ReWrite!

Lord Saleton is upset that Clark is stopping Edwards from stopping John Kerry. That bastard General just won’t lie down when he’s told to by members of the press who “are itching to write him off.” He’s screwing up the whole storyline.

When Wes Clark entered the presidential race five months ago, I said it was a rebuke to John Kerry for failing to catch on as “the candidate with the war record, the candidate who was supposed to keep the party in the center and fend off the standard-bearer of the left.” I still think it was a rebuke. But Kerry reclaimed his role, and now Clark is clearing his path to the end zone by blocking the only candidate who could stop Kerry: John Edwards.

First Clark squashed Edwards’ official campaign kickoff in September, leaking word that very day that he would get into the race. Then, a week ago, Clark beat out Edwards for third in New Hampshire by a fraction of a percentage point. That cost Edwards the ability to claim plausibly that he had continued his momentum from Iowa. Tuesday night, it happened again: Clark eked out a margin over Edwards in Oklahoma so narrow that the state election board will have to review the ballots before declaring an official winner. Edwards argued that he had “exceeded my expectations” and that his finish in Oklahoma, combined with his win in South Carolina, was “a continuation of the surge we’ve seen in other caucuses and primaries.”

Nice try. I think Edwards would be the strongest Democrat in the general election. Nobody expected him to do this well in Oklahoma. But when the history of the 2004 race is written, my guess is that we’ll look back at Oklahoma as Edwards’ Stalingrad. He had to kill off Clark. The media were itching to write off Clark, and a no-win night would have given them license to do so. Now they can’t. Clark will go on to Tennessee and Virginia, where he’ll do what he did in Oklahoma: split the non-Yankee vote and keep Kerry in the lead. Maybe Edwards will win Tennessee and Virginia, and Clark will fade. But by then it may too late to stop Kerry.

Edwards was clearly pining for a Clark defeat in Oklahoma. He delayed his flight to Tennessee more than an hour as he waited for the last returns to trickle in. On CNN before the Oklahoma returns were final, Edwards said, “This race has narrowed dramatically tonight.” He said the differences between himself and Kerry would “become clearer and clearer as the race focuses on the two of us.” On Fox News, Edwards said the contest was looking “more and more like it’s a two-person race. I’m looking forward to that two-person race.”

Oops. A couple of hours later, Clark took the stage in Oklahoma to declare, “The results are in! We have won!” Rubbing it in, Clark boasted that a week earlier he had “won the non-New England portion of New Hampshire.” It’s a thin but valid claim. And now Edwards will have more trouble running as the outsider against Kerry, because Clark will run as the outsider against both senators. As Clark put it to Larry King Tuesday night, “I’m an outsider, Larry. I haven’t been in the Senate. I didn’t vote for No Child Left Behind. I didn’t vote to go war with Iraq, and I didn’t vote for the Patriot Act.” The general who auditioned for the role of John Kerry is ending up instead with the role of Howard Dean.

He even uses the words “audition” and “role.” Please spare me any more superior e-mails about how silly my thesis of politics as showbiz is.

See, Clark was the guy who was supposed to stop Dean, but Kerry stopped him instead and now he’s going to win because Clark is trying to stop Edwards. Doesn’t Clark know what his role is supposed to be? Didn’t anybody give him the new script for gawdsake? The idiot actually thinks he’s running to win when everybody knows that he and Dean have been written out.

Kerry and Edwards are the new It Boys. Dean and Clark are like so 2003.