The shine is off the Bush presidency, although George W. still has to be the favorite for 2004. The numbers tell us that the economy is stirring, but the job market isn’t doing much better than the Detroit Tigers: the Federal Reserve’s latest report described the employment situation as weakening, and too many jobs appear to have been lost permanently, casualties to globalization and technology. Iraq continues to cost lives and money, and most Americans in a recent ABC survey thought the war has made a terrorist attack in the United States more rather than less likely. In Afghanistan, there are signs of deterioration; on a good day, relations between Israel and the Palestinians are standing still; North Korea is building nukes almost as fast as the administration’s policies add to the deficit and to economic inequality. But while Democrats have been comforting themselves with the recognition that George W. Bush just might lose the election next year, they have lacked any matching conviction that they can win it. Like the trailing team in a pennant race, the Democrats haven’t felt in control of their own destiny.

General Wesley Clark’s candidacy could change that. The general will have a tough few weeks of it: visible chiefly as a critic of Bush’s Iraq policy, his ideas about domestic policy, so far, lack depth and detail; he’s a novice with partisan Democratic audiences, and despite his experience with the media, he’s only begun to encounter the unique madness of their election mode. Still, Clark is attractive, articulate, and a quick study, and he combines a familiarity with command with a first-rate ability to work a room. His home state is a plus in Democratic electoral calculations, although a Rhodes scholar from Arkansas will surely set off a few shivery memories. On the other hand, as Jonathan Chait pointed out in the New Republic (September 22), Clark’s religious background might help: his father was Jewish, he was raised Baptist and converted to Catholicism. And, of course, his thirty-three years in the military trump a number of Republican aces: as Congressman Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) observed, with Clark as the Democratic candidate, we could count on seeing fewer pictures of the president in a flight suit.

It’s more of a problem that Clark is entering the race late, given the imperatives of contemporary politics, far behind his rivals in fundraising and needing to build a national organization virtually from scratch. Even this liability, however, has its bright side: Democrats have had time to look at the existing field and find it wanting. Howard Dean is probably the leader of the pack, drawing and exciting crowds with his version of liberal militancy, but his support is disproportionately white, middle-class, and ideologically zealous, not a bad mix for primaries but a bad portent for the general election. And it makes matters worse that Dean, who lacks expertise in foreign or defense policy, doesn’t project presidential gravitas. Dick Gephardt, Bob Graham, Joe Lieberman, and John Kerry are worthy but shop-worn, each with his own liabilities; Dennis Kucinich, Carol Moseley-Braun, and Al Sharpton are in it to raise issues or advance careers, and nobody takes them seriously as potential nominees. John Edwards has been gaining a bit of steam, but suffers from a limited résumé, especially in foreign affairs, and lacks a distinct constituency. By contrast, as Bill Clinton recently remarked, General Clark, like Hilary Clinton, is a Democrat with star quality-and he’s free from the negative ratings that shadow the New York senator’s prospects.

Democrats will need a star in 2004, since the Republican campaign will have a titanic advantage in money, and hence in paid media. The Democrats desperately need a candidate who is able to command something like equal time on the free media-someone, in short, who can get on Oprah. How many times have Cruz Bustamente or Gray Davis appeared on a talk show over the last month? General Clark can’t match Arnold Schwarzenegger’s movie credits, but he has more medals; he may not be show biz, but he’s good copy.

Their shortage of money has Democrats thinking of a campaign that concentrates on mobilizing the party’s base of reliable voters. Competing for independent voters is comparatively expensive; dollar for dollar, you get better results by turning out your own. This kind of calculation can be an argument in favor of Howard Dean and a decisive point against Joe Lieberman: Dean would get liberals to the polls and, more important, keep them from defecting to the Greens, while Lieberman would lose them in droves. And Clark’s ability to appeal to core Democratic constituencies has yet to be demonstrated. Still, simply focusing on the base is a strategy for minimizing a defeat: no party, these days, can hope to win without doing well among independents and weak partisans. On that terrain, Clark could be a champion: that he became a Democrat only recently-more specifically, that he voted for Reagan in 1980 and 1984-will almost surely hurt him in Democratic primaries (and will press him to move left on domestic issues to establish his bona fides); but in a general election it will broaden his appeal, especially to the fabled Reagan Democrats, who are still a thumb on the political scales.

More important, Clark may be able to offer the country a genuine version of democratic statecraft. Bush’s greatest asset has been his ability to convey a sense of purpose and determination to a country achingly aware of its vulnerabilities. The shortcomings of his administration, overseas or at home, are linked to its startling willingness to discount obstacles, to rely on optimistic assessments and reports that fit its desires and preconceptions. In domestic life, this is expressed in misleading or vaulting promises (“leave no child behind”) with little or nothing to make them effective. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the administration has given us military victories but without the resources to make those victories effective or secure. It likes its triumphs showy and cheap: back in June, Army Times called the administration’s praise of the military “nothing but lip service,” pointing to the White House’s willingness to shortchange the military while pursuing tax cuts that benefit the wealthy. Even in the great civic moment that followed September 11, 2001, the Bush administration shied away from asking us for any significant sacrifice-or, to be more exact, any such sacrifice that does not fall primarily on the armed services and, more subtly, on working Americans.

It’s not outrageous to hope that General Clark can offer us something better, a leadership whose strength is vertebral as well as verbal, and a liberalism that defines public policy around a moral center rather than a bargain between interests. He speaks in the great tradition of liberal internationalism, recognizing both America’s responsibility for creating a decent world and the limits of American power. It is even more important that he knows that democratic greatness, in foreign or domestic affairs, entails great costs, justly shared by all in proportion to the strength of each. Paul Krugman has been writing in the New York Times that if the Bush administration has a coherent goal, it is the starving and shrinking of the state; General Clark may be the person to remind us that government, for all its flaws, is the best instrument of our common dreams and our better angels as a people. end