But when you run it all through, it's really me. It's my views that have been shaped by a lifetime of public service, traveling across this country, putting a child through school, worried about how much--or how little--money I made, how to survive on very middle [income] wages while moving every two or three years. The wife would come in and say, "Ah, the towels don't match the bathroom and you've got to buy new bathroom mats. And now what are we going to do for curtains? The curtain rods don't fit in this kind of the house." You know, all these expenses of moving on top of not making very much money. It's just a question of who you are.

I have strong views. I have strong feelings about what's right and what's wrong in the way of policy. I taught economics at West Point, I taught political philosophy. I worked in the South Bronx in 1966 for three or four weeks in the neighborhood youth corps as part of the Johnson administration's anti-poverty program. So I had seen urban poverty. I worked as a counselor at the Little Rock Boys' Club back in the late '50s, early '60s, ended my last staff member position at the Little Rock Boys' Club in 1965, meeting kids from not the most affluent backgrounds. You get a certain feeling for America. And that's the feeling for the America I know. That's the America I want to-you know, I want to give everyone in America equal opportunity, including those people that are like I grew up with.

There's an underlying ideological drive that overrides pragmatism. The American people want government to fix the things they can't fix themselves. The American people are basically individualists. They like each other; they're very charitable and generous; they're bound together in a hundred different ways -- they're not a big-government country. They're not socialists. But they recognize there are things they can't fix, like healthcare, or education--public education.

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on Monday defended retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark, who since announcing his presidential bid has come under fire from former Pentagon colleagues who say he was disliked among fellow commanders.

Albright, who served under President Bill Clinton and worked closely with Clark during the war in Kosovo that he engineered as NATO supreme commander, credited Clark with the victory there.

"He really won that war militarily," Albright said during a lunch with Miami Herald editors and writers to promote her new memoirs, "Madam Secretary" (Miramax Books, $25.95).

"He's a very fine person and a very good friend," Albright added, "and I don't like some of the attacks that are coming about him. I think he was a very fine soldier and a patriot, and I'm glad that he got into the race."

Excerpt from Esquire By Tom Junod
The General
August 2003, Volume 140, Issue 2

In August 1995, the general—three stars, working as J-5 for the Joint Chiefs—went to Bosnia as part of the negotiating team Ambassador Richard Holbrooke had put together to end the civil war that had resulted in the massacre of as many as eight thousand Muslim men and boys at the town of Srebrenica the month before. In Belgrade, Clark had met for the first time Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, who was sponsoring the Bosnian Serbs. Now the team had to travel to Sarajevo. Told that the airport in Sarajevo was too dangerous to fly into, the team decided to drive and asked Milosevic to guarantee its safety on a road held by Bosnian Serbs. Milosevic did not, and so the team wound up taking a fortified Humvee and an armored personnel carrier on a pitched, narrow, winding mountain road notoriously vulnerable to Serb machine-gun fire. Clark and Holbrooke went in the Humvee, the rest in the APC. In his book, the general describes what happened this way: "At the end of the first week we had a tragic accident on Mount Igman, near Sarajevo. [Three members of the team] were killed when the French armored personnel carrier in which they were riding broke through the shoulder of the road and tumbled several hundred meters down a steep hillside."

It is not until one reads Holbrooke's book, To End a War, that one finds out that after the APC went off the road, Clark grabbed a rope, anchored it to a tree stump, and rappelled down the mountainside after it, despite the gunfire that the explosion of the APC set off, despite the warnings that the mountainside was heavily mined, despite the rain and the mud, and despite Holbrooke yelling that he couldn't go. It is not until one brings the incident up to the general that one finds out that the burning APC had turned into a kiln, and that Clark stayed with it and aided in the extraction of the bodies; it is not until one meets Wesley Clark that one understands the degree to which he held Milosevic accountable.

Excerpt from Fox News
July 11, 2003

When I was in the military, I took an oath to support and uphold the Constitution of the United States, and the Constitution is a constitution about freedom and liberty. It doesn't say that it's okay to mislead people, it doesn't say the end justified the means.

Gary Chapman, Special to the American-Statesman
“Amid war, joblessness and worry comes a candidate with a chance for change:”
October 6, 2003

Americans have been told no one like this would think of running for the presidency because of the toll it takes on one's life. But Clark exemplifies dedication to public service. And he's not only running, he's fighting. "Give 'em hell," someone yelled at his Austin rally in Wooldridge Square last week. "I'm going to give them the truth, and it's going to feel like hell," Clark shouted in reply. He has said that America has been "embarrassed" by the Bush administration's incompetence and recklessness.

This is what Democrats have been waiting for. They're sick to death of conservatives braying that their right-wing philosophy is exclusively patriotic and American.
. . . . . . . .
Fortunately, in times of crisis and challenge, this country has produced leaders who rise to the occasion and reinvigorate classic American values. We may be seeing that again now, and not a moment too soon.