E-Mail This Article to a Friend Wesley Clark hits his targets But the former general has a domestic blind spot BY DAVID S. BERNSTEIN

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 9, 2003 -- General Wesley Clark’s campaign is trying to broaden the candidate’s image by focusing on domestic issues, but nobody seems to be playing along -- including the candidate. Certainly not Chris Matthews, who kept the questions tilted heavily toward foreign policy and the military in Monday night’s taping of Hardball on the Harvard campus.

Clark’s people must have been frustrated as Matthews led Clark through the routine: Iraq, Osama Bin Laden, Kosovo, The Hague, and Clark’s early removal from NATO command.

This week’s campaign message is supposed to be domestic policy -- Clark this week is unveiling, day by day, the specifics behind his five-point "Turnaround Plan for America." Yet on Hardball he made no mentioned of any of them: increasing family income by $3000; preventing 100,000 unnecessary deaths from air pollution; getting an extra million students enrolled in college; lifting two million children out of poverty; and providing health insurance to 30 million currently uninsured people. (The Web site even breaks these goals down by state -- Massachusetts stands to have 32,000 children saved from poverty, for instance.)

The candidate himself must take some of the blame. Clark answered the first question of the night -- why did you vote for Nixon? -- by discussing his own West Point credentials. Asked what makes him the best candidate, he reflexively went with his military experience. (He said that the country needs a president who has lain awake at night praying that the bombs he just ordered hit the right target.)

And he absolutely would not let go of the NATO dismissal controversy, an issue that he should by now have boiled down to a one-line shrug-off response. In fact he did have that line: "I want to talk about what is important to the country, and this is not important to the country." But that came after he rambled on about how he was technically not relieved of command, and how General Hugh Shelton stabbed him in the back, and how news of his ‘early retirement’ was leaked 45 minutes after he got the news himself, and why the president and secretary of defense weren’t able to come to his defense, and how General Norman Schwartzkopf was criticizing him based only on hearsay . . . all of which seemed more Captain Queeg than General Eisenhower.

Clark did, however, occasionally show his ability to come across very powerfully, and it was usually when he let himself strut his military side. He was truly moving speaking of people who partake, in ways big and small, in the political process, saying that "this country runs on patriotic energy." Asked how he would rebuild international bridges burned by Bush, Clark made the other candidates look like novices as he spoke of building a new Atlantic charter to replace and give renewed credibility to NATO. "The real foundation for peace in the world lies in the trans-Atlantic alliance," he said.

Clark’s campaign staff is trying to push the message that the general knows more than just military material, but so far Clark himself doesn’t seem too comfortable talking about domestic policy issues.

He also steered clear of attacking Howard Dean, even though the day’s news was former Vice President Al Gore’s impending endorsement of the former Vermont Governor. He did, however, come out with a new line that seems likely to come back in Tuesday night’s debate: "If you want a lawyer to lead the country pick a lawyer. If you want a doctor to lead the country, get a doctor. If you want a leader . . . pick a leader."

Howard Dean is a former practicing doctor, of course -- and for good measure, Senator John Edwards was a long-time trial lawyer. The general still knows how to hit his targets.