillary in September, Clark stayed conspicuously available during the veepstakes last summer, but he was passed over and left without a part at the Denver convention. One attempt to help Obama flopped, when the campaign repudiated an offhand swipe at McCain’s military service (Clark said that getting shot down in a plane wasn't a qualification to be president ). When the president-elect finished handing out cabinet appointments, Clark was left outside the administration.*
"I think it's dawning on him that it's unlikely that he would end up being Secretary of Defense or Director of National Intelligence," a former aide mused, noting that he probably wasn't on any short lists to succeed Defense Secretary Robert Gates. "I don't think he would want a lesser job. I think his view is, not going to run for president again, not going to get one of the gigantic jobs he was interested in in the federal government, so might as well take a new course." Well, in February, Clark found one: front-man for the ethanol industry.
When Wesley Clark bounds into the conference room at the nondescript D.C. office of Growth Energy, the industry coalition with which he's thrown in his lot, I am struck by his smallness--he hunches in his chair, his thinning hair carefully combed. An aide brought in a Coke and a Diet Coke and set them on the table. Clark chose the red can and cracked it open.
