Nick Lachey enjoys life during wartime (Getty Images)

Onetime Presidential candidate Wesley Clark, the former NATO Commander, has a new TV gig--ushering demi-celebrities like notional pop singer Nick Lachey and Alaskan husband Todd Palin through intensive military training on the reality show Stars Earn Stripes. And despite the protests from Nobel Peace laureates against the gamification of war, Gen. Clark is unconcerned.

He tells The New Republic that young viewers may young people might “see the military through the eyes of Nick Lachey, and think, look what these people are doing. Pretty interesting, pretty tough, pretty awesome."

Gen. Clark compared Stars Earn Stripes, an NBC series featuring mentors from various branches of the armed forces, to reality shows like Wipeout: "So I’d wanted to make sure that what we were going to do was serious and authentic and purposeful. And didn’t involve a bunch of people making fun of themselves."

If it's anything like this year's Naval recruitment film Act of Valor (like Stars Earn Stripes, made with the full cooperation of the U.S. Armed Forces), this series will be a big hit and show wartime as fun and adventurous. To quote a decorated U.S. general, sounds pretty awesome!

"It's all been about local issues," said Kuhl campaign manager Justine Stokes. "And I think the biggest contrast that we have here is that Congressman Kuhl is a lifelong resident here." Kuhl was born in the town were he now lives, Hammondsport. He also represented the area in the State Assembly for six years, and the State Senate for 17 years before he was elected to Congress in 2004.

Kuhl's campaign isn't depending on the McCain-Palin campaign to drive support.

"It's not necessarily about coattails or what's going on with the national party," said Kuhl campaign manager Justine Stokes, who cast Kuhl as somewhat apolitical, although he's one of the most conservative members of Congress in the state.

Not surprisingly, Kuhl's opponent, Democrat Eric Massa, a former Navy officer who lost to Kuhl by just over 6,000 votes in 2006, disagrees.

Massa's campaign is calling Kuhl's localism a ploy to distract voters from remembering how enthusiastic Kuhl once was about the current administrations. Kuhl even brought both George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, separately, to the district.

"He didn't go the conventions," said Massa campaign manager Justine Schall. "Every time he's had a Republican leader in state, they don't do press. They only do fund-raising. He runs around saying how he's not a Bush rubber-stamp, but he voted 95 percent of the time with Bush. I mean, he can run, but he can't hide from his voting record."

Schall cited Kuhl's support for for Bush on issues related to the federal budget, Social Security, and more recently, the second version of the bailout bill.

Massa is in the Democrats' "Red to Blue" program and has the support of numerous high-profile Democrats (he formerly worked for Wesley Clark), and the Kuhl campaign says this is not a good thing, because Massa is already a Washington insider. The Kuhl campaign's Stoke sought to undermine Massa's fund-raising advantage in the last quarter by criticizing him for taking money from "those not as familiar with the area," like Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco, and Representative Charlie Rangel of Harlem.

(In this campaign finance quarter--July 1 to September 30-- Massa raised $65,269.98 and Kuhl raised $280,508.50. To date, Massa has raised $1,661,992.49 and Kuhl's $1,252,463.99; Massa now has $401,061 on hand, while Kuhl has $374,722.)

Stoke paints a scenario. "The position that we've held is he will walk in lock-step with these folks when he gets to Congress. Because, if you're a freshman member of Congress, and you're party is in the majority, and they need you're help on a vote, and they've given you a lot of money, and they've hosted a fund-raiser for you, whenever they give you a call, you're going to have to answer that call, and it doesn't really matter what he says about being an independent voice."

Politics being what it is, there may be something to Kuhl's characterization of his opponent. The Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, the same day it endorsed the Democrat in another congressional race, backed Kuhl, even though they had previously endorsed Massa in 2006. The paper wrote that now Massa is "a walking briefing book" and "his connection to constituents is less clear, less developed. He's a big picture guy in a district with small-picture needs."

Somewhat incongruously, Kuhl's campaign is pushing the theme of "change." This, Schull said, is a different sort of change.

"I think what a lot of people understand is we got change two years ago when Democrats took over Congress," she said. "For people in upstate New York, they pay among the highest taxes in the country: in property taxes, income taxes."

She went on, "In an election year where, I think, a lot of people have been convinced that they need change, I think they're looking at this race and saying, 'You know what, maybe we don't need to change people just for the sake of changing the person holding this office." He added, "Change just for the sake of change is not always good change."

After a hearty laugh, conversation returned to the speech. Ms. Albright said that while the presidential candidate is incredibly charming in person, she was also pleased with the "diplomacy" of the speech.

Later, Mr. Chase, who has spent the last week on the convention floor, said he had "enough of the arena," and had opted to watch the speech from his hotel. His mind turned to who McCain would pick as his vice president.

Would it be a woman?

"I don't think he has the nuts to choose a woman," he said. (Hey, that's why actors aren't political prognosticators!

By 11 p.m., a mostly civilian crowd dotted with journalists, politicians and celebrities—including Susan Sarandon and basketball star Derek Fisher (who was seen chatting up Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa)—had packed the Exdo event space, whose over-the-top, multi-themed décor at first seemed to outshine the crowd. A sprawling banquet hall was divided into quarters seemingly designed to represent the elements. To the left was fire-red couches, red carpet, projected flames flickering on the crimson drapes. To the right was the forest, and the back was all white, with blue sky and aqua-themed projections on walls. Other rooms featured a disco-themed dance floor, and karaoke and Guitar Hero stages.

"Who are all these people?" was a common refrain heard about the room

Fran Drescher was holding court in the red room, handing out copies of her Cancer Schmancer CD. It had been a long week. She'd learned to carry flip-flops in her bag. "I think the 21^st century is all about putting yourself out there for something greater than yourself," she said. Ms. Drescher went on to say that the Lifetime Television events that she had been involved with had been the most important of the week.

"I'm fucked," said Alan Cumming. "Completely knackered." He estimated he'd attended about 30 events over the course of the last four days in conjunction with the Creative Coalition.

A producer with the Barry Levinson-helmed film Poliwood, which has been documenting the celebrities at the DNC, said that watching the celebrity box at Mr. Obama's speech at Invesco Field "almost felt like celebrity summer camp. You could see that a special bond had been formed between the actors in the Creative Coalition. Nine out of 12 of the celebrities cried during the speech!"

After midnight the party started to pick up, and the somewhat awkward crowd started to gel. John Kerry mugged for photos with random people. Ashley Judd was leading Jamie Foxx around. "I'm so proud of my party," gushed Ms. Judd, who had been something of a Hillary Clinton holdout. "I'm so inspired. I've got to get back home and roll up my shirtsleeves and get out the vote. I've told all my friends it's like the Cannes Film Festival times three." A few minutes later, Ms. Judd and Mr. Foxx were spotted dancing away enthusiastically with a crowd of civilians.

"It was a great speech -- it was powerful and strong," said Wesley Clark. "I think it had broad appeal." The New York Times columnist David Brooks gave the speech an A-minus.

By 2 a.m., almost everyone seemed drunk. Matthew Modine was talking about what a great job Mr. Obama had done. "It's like you go into a dark room. It's scary, and there are a lot of monsters," said Mr. Modine. "All you have to do is turn on the light."

The background of the Clark flap is by now familiar: On CBS’ Face the Nation on Sunday, the retired general said that “I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president,” a comment that has been portrayed by the right – and by much of the media – as an effort to disparage McCain’s service.

While Obama quickly rebuked Clark, much of the left has rushed to the Clark’s defense, noting that he was merely responding to a question that was almost identically phrased and that he was only drawing a reasonable distinction between McCain’s military service and the experience needed to set U.S. foreign policy.

Clark’s defenders have a point, but in the bigger picture the details of the argument aren’t what’s important. The real significance of this week’s controversy – however unfair and unjust it is – is that it pretty much ensures that Clark won’t be on the Democratic ticket this fall, something that seemed a very real possibility beforehand. And Clark, almost certainly, would not have lived up to his potential as a running-mate.

That is the story of Clark’s political career, which began sometime in the early part of this decade, when he began toying with a 2004 presidential campaign. On paper, then as now, he seemed the perfect face for a Democratic Party whose leaders have all too often been caricatured by the right as national security weaklings, eager to appease aggressors and frightened of using force. What better antidote to this poisonous perception than an actual military general, a man who oversaw a successful war and Kosovo and who spent three years as NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander?

Clark dawdled before finally plunging into the ’04 Democratic race, but his entry was still greeted enthusiastically by the party’s grassroots and by some key fund-raisers. He was instantly competitive in polling. The potential clearly existed for him to supplant Howard Dean, who was then the front-runner, by campaigning effectively as an anti-war Democrat who seemed likely to win over independent and Republican voters in the fall.

He failed miserably. His late start and Dean’s head start, along with his decision to write off the Iowa caucuses, can all be pegged as contributing factors in Clark’s ’04 demise. But the real explanation is simpler, though hard to define precisely: He did not make the right personal impression on voters.

Others have commented on his personality problem. When Clark jumped in the race in ’03, the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen asked if he might be “too weird for prime-time.”

“Something about Clark makes people bristle,” wrote Cohen, who concluded that the general lacked in “warmth and affability” what he had in terms of intellect.

Other theories have been offered. Peggy Noonan, obviously not one to extend too many courtesies to Democrats but still an astute observer of personality, called Clark “a first-class strange-o,” arguing that his ambition and arrogance were too easily visible.

Whatever it was that turned voters off, Clark fell well short of expectations in 2004, eking out a win in the Oklahoma primary (he is from neighboring Arkansas) but winning nowhere else before dropping out.

My own theory is that Clark, unlike other military figures who have transitioned into politics (like Colin Powell), simply did not – and does not – carry himself in public in a way that is consistent with what most voters expect when they hear the title “General.” He is not physically imposing or intimidating, does not naturally assert control during interviews and in debates, and doesn’t seem to command any extra degree of respect of deference from his opponents or from questioners. Clark’s mere presence does not convey authority.

The problem is that this undercuts the value of his military background. The whole idea of running a retired general for office is to offer a reassuring figure to the masses. Powell, for instance, shed his military uniform in 1993, but was no less commanding a presence when he began venturing into politics in 1995 and 1996. The same is true of Jim Webb, who was never a general but who exudes the seriousness, purpose, and focus voters associate with military men.

Without his uniform, by contrast, Clark seems like just another politician struggling to stick to his talking points. When Democrats realized his average-ness in ’04, they jumped off the bandwagon, recognizing that his military credentials wouldn’t be worth nearly as much as they hoped in the fall.

But Clark, of course, still hungered for national office after the ’04 debacle, and worked hard to maintain his visibility in the aftermath of the election. Almost certainly, he would have run this year had Hillary Clinton, whom he supported, not done so. And not surprisingly, his lingering presence on the public stage has – once again – led some Democrats to fantasize about the value he might add to an Obama-led ticket. Seduced once again by his military title, they envisioned Clark as a powerful counterbalance to the G.O.P. attacks on Obama’s perceived national security inexperience.

In reality, there’s little reason to believe that the result would be a more positive one than ‘04 if Obama picked Clark. Just consider the reaction to his comments about McCain this week: His own military record hasn’t insulated Clark at all from efforts to portray him as just another anti-military MoveOn leftist. And why? Because it’s only too easy, upon watching Clark play a politician, to forget that he even has a military record.

For Obama, there is clear value in selecting a running mate who will offer reassurance to the public on national security. But Clark is, and always has been, the wrong person for that role. This week’s events, unfair though they may be, will simply exclude from the selection process a man who probably shouldn’t have been included in the first place.

Instead, perhaps naïvely, General Clark stated a very simple fact. Mr. McCain’s service in Vietnam doesn’t prove his aptitude or competence to serve in the nation’s highest office. Or as he told Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer on CBS: “I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.”

Nor with all due respect is withstanding long captivity and torture by the North Vietnamese. “I certainly honor his service as a prisoner of war. He was a hero to me, and to hundreds of thousands and millions of others in the armed forces, as a prisoner of war,” said General Clark. The reservations he expressed were clear and honest, requiring no apology and no scuttling repudiation by Barack Obama.

Supporters of Mr. McCain insist that his military service should be exempt from discussion, except when they feel like bringing it up to prove some point about national security, terrorism or the presidency that it really doesn’t prove at all. But of course he was not the only soldier, sailor or airman to survive such experiences with courage and nobility. There was once another former POW whose candidacy for high office vindicates the Clark argument.

Or has everyone forgotten Admiral Stockdale?

The late James Bond Stockdale epitomized the bravery and idealism of the Americans imprisoned and tormented, both physically and mentally, by their captors in Hanoi. Captured and beaten after his Navy jet was shot down, he lived in leg irons for two years and in solitary confinement for four years between September 1965 and February 1973, when he was finally released. His many honors and citations included the Medal of Honor and he rose to vice admiral. He was a man of indisputable intelligence who taught philosophy at Stanford University and wrote several books before he died of Alzheimer’s disease three years ago.

Yet the sad truth is that Stockdale lived out his final years in the shadow of his disappointing independent candidacy for vice president as industrialist Ross Perot’s running mate in 1992. He knew little about policy or politics, as roughly 70 million Americans discovered with a wince as they watched a televised debate that pitted him against Al Gore and Dan Quayle.

“Who am I? Why am I here?” were his opening lines, a bid to acknowledge his inexperience that left audiences laughing at him. Although he sounded refreshingly unscripted by comparison with his opponents, Stockdale’s evident confusion and unreadiness left him looking like a “bewildered grandfather,” as Maureen Dowd put it. Everybody liked Stockdale, but nobody thought he should be running for vice president, and the notion that he might sit a heartbeat from the Oval Office raised serious questions about Mr. Perot’s judgment.

Stockdale was too honorable and too wise to claim that the answer to his own question—“Why am I here?”—should be found in his matchless military record or his epic POW experience. After his humiliation in the debate, he liked to say that he was the candidate of “the people,” but although the people liked him, they didn’t vote for him.

The Stockdale episode also highlights the bias and hypocrisy behind the fury over General Clark’s comments. In the days following the October 1992 debate, Stockdale was roasted from all sides, with much of the most withering commentary emanating from the self-styled superpatriots of the far right, who were angry about the Perot candidacy and worried that Bill Clinton would win the election, as he did.

So a headline in The Washington Times called Stockdale a loser, and conservative columnists denigrated him as “geezerish,” “lame” and “the big loser.” Rush Limbaugh, who evaded the Vietnam draft thanks to an inflamed boil on his behind, devoted nearly an entire broadcast to mocking Stockdale. After playing a clip of the admiral defending abortion rights, the radio host described him as “intellectually vacant” and “pandering” and suggested that his pro-choice views were insincere.

Incidentally, the Limbaugh show’s producer back in October of 1992 was none other than Roger Ailes, who now heads Fox News Channel, where the faked anger over the Clark comments has swiftly reached a seething boil. He’s a phony, and so is this latest eruption of right-wing indignation.

jconason@observer.com

The simplest way is to run for the office you covet when it comes open and to win it—or, failing that, to wage a noble-but-losing campaign that puts you first in line for the next time around. This approach enjoys a long tradition—renewed this year with John McCain’s nomination—in Republican presidential politics.

And then there’s the other strategy: If there is an unbeatable and immovable force blocking you from the office you desire, yield to that force, embrace it and hope it will favor you with its blessing for the next opening.

This is the game that some of Hillary Clinton’s most high-profile supporters have played. Evan Bayh, Tom Vilsack and Wesley Clark all clearly covet the presidency and were itching to run this year. Vilsack actually jumped into the race, the first candidate from either party to do so, back in November 2006, while Bayh formed an exploratory committee a month later and Clark never really shut down his political operation after his ill-fated 2004 campaign.

But then they all thought the better of it. Hillary Clinton was poised to enter the race as perhaps the most prohibitive front-runner in the modern primary era, powered by an unbeatable mix of cash, expectations and insider support. And whatever oxygen she wouldn’t consume would be gobbled up by Barack Obama and John Edwards, leaving no room in the 2008 contest for anyone else. The conventional wisdom of early 2007 was clear: Clinton was the inevitable winner, and with Obama and Edwards in the race, no one else could even get noticed.

One by one, then, the lesser-known but equally ambitious Democrats headed for the sidelines and joined Clinton’s cheering section. Just two weeks after launching his exploratory committee in December 2006, Bayh announced he wouldn’t be a candidate, and by September he officially backed Clinton. Vilsack ended his bid last February and signed on with Clinton a few months later, and Clark endorsed her in September.

It was easy to divine the pragmatism at work in all three moves. Bayh, for example, is a case study in why Clinton attracted so much early support in this race from so many ambitious Democrats.

Much like Al Gore, Bayh is a child of Washington, someone almost literally bred to run for president. The son of Birch Bayh, the old liberal lion and former Indiana senator who sought the Democratic presidential nod in 1976, he established roots in Indiana as soon as he earned his law degree, plunging into elected politics in 1986, when he won a race for secretary of state at age 30. Two years later, he was the governor, a post he held for two terms. By the early ‘90s, Bayh seemed on an inexorable path to the national stage.

His first big break was supposed to come in 1996, when he was asked to deliver the keynote address at the Democratic convention—the same prime-time platform that turned Mario Cuomo into a national star in 1984. But Bayh’s speech was not the smash hit that Cuomo’s was and it didn’t leave many Democrats clamoring for a Bayh presidential run in 2000. Instead, he ran for and won a Senate seat in 1998 and ended up as one of four finalists for Gore’s vice presidential slot in 2000. He passed on a 2004 campaign, perhaps calculating that George W. Bush was likely to win reelection and that his odds would be better in 2008.

Sure enough, from the moment Bush defeated Kerry in November ’04, Bayh seemed certain in 2008 to run his long-awaited national campaign. He stepped up his travel and fund-raising, dispatched a mini-army of field workers to assist Democratic candidates in Iowa and New Hampshire, and sought to establish himself as the most electable ’08 option for Democrats—someone with a proven ability to win in one of the most Republican states in the country.

“More than anything else,” he said when he launched his exploratory committee, “I think we need someone who can unite the American people in the common cause of building our nation. And that's not happening in Washington today.”

But that didn’t last long. Realizing how tough it would be to gain any traction in a race dominated by the money and personalities of Clinton, Obama and Edwards, Bayh promptly backed out. When he threw himself into Clinton’s effort, his game seemed clear: Win favor with her in the primaries to earn the VP slot on her ticket in the fall. Win or lose, he’d then be on course to win the big prize on his own in either 2012 or 2016.

Of course, he couldn’t quite admit this. Publicly, he said he was backing Clinton because “the next president of the United States must be experienced and seasoned, must be smart and must be tough.” So much for his earlier talk of finding a candidate who could unite the country and win over Republicans—hardly the calling cards of Clinton, one of the most polarizing public figures in America.

But the speaker of the Indiana House of Representatives, Patrick Bauer, all but confirmed Bayh’s true motives. Bauer said that Bayh had personally courted him for the endorsement and suggested that Bayh had hinted he might end up on a Hillary-led ticket in the fall.

Vilsack and Clark, without doubt, had similar thoughts. As the moderate former governor of Iowa, a key swing state in the fall, Vilsack was well aware of the ticket-balancing assets he’d provide for any Democratic nominee, not to mention his potential importance in his state’s lead-off caucuses. In ending his own campaign and endorsing Clinton, the calculation was obvious: Deliver Iowa (and, thus, the nomination) for her and win a spot on the fall ticket. (It also didn’t hurt that Clinton helped pay off his $430,000 presidential campaign debt when he backed her.)

Clark, too, surely considered the vice presidential angle in lining up with Clinton, knowing that his military credentials would make him attractive to a wartime presidential nominee. It’s also conceivable that he had an eye on a top-level cabinet appointment, secretary of state perhaps. In fairness, unlike Bayh and Vilsack, a personal angle was also at work, given his previous ties to the Clintons.

According to the original script, the only Democratic intrigue in the spring of 2008 would involve Hillary Clinton’s vice presidential selection. This is the race that Evan Bayh, Tom Vilsack and Wesley Clark all thought they were entering when they made their endorsements. But then, of course, something funny happened, and now it looks like Barack Obama will win the nomination. Which goes to show that when you’re trying to figure out how to get onto a presidential ticket, there’s no such thing as a safe option.

“No one can tell you how to milk a cow—you have to learn that yourself,” Ballard went on. “There’s no doubt in my mind that he [Obama] can recognize a cow, but there’s no experience that shows me he know how to milk one.”

Hillary Clinton’s vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq has long been seen as one of her great liabilities, in contrast to Obama’s early opposition to the war.

But the Clinton campaign is seizing on two recent developments to poke holes in Obama's rhetoric about Iraq. The first is a recent comment by former Obama foreign policy adviser Samantha Power, who said Obama would not necessarily stick with the plan for Iraq his campaign has articulated if he were elected. The second is an article in the New York Times yesterday that examined Obama’s early days in the Senate and portrayed him as cautious on legislation opposing the war.

On the conference call today, Ballard, General Wesley Clark, Congressman (and Vice Admiral) Joe Sestak, along with Clinton national security director Lee Feinstein and communications director Howard Wolfson tried to upend the issue of Iraq in the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.

“This is going to be a central test of presidential leadership,” Wes Clark, a longtime Clinton supporter, said. “What I have heard from the Obama campaign is a matter of serious concern.” He recounted Power's comments to the BBC about how Obama will reshape his Iraq plan "together in consultation with people who are on the ground to whom he doesn’t have daily access now, as a result of not being the president."

“Those inside advisers have no magic formula,” Clark said. “It comes down to the resolve and conviction of the president.” He went on to push Clinton’s assets, saying, “She has the strength of character and purpose to get us out of Iraq relatively quickly and responsibly.”

Sestak was more specific, speaking about “The strong lessons that we learned in Somalia.”

“When I heard Senator Clinton come out early and say one to two brigade combat troops at a time, “ he said, “there was an understanding, there was a deliberateness.” He added, “It’s not just the number that Senator Clinton threw out it’s the memory.”

Feinstein spoke after the military officials. “Senator Obama gave a great speech which we admire, in 2002, opposing the Iraq war.” But, he added, “he didn’t oppose funding the war” and “there isn’t much of a record when it comes to specific action…prior to becoming a presidential candidate.”

In case that wasn’t clear, Wolfson wrapped the campaign’s comments by saying, as he has before, “Senator Obama has not passed the commander in chief test.”

Clark also says in the spot: "I see that Hillary's opponents have started attacking her. That's politics. What this country needs is leadership."

After greeting a few locals eating in the booths, the trio sat at the counter for coffee and fruit cup in front of about a dozen cameras.

After some niceties ("Well, you still swim everyday," Clinton said to Clark) the discussion took a sharp turn towards energy policy.

Clark talked about the "geology of bubbling carbon dioxide" and spoke about the ability to actually ship the gas between countries.

"How do you carry carbon dioxide?" asked Vilsack.

Clinton, picking bites of pinapple out of the fruit cup, explained the pumping technique involved in the shipping process.

"That's what they call tertiary recovery," Clark said.

The entire time they ignored the cameras clicking and rolling around them like practiced actors. When Clark mentioned a Dutch company that is doing work with wind, Clinton affected surprise. "That is so exciting," she said.