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About the debates and the staff, to which I would add:
About the debates (and applies to some interviews as well), Clark is a deep strategic thinker who doesn't like to resort to "sound-byte" answers. He's too honest to give a short quip when the question really deserves a thoughtful complex response. I may be a zealous apologist, but the fact is he does extremely well when he has adequate time to take his audience thru his thought process.
Most of his "conflicting statements" were when he tried to do the same thing with an interviewer, almost invariably a print reporter, and they reduced his comments to a sound-byte and a headline.
I don't recall any conflicting statements actually made during a debate and would appreciate an example, if that's what you meant. What I do recall is that the debate moderators would take one or two lines from a much longer article he had written or speech he had made and try to make it sound like he had changed positions, as when he was asked (twice in the same debate!) about that article he had written for the London Times. He gave the right answer, but he was on the defensive by that point and it showed. I wonder how any of the other candidates would have responded in the same circumstances?
I do agree with you that in several of the debates, but not all, the moderators were very confrontational, and seemed to dwell completely on his past statements and alleged missteps instead of asking about proposed policies and plans for what he would do as president. Now, they did this with all the candidates to some extent, but more so with Clark. Perhaps some of it was because he had no congressional record to pick apart, so they went after his past words instead, but it sure seemed to me that some were just plain flat more hostile. Jennings and Hume for example--I dunno if that's one of the debates you reviewed, but no question that it was a disaster for Clark. He did ok in most of the others, and was declared the "winner" by the talking heads after at least two that I remember.
I also noticed that they tended to treat Clark like a one-trick pony in some of the debates and tended not to ask him about domestic issues. Maybe they thought they were doing him a favor, but I don't really think that was their motive.
One last thought about the debates. Perhaps Clark's disinclination to reduce his own positions to simple one-liners is a flaw as a politician. It works well when he has some control over the time, and no one was better in the town-hall Q&A sessions. No one. He also can usually make it work in one-on-one TV interviews, where it's tougher for the interviewer to edit down his answers.
I believe the debate with Cheney will be closer to the latter than to the nine-candidate debates of the primaries. There will be time limits, but there are on TV too. They'll both have time to work thru their answers and a lot of people will be watching live. I could really see it being a lot like the Kennedy/Nixon debate, with Cheney starting to sweat. Who knows--maybe he'll resort to cussing--wouldn't that be something to see? I wonder if Clark's comment on Hardball last nite about Cheney's stress level was meant to be sort of a pointy stick in anticipation of a coming confrontation? Hmmm....
About the staff, I couldn't agree more with Tom, and would only point out that if Clark is the VP nominee, it's Kerry's campaign staff organizing the effort. So Clark's problems in organizing a staff, in hiring top-flight people, would not be a factor. There would probably be some learning curve as they adapt to Clark, but relatively little since they've been handling his appearances for Kerry since February. I would assume they've had more interaction with Clark and his people than any of the other possibles because Clark has been doing so much more.
About his "campaign blunders," I don't see how entering the campaign late and skipping Iowa could have been helped. They were mistakes in the sense that they ultimately caused his campaign to fail, but there was really no other reasonable choice at the time. In any case, they are "blunders" that could not be repeated, so they have no bearing at all on how he would do as Kerry's running mate.
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