Conservative pundit, John Ellis, incidentally first cousin of the president, who achieved notoriety by calling the 2000 election for Bush when working for Fox News, precipitating the media rush to declare Bush the victor, floated his theory as soon as September 19th that Clark's entire candidacy has been conceived of and stage-managed by ex-President Bill Clinton. According to Ellis's theory, the idea is to create a groundswell of support for Sen. Hillary Clinton as Clark's vice-presidential running mate. The full idea is for Clark to lose, thus making Sen. Clinton the front-runner for 2008, the run as VP supposedly having cleansed her of any residual baggage she might be carrying. What is in it for Clark according to this scenario is unclear, one of many flaws in Ellis's grand theory.

This particular attempt to discredit Clark's candidacy, which has received much airtime in certain conservative strongholds is based on the mistaken assumption of Clinton-haters that anything associated with the ex-president will turn off the voters as much as it does them. More subtly, though, positioning Clark as a tool of the party establishment could hurt Clark with the grass roots of the party. Sadly for Ellis and his ilk, there is zero evidence to suggest any such thing.

The idea of Sen. Clinton as Clark's running mate idea that has been propagated by Republican activists is perhaps a shrewder tactic, as voters remain ambivalent if not hostile to the idea of Sen. Clinton on a national ticket a recent poll put her negatives in such a context in the 60s. But of course Sen. Clinton is not going to run in 2004 for the simple reason that such a move would make her look exactly the kind of carpet-bagging, power-hungry politician she has convinced the people of New York she is not. In any case, she already is the presumptive front-runner for 2008 and it's hard to see the attraction of being on a losing ticket. And of course, they might win, and then where would she be? In Al Gore's old job? I don't think so.

Then there is the story widely publicized by the Rupert Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard that Clark had told two people (incidentally Republican operatives) that upon his return to the US from Kosovo, he had attempted to find work within the Bush administration but that the only reason he wasn't a Republican was that "Karl Rove never returned my phone calls." Clark has since clarified that he made the statement in jest. The incidentally Republican operatives insist that Clark made the comment in deadly earnest. Right-wing propagandists, led by the inimitable Andrew Sullivan, profess that the issue raises grave concerns as to Clark's consistency. Sullivan, indeed, regularly drops items accompanied by a barbed snide comment from him into his widely-read weblog (www.andrewsullivan.com) suggesting that Clark is unstable and inconsistent and, in Sullivan's opinion, a little nuts.

Expect to hear a lot more in the coming months about Clark's prosecution of the Kosovo war and especially about his being a hothead who was constantly in conflict with his superiors in the US military and his allied commanders in NATO.

This malicious little buzz that is running through right-wing airwaves in the US is standard operating procedure for Karl Rove, President Bush's political adviser. It mirrors his insidious whispering campaigns against both John McCain and Al Gore in 2000. That McCain must have gone a little crazy in captivity in Vietnam. That he had a black love-child (actually his Bangladeshi-born adopted daughter). That Gore was a pathological liar. That Gore said he invented the internet. That Gore had to hire a woman to teach him how to dress and act like an alpha-male.

In a sense, this attempted smearing of Clark is something of a compliment. It indicates what a serious threat the Bush political machine and its minions believe Clark to be. And they have good cause to be worried. Bush trails Clark in recent opinion polls and has no discernible strategy to use against a centrist Democrat with unimpeachable national security and foreign policy credentials who is a four-star general and a Rhodes Scholar to boot. So far all the Bush team has managed to muster against Clark is a little under-handed innuendo. But if Clark continues to rise in the polls, expect the attacks to get lower in turn.