Reply #53: I like this piece

[CarolNYC]

...about a speech the General gave in South Carolina during the primaries....

In something called the school’s media center, several hundred people form a ring, slightly more students than adults. Wesley Clark bounces into the room, beaming, waving, greeted by a burst of applause, people leap to their feet, heads stretch to catch a glimpse of the celebrity, the national celebrity that has came to their small Southern town.

“The education you get,” Clark says, “depends on where you live.” He explains that in our country the quality of the education one receives is determined by the tax base of the town one lives in, meaning poorer children get a worse education than children in more wealthy neighborhoods. “This country cannot afford to leave students behind,” Clark emphasizes, “education is the key to the American Dream!”

The speech is delivered with strength and with passion; the general gives the impression that what he says is what he believes. Fifteen minutes into the speech, the adults remain attentive, but the high school students, being high school students, have glazed-over eyes. Fifteen minutes can be a long time.

“We are in this together,” a theme Clark would return to several times, as he attacks Bush’s tax cut. “I’m going to put our children at the top of the list. They are going to be my first priority.”

What education is really about is money, funding education programs, funding teachers, funding the repair of school buildings. Clark is not discussing tax cuts for individuals, not the American Dream as a new SUV. For him all Americans must sacrifice for the good of this country, a good that cannot happen without our sacrifice.

“There is plenty of money; it’s just not in the right places. The wealthy need to be patriotic and to give some money back!”

For Wesley Clark, then, redistribution of income is not a dirty idea, not unpatriotic as it is for George Bush, and even for some of the skittish other Democratic candidates. For Clark it is the essence of patriotism.

Although Clark’s speech was on education in rural areas, it was also about his overall views. The candidate kept returning to the venerable liberal theme that we are a community of people and as a community all of us must contribute to the solution of our problems. The military is not an individualist institution, regardless of the "Army of One" ads, nor one that emphasizes materialism. Clark’s three decades in this institution does not have him today singing the glories of individualism and the dream of financial enrichment, he is more comfortable with sacrifice for the common good.

While the national media carries the Republican message that Howard Dean is a liberal, Wesley Clark, under the media’s radar screen, speaks like a Kennedy-Johnson -- dare I say the word? -- liberal. Dean, being slammed hard, would never talk straightforward about taxing the rich to pay for programs for the poor. Wesley Clark is doing exactly that.

It took a Cold War politician, Richard Nixon, to go to communist China. Will it take a retired military general to rehabilitate liberalism?

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