As previously mentioned, Wesley Clark spoke on campus last night. The speech was pretty much what you’d expect from a once and future (?) Presidential aspirant with his background: he mostly talked about military matters, stressing that George Bush bad, Americ good, puppies and apple pie, yay! OK, not so much the puppies and apple pie, but, you get the idea.
A student had warned me earlier in the day that some students were planning to protest Clark’s appearance, but I apparently got there too late to catch them (I came in only a couple of minutes before the talk started). I did read one of their leaflets, though, which managed to use the word “fascist” four times on one sheet of paper, which shows impressive fervor, if not critical thought.
In what I think was a part of the “protest,” three or four students got up in the question and answer period and asked slightly combative questions about Kosovo. Which, I have to say, I thought was completely pointless as a protest gesture goes. If you’re really opposed to the man as a political figure, Kosovo is absolutely the last thing you should ask him about.
I mean, what do you think you’re going to accomplish with this? The man graduated first in his class at West Point five years before I was born, and he became a general at right about the same time most of the students asking questions were born. He’s been answering or artfully dodging these exact questions about Kosovo for nigh on ten years.
Do you really think you’re going to come up with some unique spin on the Kosovo question that he hasn’t already heard a hundred times? He can answer those questions in his sleep, and really, the greatest risk you pose by asking them is the chance that he might fall asleep from the sheer tedium of having to answer yet another pissy questions about some bridge over the Danube. You stand a better chance of getting him unhinged by deliberately not asking about Kosovo– I bet that’d really mess with his head.
If you want to throw him off guard, ask him about something completely outside of his pet issues. A professor from Visual Arts had the right idea when she asked him about gays in the military, and followed up at the post-talk reception by asking him about gay marriage. (For those who care, he supports the right of gays to serve in the military, and is in favor of civil unions, though not necessarily marriage (I got the latter second-hand, so I can’t give the exact phrasing.), both of which are fine by me.)
But really, if you want to get a non-rehearsed response, you need to come up with something more interesting than Kosovo, or even Iraq. He even took a quick poke at the ritual protest when somebody asked about whether he thought we ought to have a draft, saying that “if we had a draft, this talk wouldn’t be picketed by a couple of people asking questions about a war that happened eight years ago.” If you want to get him off script– which is really the only chance you have of making a politician look bad– you need to think outside the metaphorical box.
I was holding forth on this to a couple of students at the reception after the talk, while they were in a crowd of people waiting to shake his hand and ask questions. One of the suggested alternate topics they came up with was global warming stuff. I wandered off to get some cookies, and came back when they were getting close to the front of the crowd, to hear what they ended up with, only to hear Clark saying to an Indian woman in front of them, “…we need to use solar, we need to use wind. We need to use coal, but you have to gasify it first, and capture the carbon, so it doesn’t go into the atmosphere. It’s absolutely ridiculous to use petroleum products for any stationary power plant– that’s just a waste of hydrocarbons…”
So, it might be a little harder to get him off balance than I thought…
(I didn’t attempt to ask any questions, but he did directly answer one of the questions suggested in my previous post, when he said that we should “absolutely renounce” the idea of permanent bases in Iraq. He also had some unkind things to say about Alberto Gonzales and his expansive view of executive power.)