Wesley Clark vs. Rote Protesters

As previously mentioned, Wesley Clark spoke on campus last night. The speech was pretty much what you'd expect from a once and future (?) Presidential aspirant with his background: he mostly talked about military matters, stressing that George Bush bad, Americ good, puppies and apple pie, yay! OK, not so much the puppies and apple pie, but, you get the idea.

A student had warned me earlier in the day that some students were planning to protest Clark's appearance, but I apparently got there too late to catch them (I came in only a couple of minutes before the talk started). I did read one of their leaflets, though, which managed to use the word "fascist" four times on one sheet of paper, which shows impressive fervor, if not critical thought.

In what I think was a part of the "protest," three or four students got up in the question and answer period and asked slightly combative questions about Kosovo. Which, I have to say, I thought was completely pointless as a protest gesture goes. If you're really opposed to the man as a political figure, Kosovo is absolutely the last thing you should ask him about.

I mean, what do you think you're going to accomplish with this? The man graduated first in his class at West Point five years before I was born, and he became a general at right about the same time most of the students asking questions were born. He's been answering or artfully dodging these exact questions about Kosovo for nigh on ten years.

Do you really think you're going to come up with some unique spin on the Kosovo question that he hasn't already heard a hundred times? He can answer those questions in his sleep, and really, the greatest risk you pose by asking them is the chance that he might fall asleep from the sheer tedium of having to answer yet another pissy questions about some bridge over the Danube. You stand a better chance of getting him unhinged by deliberately not asking about Kosovo-- I bet that'd really mess with his head.

If you want to throw him off guard, ask him about something completely outside of his pet issues. A professor from Visual Arts had the right idea when she asked him about gays in the military, and followed up at the post-talk reception by asking him about gay marriage. (For those who care, he supports the right of gays to serve in the military, and is in favor of civil unions, though not necessarily marriage (I got the latter second-hand, so I can't give the exact phrasing.), both of which are fine by me.)

But really, if you want to get a non-rehearsed response, you need to come up with something more interesting than Kosovo, or even Iraq. He even took a quick poke at the ritual protest when somebody asked about whether he thought we ought to have a draft, saying that "if we had a draft, this talk wouldn't be picketed by a couple of people asking questions about a war that happened eight years ago." If you want to get him off script-- which is really the only chance you have of making a politician look bad-- you need to think outside the metaphorical box.

I was holding forth on this to a couple of students at the reception after the talk, while they were in a crowd of people waiting to shake his hand and ask questions. One of the suggested alternate topics they came up with was global warming stuff. I wandered off to get some cookies, and came back when they were getting close to the front of the crowd, to hear what they ended up with, only to hear Clark saying to an Indian woman in front of them, "...we need to use solar, we need to use wind. We need to use coal, but you have to gasify it first, and capture the carbon, so it doesn't go into the atmosphere. It's absolutely ridiculous to use petroleum products for any stationary power plant-- that's just a waste of hydrocarbons..."

So, it might be a little harder to get him off balance than I thought...

(I didn't attempt to ask any questions, but he did directly answer one of the questions suggested in my previous post, when he said that we should "absolutely renounce" the idea of permanent bases in Iraq. He also had some unkind things to say about Alberto Gonzales and his expansive view of executive power.)

Tags

More like this

Mike Huckabee spoke on campus last night, to the second-biggest crowd I've seen for an on-campus speaker (the biggest was Maya Angelou, back in the fall, where a few hundred people were turned away). It was a very good speech in a lot of ways, but ultimately, the whole thing was kind of frustrating…
You all know them: those awful loud little men who travel from campus to campus to preach apocalyptic hateful nonsense on the sidewalks, who rant and howl and condemn everyone who passes by as a sinner, damned to hell, and reserving a special hatred for women and gays. One of the virtues of being…
Avi Steiner emailed me with a set of questions that are too good not to turn into a blog post: Being a math/science major at a small liberal arts college, I unfortunately never get the "full" experience of a math/science talk. Since I do plan on eventually attending grad school, I thought it might…
Because there are some conversations you have to have with your kids even if you wish you didn't have to have them: Dr. Free-Ride: I wanted to talk to you about a situation that has come up for a friend of mine and is a little worrisome. So, you know I went down to UCLA the other week, right?…

Google Clark+Kosovo+1999 and you'll learn why asking him about Kosovo is what he should be dreading the most (but is fortunate the US media whitewashed). He should be sitting in the Hague, now that Milosevic cell is empty.

I understand that people have deeply felt grievances regarding his conduct of the Kosovo campaign.

Do you really think anybody's going to come up with a question about it that he hasn't been asked a thousand times before? Do you think that the thousand and first repetition of the question is suddenly going to cause him to break down weeping and beg forgiveness?

Do you really think anybody's going to come up with a question about it that he hasn't been asked a thousand times before? Do you think that the thousand and first repetition of the question is suddenly going to cause him to break down weeping and beg forgiveness?
***************************************
Is the point of asking really to get him to answer? I would think it would be to raise the issue for those that don't know about it and to keep the issue out there. Now whether this is the best means to do this is entirely debatable.

Hopefully he has prepped answers now. Before he washed out of the primaries in 2004, he went deer-in-headlights when a reporter asked him, after he argued that the Iraq invasion was illegal, what exactly made the Kosovo campaign (which the UN also refused to authorize) legal.

By Eric the .5b (not verified) on 09 May 2007 #permalink

Whatever he had in 2004, he certainly has very smooth and well-rehearsed answers to questions about Kosovo now. If anything, the questioners came off looking a little worse than he did, because the questions were asked in a slightly snotty tone, and he answered them very gracefully.

I don't think it even worked in a "keep the issue alive" sense, because he was so smooth-- people who didn't know what the question was about would most likely just accept his answers, and move on.

Anyone who thinks that General Clark's conduct during Kosovo is suspect need only look at the "Shock and Awe" of Belgrade that he stood up against the Pentagon to prevent. Ultimately it's the citizens of Kosovo who praise General Clark full throatedly that should be on your mind.
--------
I would like you to read this short war story about me and my family in Kosovo...
That is WHY WE LOVE GEN. CLARK.
Click here: http://www.mrds.org/Regions/easterneurope/kosova/KOSOVA.htm

Thank you to every American for supporting us Albanians. Because of you, we are now FREE. I am doing my best here in US Airbase in Afghanistan. I am working here for US army and I hope that I will pay my portion back to you.
We owe you a lot, American People. I don't care what the other part of the world says.

----

Now if you're doing this because you support someone else, you seriously should be ashamed. I'll pop back if you have any real questions on anything, but there's no need to be combative about it. If not for General Clark taking a strong stand, the 2nd biggest genocide in European history would not have been prevented. And all we ever saw on TeeVee was Monica Lewinski.

he did directly answer one of the questions suggested in my previous post, when he said that we should "absolutely renounce" the idea of permanent bases in Iraq

Interesting, thanks for relaying this.

Being exceptionally cynical at the moment, I think most student protesters are more interested in scoring points with their own pre-disposed crowds, than in actually effecting change.

(Even in the most fortuitous of circumstances-- when I was in school, and agreed with a protest's main premise, and thought it was important or urgent-- I was never actually impressed by student protests.)

By John Novak (not verified) on 09 May 2007 #permalink

At the first Yearly Kos gathering in Las Vegas last year, Clark participated in a science panel and spoke - largely off the cuff - for about 15 minutes about the promise of science and the need for the government to encourage research in science and engineering and rely upon it in solving some of the overwhelming issues that face this country and the world.

Afterwards I heard a number of the panelists, far better versed in things scientific than I, commenting very favorably on his ease with matters of science and his determination to use scientific reality rather than faith-based ideology in making important decisions.

So I'm not surprised that the question about energy and global warming didn't throw him. I expect it's something he's thought about.

By Oliver Texeira (not verified) on 11 May 2007 #permalink

Regardless of what you think of the Kosovo War (and remember, even if you think Clark is a war criminal, you don't want to be defending Slobodan and his gang of thugs and killers), it's probably the last thing you want to attack Clark on, at least from the Right; because you then have a right-in-the-open comparison of two American-fought wars; Kosovo, which was over fairly quickly, with no casualties, and accomplished its goals; and Iraq, which has dragged on miserably for four years, with tens of thousands of American casualties, probably hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, and no end in sight, or even any idea of what the end looks like (a happily-occupied Republican Iraq with oil money flowing to the multinationals is probably out right now).

Plus, said war is a great source for Republican quotes on how they needed to limit the executive's power to wage war.

By Captain C (not verified) on 14 May 2007 #permalink