Blogger extraordinaire Josh Marshall, at the oft-cited Talking Points Memo, published an exclusive online-interview with Gen. Wesley Clark yesterday. It’s definitely a must-read.
I’m mentioning the interview for a few reasons. First, I think it’s an interesting landmark for the medium. As far as anyone can tell, this is the first-ever interview between a major-party presidential candidate and a weblog.
Second, and far more importantly, the Marshall interview was an informative exchange that gave Clark an opportunity to delve into policy areas with the kind of detail and specificity that one can’t find in a 10-candidate debate nor a three-minute interview segment on CNN.
I particularly enjoyed reading about Clark’s thoughts on education.
“[T]ake the idea of competition in schools,” Clark said as an example of Bush’s drive to “roll back” American institutions. “OK now, what is competition in schools? What does it really mean? Well, competition in business means you have somebody who’s in a business that has a profit motive in it. It’s measured every quarter. If the business doesn’t keep up, the business is going to lose revenue, therefore it has an incentive to restructure, reorganize, re-plan, re-compete and stay in business.
“Schools aren’t businesses,” Clark added. “Schools are institutions of public service. Their job — their product — is not measured in terms of revenues gained. It’s measured in terms of young lives whose potential can be realized.” Good stuff.
And lastly, I also wanted to mention that interviews like this help demonstrate that Clark is an educated intellectual.
Consider Clark’s take on Bush’s beloved economic policies: “No reputable economist stands up and says, ‘Trickle down economics really works.’ Because we know the marginal propensity to consume of people who are making $100,000 a year and less is much higher than the marginal propensity to consume of people who are making $350,000 a year and more.” It reminds me of the fact that Clark taught economics at West Point and has a post-graduate degree in economics from Oxford.
Or how about some of his thoughts on world history: “Lord Palmerston in the 1830s, I think, in the UK, later quoted by Count Gorchakov, the Russian foreign minister in the 1880s, later quoted by Prime Minister Primakov in 1998, it was, at the original saying, “‘Britain has no permanent friends, only permanent interests.'”
Later in the interview he referenced metaphysics and the 19th-century geo-strategy “Great Game.”
In other words, he’s no intellectual slouch. The guy’s got game.
When I consider the fact that the current occupant of the Oval Office has trouble with subject-verb agreement, I start to look forward to the Clark-Bush debates this time next year.