Watch out for muggers, Mr President

By ROGER FRANKLIN Herald correspondent

Even though a little creative rescheduling was needed, it must have struck the strategists at the Republican National Committee as a real good idea at the time. Delaying their party's presidential convention, that is, and staging it in New York. Back in January when the decision was made, all the pieces just seemed to click. Get George Bush and his Cabinet all-stars on stage, band playing and Old Glory waving, and beam the spectacle to America's living rooms on, yes, the third anniversary of September 11.

The Democrats grumbled at the time about their opponents' chutzpah, that delightful Yiddish-rooted New York term for being too cheeky by half. The Big Apple is their home turf, as it proved by voting 4-to-1 to make Hillary Clinton its senator. And Madison Square Garden? It's almost a party shrine, the much-loved parade ground from which Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton marched to the White House.

But it was all part of the Republicans' in-your-face arrogance at the time. The big push into Iraq was about to start. With Bush seemingly unstoppable the best punches the Democrats could land were slaps, and weak ones at that. The New York incursion was another of the Turd Blossom's strategies, they sniffed, invoking the nickname of presidential strategist Karl Rove.

They meant it as an insult, but Bushies rather enjoy the veteran operative's nom de guerre. Like the flowers that sprout from cow cakes on the Texas prairie, the back-slappers like to joke that Rove has the wiles to turn any political pile of deep do-do - to borrow a phrase from Bush the Elder - into a bed of roses.

George Bush didn't dub Rove "boy genius" for nothing, especially after the guru orchestrated the unprecedented mid-term congressional victory that gave Republicans undisputed control of Congress last November.

And today? Well let's just say that the Republicans' decision to meet in New York proves that if a week is a long time in politics, nine months is an eternity. The war - the hot part of it, anyway - is long over, yet the kudos Rove and his President expected hasn't been forthcoming. They can point, and with some justification, to a tyrant toppled and the birth of something that, with a bit of luck and a lot of money, just might emerge as the Middle East's first functioning democracy.

But these days, like the Democrats' earlier whining about their enemies' designs on New York, the message isn't getting through. Instead, night after night, it's more footage of bombings in Baghdad, updates on the latest casualties, and UN workers getting the hell out of Dodge. For the first time since America rallied to the flag on September 11, the President who wrapped himself in it appears to have a less than adequate shield.

Worse for the White House, if the latest scandal roiling Washington has legs, there may be a major detonation uncomfortably close to the Oval Office. Rove is widely seen as the man who blew the cover of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame to punish her husband, retired diplomat Joseph Wilson, for publicly dismissing the charge that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger. Last week, a month after the story began to gain traction, Democrats were calling for Kenneth Starr-style independent counsel and a defensive Bush was vowing that leakers had no place in his Administration.

Lame and late to the ball, the President's performance reinforced the findings of the latest polls. In a few short months, Bush has gone from invincible to vulnerable - a squeeze he might find even tighter if the field of Democratic hopefuls boasted a single potential challenger with the skills and support to exploit the shifting momentum in each party's political fortunes.

That's not an admission you'll hear from Democratic strategists, at least not in public. But privately, as they survey the polling data, it's a conclusion they can't avoid. Just look at the rapturous reaction to retired General Wesley Clark's entry into the fray.

Initially, if you went by the ecstatic sighs of the faithful, it's a wonder the ex-Nato commander didn't emerge to the sound of angels' trumpets. Behold, the Democratic messiah, his admirers insisted, Bill Clinton chief amongst them.

As a former military commander, Clark would be immune to Republican charges that he lacked the stomach for war. As a perceived liberal on social issues, he wouldn't alienate his party's left wing. According to his campaign team of Clinton Administration veterans, he alone boasts the credentials to woo Middle America and defeat Bush.

Two weeks later, however, Clark looks much less of a sure thing, even as poll numbers soar and coffers fill with contributions from the Clintons' network of fundraisers. Yes, he's slick on the stump, but he has a problem: even his friends don't like him.

Start with Bill Clinton. Despite the flattering things he has been saying about him lately, Clinton forced Clark into early retirement. The reason: Clark couldn't be trusted, going behind his commander in chief's back to lobby Congress when he couldn't get his own way in Kosovo. Or listen to his fellow West Pointer, retired general Hugh Shelton: "The reason he came out of Europe early had to do with integrity and character issues. I'm not going to say whether I'm a Republican or a Democrat. I'll just say, Wes won't get my vote."

On the Iraq war, over the past year, Clark has been for it, against it, and most recently, somewhere in between. Asked aboard his campaign plane if he would have supported last year's congressional decision authorising the attack, he first looked baffled, then stammered, then hollered for his press secretary, who raced to his side and explained that, yes, he would have - sort of. The vote would have won his approval, she insisted, but when push came to shove, he probably wouldn't have followed through on it. "Right," said Clark. "Exactly!"

His positions on health care, joblessness, gay marriage, immigration, taxation and the deficit are more clear, but less definite. He just doesn't know, claiming not to have studied those issues.

Yet because Clark lends himself to presidential packaging, plays well before the TV cameras, and because the Democrats are desperate to find someone - anyone - who can unite the party's fractious constituencies and defeat the hated President who has so far bested them at every turn, Clark is topping polls across the country.

It's a yearning for a saviour exemplified by Jonathan Chait, a senior editor at the centrist and normally sedate New Republic magazine. "I hate President George W. Bush," Chait writes. "I hate the way he walks - shoulders flexed, elbows splayed out from his sides like a teenage boy feigning machismo. I hate the way he talks - blustery self-assurance masked by a pseudo-populist twang. I even hate the things that everybody seems to like about him. I hate his lame nickname-bestowing - a way to establish one's social superiority beneath a veneer of chumminess."

That attitude - mirror image of the enmity hard-core Republicans displayed for Clinton - hardened during Al Gore's Florida fiasco in 2000 and was distilled into the pure essence of absolute contempt by the Democrats' subsequent humiliations on Capitol Hill. It is also the greatest factor working in Clark's favour. Who cares if he fudges and contradicts himself, they say, Clark can win. At least that's what many party loyalists now tell themselves.

Clark's standing in New York makes the point. A month ago, he was flying beneath the radar. Today, two weeks after declaring, he commands the loyalty of 18 per cent of primary voters - one point ahead of the prickly Howard Dean, who the party's wallahs believe is just too far to the left to be a serious, enduring contender. It's yet to be seen whether Clark can keep riding the wave, especially given that Dean isn't about to easily surrender the nomination that his early success and huge, grassroots fundraising have led him to see as his by right.

On Wednesday, within hours of the New York poll being made public, Dean's operatives were having a grand time pointing out that the ex-general isn't even a Democrat, still being listed in his home state of Arkansas as an Independent.

"This has been a whirlwind two weeks. There are a lot of things we have to do," says spokesman Mark Fabiani, who was last seen in Washington easing Bill Clinton out from under the Monica mess, and after that in New York, where he helped Hillary into her Senate seat.

Ah, New York. The state that, in any other presidential year, would be one of the least interesting battlegrounds. In terms of votes, it still is; the Empire State almost always goes Democrat, and there is no reason to imagine it will swing to the right next year.

What make New York so interesting, such a source of potential upsets, are the players that could be dominating the local stage by next September. Bush will be there, of course, thanks to strategist Rove's brainstorm to take the convention into the heart of enemy territory.

And his opponent? Well it could be Clark, if he hasn't self-destructed. Or it might be Dean, if his game plan survives the newcomer's depradations and the animosity of his party's establishment. Or it might be - and this is what presidential-drama junkies fervently wish to see - someone else. Someone whom the polls show as the current favourite, with 44 per cent of the overall national electorate. Someone, in other words, called Hillary Clinton.

Yes, she's said she won't run. But her last name is Clinton, so consider the speaker when evaluating the sincerity. If Clark crumbles, but not until he has ruined Dean, where else could the party turn - the party now dominated by officials put in place by hubby Bill. Since his campaign is full of her former aides and staffers, she would inherit a well-oiled, up-and-running machine. And when Bush arrives for what, in January's innocence, he imagined would be a New York victory lap, she would be there to greet him, armed and ready on her home turf.

"With Bush at 49 per cent approval, Hillary's not running," the slimy but astute former White House consigliore Dick Morris said last week. "But if he slips to 45 per cent - and he probably will - she's in. You can bet on it."

Welcome to New York, Mr President. Watch out for muggers.