The existence of the Draft Clark movement has been a significant factor in encouraging the four-star general to consider tossing his hat into the nominating ring. Led by Washington-based DraftWesleyClark.com, it has secured more than $1 million in pledges (though no cash) for Clark, should he run, and has “platoon leaders” and “ground troops” waiting to be deployed for Clark in all 50 states. With just 25 days to go until the end of the third quarter FEC filing deadline, the group has launched a $5 million pledge drive for Clark. Already, they’ve run radio and television ads in New Hampshire, Iowa, Washington, D.C., and Arkansas to raise Clark’s name recognition and encourage the Arkansan Rhodes scholar and West Point graduate to enter the race.

The group also took a lead from former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean’s campaign and contracted with MeetUp.com, and now boasts more than 11,000 members meeting in 400 venues in 100 cities — more than have been attracted by either Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., or Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., though a far cry from Dean’s more than 105,000 MeetUppies.

Then there is DraftClark2004 — the ground machine. Based in Little Rock, Ark., and with a satellite office in New Hampshire, DraftClark2004 is the nascent field operation working to supplement DraftWesleyClark’s buzz machine. It’s got five full-time staffers and more than 108 field coordinators who hold weekly conference calls and prepare to get Clark on ballots and endorsed by local officials. There are plenty of other Clark groups, too. The ClarkSphere, based in Boston, operates as the technical arm of the Clark movement, providing Web expertise to all the Clark organizations and recently launching United for Clark, a Web page to bring the disparate Clark factions together under one roof. Women for Clark adds marketing expertise and a different voice to a movement that is, like the military, overwhelmingly male.

As Clark gears up for a probable announcement by Sept. 19, interviews campaign staff, and makes nice with potential funders, he also faces the further, unique challenge of figuring out how to insert himself into the core of a movement that has sprung up and run itself for more than six months without him or any central command, and whose members back him more than they do each other. And not only will he have to smooth over the rivalries between the groups, he will also have to figure out what to do about “Clarkism,” an almost mystical philosophy expounded by some of his most ardent supporters that seems antithetical to the kind of straight talk necessary to win a nomination contest. And he will have to figure out if his most loyal fans will in the end be a help — or an embarrassment.

“The interesting thing about the movement is that there are a lot of nodes of activity that have developed organically over time. A lot of these relationships and a lot of the legwork will have already been done,” says an enthusiastic Jeff Daily, a 32-year-old devoting himself full-time DraftClark2004 in Little Rock. From the perspective of DraftClark2004, it’s all about taking “the movement” from the Web to the real world, rather than running ads or getting more press attention.

“We’re at the point now where there doesn’t need to be any more buzz about General Clark. People know about General Clark. We just want to have some foundation there that he can take advantage of,” says Brent Blackaby, national coordinator for DraftClark2004 and a former fundraising aide to Democratic National Committee chair Terry McAuliffe. “It’s great to have an Internet team, but we have to be able to go from clicks-and-mortar to bricks-and-mortar,” adds Daily.

But talk to Clark’s buzzmaster in chief and you’ll get a very different view about the relative importance of free media in a race where Clark has only 40 percent name recognition, even in New Hampshire. “I think some folks may be talking too big a game,” says John Hlinko, co-founder of DraftWesleyClark.com. “Once the general runs he needs to call the shots and run his own campaign. Anyone who claims they are going to run a turnkey operation is being a little bit silly. Anyone who says it’s going to just flip over is overstating it.”

The tension with DraftClark2004 — or “20-Oh-4,” as it’s called by insiders — stretches back to when DraftClark.com, one of the first Clark Web sites, was relinquished by its founder, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, a 31-year-old former U.S. Army soldier turned lawyer turned Dean campaign technical consultant. Moulitsas jump-started the Draft Clark Movement earlier this year before finally giving up on Clark after months of waiting for him to declare — and after Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi invited him to work with Dean. Moulitsas (also known as Kos, of the Daily Kos blog) wanted the 20-Oh-4 people and Hlinko to share his old site, but the Arkansans wanted to buy it proprietarily and tried to block Hlinko’s involvement, says Moulitsas. This so annoyed Moulitsas that he gave the site to Hlinko for free.

“I do not like the DraftClark2004 people. There’s two competing movements and I don’t know how close they work together,” says Moulitsas. “I’ve dealt with John Hlinko and I think he’s a real class act and if Clark runs I hope they work closely with Hlinko.”

A small man with a dark goatee, Hlinko (the “H” is silent) is of Greek-Lithuanian extraction and a New Yorker by birth and temperament. If you haven’t already realized that he’s become the loudest voice in the Clark movement since joining up in April, he’ll make no bones about telling you: “Not to disparage the other groups, but to describe who’s driving the movement — not to sound hubristic — it’s us.”

The effort to draft Wesley Clark is only one of the many high-profile, online projects he’s engaged in over the years. He’s also the “Action Hero,” according to his business cards, of ActForLove, a personals service for liberal activists whose motto is “Take action to get action.” In 2001, he was profiled in Salon for his “activist high jinks.” He started the “Just Say Blow”online petition campaign against the Bush administration’s decision to deny federal student aid to students convicted of drug possession or dealing. That stunt also got him interviewed on Fox News and went so far that his group, Students for a Drug-Free White House, even launched radio ads. In 2001, he worked on the John Cusack for President campaign. That same year, he dressed up as a pile of laundry and delivered a pro-campaign finance reform petition to Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., for MoveOn.org, for which he had done some publicity work back in 1998. In 1997, he was hauled into court in San Francisco, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, with a group called “Multimillionaires for Corporate Welfare,” which satirized a ballot initiative for a new stadium in a manner potentially confusing to voters. At the time, his business cards said he was a “comedy writer/model American.”

For all Hlinko’s stunts, he’s been profiled in “Getting Your 15 Minutes of Fame and More!” he boasts proudly on his Web site. A review on Amazon.com says the book will teach readers to “discover the ease of becoming famous” and demystify “the process of obtaining free publicity.”

In short, if you want to run an online petition drive coupled with advertisements and get loads of high-profile publicity for an improbable cause, Hlinko is clearly the man to hire.

Today, Hlinko runs his latest foray into the limelight out of a one-room office in a larger suite inhabited by former Clinton White House press secretary Mike McCurry’s online public affairs firm Grassroots Enterprise. Three men staff the organization on a regular basis, plus college interns and volunteers. A sign on the wall instructs them to remember the “Three M’s: Media, members, money.” A giant map of America graces another part of the wall, small American flags stuck into it in every city where there are “local platoons.” A banner above the computers reminds, “It’s the DRAFT, stupid!” while boxes of Clark bars (a candy that tastes like “chocolate-covered barley,” says Hlinko) and DraftClark ’04 beer steins have accumulated in corners, waiting for distribution to local MeetUp members.

One of the group’s other leaders is Josh Margulies, a Republican attorney from New York City who ran for mayor of Utica, N.Y., at age 24 and voted for Clinton twice. He also happens to be Hlinko’s brother-in-law — and is on friendly terms with Clark’s son, Wesley Clark Jr. (Keeping it in the family, one summer intern was Hlinko’s cousin.) Chris Kofinis of ISE Consulting signed on in August and has written strategy memos for the group, and Eric Carbone, a previously retired 33-year-old dot-commer who sold his Real Sports Fans Network to AOL, designs and manages the group’s online presence.

“There’s something about Clark; when he’s up there, hardened, cynical people get the sense he should be president,” says Hlinko over lunch — for him, an order of fried liver with onions, at D.C.’s Old Ebbitt Grill. “It’s not a question of if we want to be electing a wartime president,” adds Margulies. “We’re electing a wartime president because we are at war.”

Why the drafters are backing Clark is a question that elicits many different answers. Movement members don’t just talk about his national security bona fides, his liberal domestic positions, or his formidable logistical expertise, though. They also talk about Linus Torvalds.

Torvalds, the father of the open-source software system Linux, is a hero to the online Clark community, which is developing a new political philosophy called “open-source politics.” Stirling Newberry, a 36-year-old computer consultant, is the unofficial theorist of the Clark movement, a regular blogger over at the ClarkSphere, and maintainer of Zuniga’s old site, DraftClark.com.

“If you’re annoyed about something in the Dean message, good luck going to Joe Trippi and getting it fixed,” Newberry says. He expresses frequent annoyance with the Dean campaign, which he says rebuffed his offers of help some 18 months ago. “The Clark movement is a movement based on a person with an idea. Wesley Clark has articulated a vision and it’s the job of the Clark movement to put that vision forward in a variety of ways to bring people in and say, ‘We do things a certain way here, and if you do things that way you’ll be welcome and your work will be disseminated to everybody.’”

In short, the philosophy of the Clark campaign is “into the center and out again.” It’s not mainframe politics — the traditional top-down campaign. And it’s not Microsoft, which is the Dean campaign, providing an easy-to-download, endlessly modifiable platform for voters but remaining at core anarchic and lacking a strong message.

(Trippi has told Stanford University law professor and blogger Lawrence Lessig, in an interview, that he does see the Dean campaign as the first open-source campaign, but Newberry insists Dean is really running the Windows campaign.) “The Clark campaign does not have a tight campaign,” continues Newberry. “Wesley Clark has been running for over a year and he wanted to have time to talk about ideas. He said, I won’t run unless I have a chance to talk about ideas. He began a campaign to become a public figure. He founded Leadership for America, he raised his public profile, and once he became a public figure, he wanted to see if that would be enough to run for president.

“Clark, like Torvalds, gave a way of creating a movement,” he adds. “You don’t need to have this great polished final thing, you need to have a basic thing. People will fill in the other things. It’s not about just an individual person; it’s about a very simple core of ideas about institution building, about leadership, about people taking responsibility.”

In short, the philosophy that has been developed is one ideally suited to a movement without a leader and to a leader without a well-articulated set of policy positions. And so the Draft Clark for President movement — a movement, on it’s surface, that is about a specific man and a specific position — is held by many of its adherents to be about freedom from the politics of personality and to be more about the systems of governance and their legitimacy.

“Clarkism is not about an individual,” explains 25-year-old Matthew Stoller, former Kerry volunteer and recent Harvard graduate who runs the ClarkSphere with Newberry. “It’s not Dean for America, it’s leadership for America. It’s not an embrace of the man, it’s an embrace of the ideas he suggests, and an embrace of Clark’s vision is an embrace of what we love about America, what we always felt in our hearts was the America we really wanted to live in … The absence of personality in the Clark movement attracts people who are not interested in personality; they are interested in ideas.

“If you place your faith in an individual,” Stoller continues, “then you are not placing your faith in systems like the rule of law. The Clark people place their faith in systems. That’s why institutional legitimacy is so important to Clark — the institutional legitimacy is about systems, about placing ideas in their legitimate forms, which is institutions. America is the actualization of the Enlightenment through institutions.”

If all of this sounds a bit academic and abstruse for a movement that’s going to need to attract voters, Moulitsas says not to worry. “Dean freaks are the ones who built the whole movement,” he laughs. “Don’t make fun of the [Clark] freaks. We need the freaks.”

The people who sound so fuzzy-headed right now are the same ones who are organizing the mechanisms that may one day assist Clark. That’s the paradox of a grass-roots campaign. There is always both more and less there there than there appears to be. Stoller isn’t just dragging out his Derrida in conversation, he’s mass e-mailing a new daily update about the Clark movement, the Clark Tribune, to anyone who’ll sign up for it. And in that forum he’s not the Harvard history student, but the chipper Harvard Lampoon writer, as silly as he wants to be. In a recent e-mail, he included a vinaigrette recipe he thought Gen. Clark might enjoy.

“One of the strengths of the Draft movement, of any kind of grass-roots movement, is people can use their own initiative to promote a candidate,” says Moulitsas. “The worst thing to do is impose a top-to-bottom organization, because once you do that people will lose their incentive. Nobody likes to be told what to do, especially if you’re doing something for free.”

And, he might have added, doing it for free for someone who is not yet even a candidate.

But the most important thing McGovern can see about the upcoming presidential contest of 2004 is that it is not taking place in 1972, and that he is not running in it. Certainly, McGovern can see some resemblance between himself and former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean. They’re both from sparsely populated, rural states. They both entered their respective races early, and became heavily reliant on volunteers and grass-roots mobilizing. That aside, though, “I think it’s difficult to draw a close comparison,” says McGovern.

“There’s no transcendent issue now that he’s identified with,” says McGovern, who met Dean and some of the other Democratic presidential aspirants at a May conference on rural issues in Lake Placid, N.Y. “There’s no Vietnam War, no Great Depression … I don’t see any single issue that has mobilized especially the young people and women like 1972 did. There was something about the Vietnam involvement that did create a divide in the Democratic Party probably surpassed only by the period of the Civil War, which had a shattering impact on the Democratic coalition. I don’t think there’s anything quite as divisive culturally or politically today.

“Another difference,” continues McGovern somewhat wistfully, “is that he has a large sum of money in the race more than a year ahead of the election and I was never but one step ahead of the bill collectors … I never had the millions that he has.”

There are plenty of other differences, too — such as the rise of the Internet and a front-loaded primary schedule next year that could provide a clear winner as early as March 3, whereas McGovern’s state-by-state slog for the nomination lasted through and then into a convention so divisive that California’s delegation was challenged all the way to the Supreme Court and four of McGovern’s vice-presidential picks turned him down publicly before he finally won over former Peace Corps director Sargent Shriver.

But to hear Howard Dean’s critics in the conservative wing of the Democratic Party, he is nothing less than the second coming of McGovern, doomed to lead the party into the same electoral inferno if he wins its nomination next year. According to Al From, CEO and founder of the center-right Democratic Leadership Council, and Bruce Reed, DLC president and President Bill Clinton’s former domestic policy guru, Dean must be stopped before he steers the party back to the McGovern era of bell-bottoms and muttonchops — and back to political oblivion.

“I would never wish the ’70s on anybody,” Reed wrote in a June 30 column in the DLC’s Blueprint magazine. And yet for the past two-and-half months, he’s done his level best to drag the debate about how to beat Bush in 2004 all the way back to 1972, the year his colleague and Progressive Policy Institute head Will Marshall recalled, in a sentimental Blueprint story, that he’d “wound up casting my first presidential ballot, with scant enthusiasm, for McGovern,” and the same year From was directing a Senate subcommittee headed by losing Democratic presidential aspirant Ed Muskie, D-Maine. The history lessons started with a May 15 broadside by From and Reed, “The Real Soul of the Democratic Party,” that called out Dean by name. “What activists like Dean call the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party is an aberration: the McGovern-Mondale wing, defined principally by weakness abroad and elitist, interest-group liberalism at home,” they wrote. “That’s the wing that lost 49 states in two elections, and transformed Democrats from a strong national party into a much weaker regional one.”

Soon a full-scale media barrage against creeping Deanism was launched, with From-Reed Op-Eds in the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times, and another Dean takedown by Lawrence Kaplan, the New Republic’s neoconservative senior editor. Kaplan was joined by his New Republic colleague Jonathan Chait, who offered a novel twist on the anti-Dean theme, comparing him not to McGovern, but to another notorious loser, former Republican presidential aspirant Steve Forbes.

Confronted with these comparisons, Dean for America campaign manager Joe Trippi just sighs. “How come it’s always us who’s gotta be somebody else?” he asks. “The truth is that our name is Howard Dean. Howard Dean is Howard Dean. He’s not anybody else, and that’s why people support him.”

So far, From and Reed’s warnings to the Democratic Party, to the extent that they’ve reached the rank and file at all, appear to have had no impact on Dean’s campaign, which has surged in fundraising, volunteer support and national and state polls. If anything, the DLC’s attacks have increased support for the Dean campaign, which sees its fundraising spike each time it comes under attack from the Washington insiders, says Trippi. That’s because rather than running as McGovern, Dean seems to be running according to the campaign playbook outlined by none other than From and Reed in their very smart Feb. 11 memo, “What It Takes to Win the White House.”

“Your most formidable opponent,” the duo wrote, “isn’t President Bush or your fellow contestants for the nomination. Your real enemy is the ghost of Democrats past.

“[P]arty perceptions are a wonderful foil for an insurgent candidate looking to define himself,” they continued, urging the candidates to refuse “to be subtle about defying the Democratic stereotype.” Added Bernard L. Schwartz and Daniel Yankelovich in the same issue of Blueprint magazine: “The worst mistake Democrats can make is to continue to work within a Republican framework. This is how Democrats were snookered in the 2002 election.”

What From and Reed did not realize is that their DLC would become the Democratic ghost against which an insurgent Dean would run.

Rather than running against the Democratic Party of 1972, Dean is running against the DLC-dominated (in image, if not in fact) Democratic Party that lost the House in 1994, the White House in 2000, and the Senate in 2000 and again in 2002. This, too, is just as From and Reed advised, though they seem to have forgotten that.

“The real front-runner, fresh off its triumph in the midterms, is the Democratic Party’s losing image,” they wrote in February. “If you want to win the presidency in 2004, you have to redefine the Democratic Party in 2003. By all means, capture your party’s imagination — but do it on your terms, not theirs.”

That is exactly what Dean is doing — by directly challenging the party’s support for the president’s war in Iraq, the USA PATRIOT Act, and such losing or poorly funded pieces of legislation as the Patient’s Bill of Rights and the No Child Left Behind Act. “Don’t look for the false unity that comes from shying away from every controversial issue, and reject the consultant consensus that stacking constituency upon constituency will add up to a majority,” wrote From and Reed. “Now more than ever, the one reason to seek the presidency, and the only way to win it, is to unite people behind a cause that is larger than your candidacy.”

And so Dean’s presidential announcement speech on June 23 reached for the broadest themes possible: “This campaign is about more than issue differences on health care or tax policy, national security, jobs, the environment, our economy … It’s about who we are as Americans,” Dean told the 30,000 people across the country who followed his speech. “I ask all Americans, regardless of party, to meet with me across the nation — to come together in common cause to forge a new American century. Help us in this quest to return greatness and return high moral purpose to the United States of America.”

Now that Dean is capturing the party’s imagination on his own terms, the DLC is crying foul. And From and Reed are using every available opportunity to whack the former governor of Vermont. By their statements over the past two months, From and Reed have shown that the few years their group has spent in the electoral wilderness since the Clinton administration have intensified a process that had already begun in the late ’90s: turning the DLC into just another interest group clamoring to have its agenda considered uppermost and its favorite sons promoted, irrespective of any concerns about winning elections.

The group is losing sight of the larger narrative, and assisting its real opposition by attacking Dean. Already, the McGovern-peacenik-Democratic-weakness charge is spreading from DLC articles into the mouths of Republican critics, except the DLC charge is creating a blowback that will damage all Democrats — including those who voted for the president’s war resolution — on matters of foreign policy. “The Dems are still the party of George McGovern, and for them it’s still 1968,” wrote Jed Babbin, deputy undersecretary of defense in the first Bush administration on National Review Online July 23, in the first of what will no doubt be many such articles to come. But Babbin wasn’t talking about Dean, whom he didn’t even mention, or the pre-war debate over Iraq. No, what inspired this broadside was the quest all nine Democratic candidates share: to get to the bottom of the Niger-uranium claim in Bush’s State of the Union speech. Wrote Babbin: “The McGoverniks and their pals in the press have been working feverishly to turn the ‘Niger uranium’ sentence in the State of the Union address into the same sort of fraud they attribute to the reports that led Congress to pass the Tonkin Gulf resolution.”

Then there’s the DLC’s backing of Joe Lieberman. While there’s something admirably loyal about the group sticking with an old friend and ally, it also shows an apparent resistance to an honest assessment of the facts on the ground. While spending over $4 million in the first half of this year, the Lieberman campaign has watched its candidate — leading with 21 to 27 percent of the Democratic vote in January, depending on the poll — drop to between 16 and 21 percent. Lieberman began the year with every possible advantage in terms of name recognition and institutional support — advantages that Dean lacked — and yet, today, Democratic and Republican strategists alike say they find it extremely difficult to see a way clear to the nomination for Lieberman. The stiffness of the competition, the nature of the primary electorate, and the primary calendar all work against him. Meanwhile, some seasoned political observers now believe Dean has a shot at winning not just New Hampshire, but Iowa — a combination no non-incumbent Democratic candidate has won since 1976.

Likewise, the John Edwards campaign — which Reed has advised on education and economic policy — has spent $3.8 million and watched its national standing decline from 12 or 14 percent in January, depending on the poll, to 6 or 4 percent. Neither campaign is positioned to win Iowa or New Hampshire, and Edwards remains in the single digits even in South Carolina, where he was born.

In contrast, Dean has spent $3.99 million and gone from 3-4 percent to 10-12 percent in national polls, and from nowhere to second or tied for first, depending on the poll, in New Hampshire and Iowa. And now comes news that California, too, is trending his way.

Though it is still early in the Democratic contest, by any measure it’s already clear that either the DLC candidates are campaigning less effectively than the ex-governor of Vermont, or that their messages simply do not have the same appeal as Dean’s. Notes McGovern: “I think some of the people who are so concerned about where they are going to be positioned in November may lose sight of the fact that you won’t win in November if you can’t even get through March.”

The only serious threat to Dean’s campaign comes from Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, who has spent $4.88 million to basically stay in place in New Hampshire and move up a bit in Iowa over the past six months. Dean critics portray Kerry as a less exciting, but more electable candidate. “The Democrats would be much better off with a blander, more faceless, less exciting candidate — Kerry, Gephardt or even Lieberman (perhaps with Edwards, Florida Sen. Bob Graham, or retired Gen. Wesley Clark as running mate) — than they would be with a fiery, controversial Dean,” wrote John Judis in Salon. This analysis is especially unfair to Kerry. Kerry is not the leader in New Hampshire because he is the bland, unexciting, unobjectionable party favorite. Kerry is leading because he is running an aggressive, smart campaign that was first out of the gate in January with a strong operation, has spent wisely, and has expanded ahead of the rest of the pack into multiple states. Kerry has proven himself a surprisingly personable and adept one-on-one campaigner, and his campaign has shown flexibility in responding to the challenge Dean has posed. Meanwhile Gephardt has tried to ratchet up his rhetoric to compete with Kerry and Dean and to avoid the fate that befell him in 1988, when he learned that “bland and tepid won’t cut it,” according to Jim VandeHei of the Washington Post.

Worth noting too is that Dean, as abrasive as he is, manages to get away with things no other candidate can. If you prick a straw man, does he not bleed? Well, no. As long ago as 1995, the Vermont press found itself confounded by “Dean’s Teflon characteristics.” The governor was able to alienate virtually the entire state at one point or another and yet win reelection four times. In May, critics said he wasn’t being held to the same standards as the other candidates. Since then, he has been. And he’s survived a poor debate performance in South Carolina, the “mean Dean” meme, public spats with Kerry and Graham, apologizing for those spats, his son’s arrest, a controversial “Meet the Press” appearance, ongoing comparisons to McGovern, and a travel schedule that has him out on the road 26 days out of 30. Instead of being hindered by any of the criticisms or stresses he faces, though, Dean has kept going and continued to draw new supporters, increase fundraising, and get his message out. But like all Teflon people — such George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan — he drives his critics crazy.

The Dean campaign may yet stall out of its own accord — if, for example, it mistakes the candidate’s ability to maneuver past problems for the absence of any need to fix them, or if, as time passes, his supporters no longer find his bluntness as refreshing, or if, come January, they find his policy proposals wanting. And meanwhile, the DLC attacks of this spring and summer will work their evil magic, you may be certain. They will weaken the eventual Democratic nominee — whether it is Dean, Kerry, Gephardt, Edwards or some other candidate  and increase the chances that the nominee will lose to Bush.

But in the end, victory might well go to the boldest candidate, despite the carping of the cautious and centrist. “Americans don’t vote for someone who has positioned himself in the center,” says Curtis Gans, former director of the nonpartisan Committee for the Study of the American Electorate. “They vote for a human being who they trust to help them solve their problems.”