PoliBlog

Clark in NH

Clark has officially opened his campaign HQ in NH. All well and good, but it begs the question: what has he been doing in the last month? If he indeed had spent weeks pondering whether or not to run, one would have thought that part of that time would have been used in planning. Further, one would have thought that one of the first things he would have done would have been to set up camp in NH. As the NYT's notes:

The campaign has lost valuable time since General Clark joined the race Sept. 17 by failing to plant the flag aggressively here until now. He has been in New Hampshire all week, with side trips to raise money in New York and Boston. But a case of laryngitis, and limited appearances at photo opportunities--with nonvoting high school students and toddlers--have kept him from the kind of give and take that voters here expect.

As a result, the campaign here had stalled just as potential supporters were looking for signs that General Clark could become an effective candidate and organize a presidential-level campaign. The state will be his first electoral test because he has decided to skip the caucuses in Iowa, which votes a week earlier.

If the argument for skipping Iowa was that he couldn't run and really couldn't engage in the requisite retail politics, then skipping NH seems in order as well, with focus on Arizona and South Carolina (of course, that would show weakness, but then again I argued that skipping Iowa showed weakness as well).

Further, if part of his argument concering Bush's Iraq policy is that the administration failed to engage in suffcient advanced planning for post-war Iraq, then one has to ask whether Mr. Clark really would have done a better job given the obvious lack of planning and advanced thought that went into his presidential campaign to date. Let's face facts: mapping out a run at a party's nomination is less complicated than rebuilding a country after decades of tyranny.

Source: Clark Campaign Embarks on New Hampshire Mission