WHAT ABOUT GEN. CLARK?

Almost unnoticed by the mainstream press, a campaign to draft Gen. Wesley Clark for the Democratic presidential nomination is gaining steam on the Internet. While the former NATO supreme allied commander has not yet announced his candidacy and won’t (quite) even say he’s a Democrat, the campaign has some Democrats hoping that they at last have found a suitable opponent for President Bush in 2004.

The last time a retired general sought and won the presidency, Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953 successfully persuaded the American people, with the slogan “I will go to Korea,” that he could do better than President Harry Truman in bringing the stalemated Korean War to a close. Mr. Truman was not running for re-election. Gen. Clark’s long-shot opening as a professional soldier could come if Americans seriously doubt President Bush’s capability as commander-in-chief in current and future wars.

But a Wesley Clark campaign is still some distance off. Two draft-Clark committees are gathering signatures and a little money on the Internet. One of them is moving its headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Gen. Clark’s home state of Arkansas. The other committee has opened a New Hampshire field office but calls itself a campaign without a candidate.

Former Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont has blazed the way in Internet candidacies, amassing so many signatures and raising so much money that he threatens the one-time Democratic front runner, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, in the developing New Hampshire primary race.

Mr. Clark, 58, retired in July 2000 as a four-star general after a 34-year career in the U.S. Army. He commanded NATO forces in the 78-day air war against Yugoslavia in 1999, forcing President Slobodan Milosevic to withdraw forces from Kosovo. He now operates his own strategic advisory and consulting firm and is a military analyst for CNN. He was a Rhodes scholar and holds a master’s degree in philosophy, politics and economics from Oxford University.

Mr. Clark has been a consistent critic of the Iraq invasion and aftermath. On the NBC News program “Meet the Press” in June, he described an administration push for war with Iraq starting immediately after the 9-11 attacks. On that very day, he said, he was on CNN and got a call at home from “people around the White House” saying, “You got to say this is connected. This is state-sponsored terrorism. This has to be connected to Saddam Hussein.” He said he asked what was the evidence but received only pressure and assumptions but no evidence.

Under further questioning, he opposed the Bush tax cuts, supported affirmative action, and opposed the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on gays in the military. He said this was no longer an emotional hot-button issue and should be reconsidered by military leaders to ensure both fairness and discipline.

On CNN’s “Crossfire” program, he expressed support for abortion rights but said he had not studied the details of the controversy over so-called partial-birth abortion.

So it sounds as if one more Democratic candidate is carefully laying out his platform and probably will enter the mix sometime this fall. And the political force of the Internet continues to lurk as an unknown that is worth watching.