Talking Points Memo by Joshua Micah Marshall has posted the transcript of a discussion he had with Wesley Clark while riding from Dulles Airport to Capitol Hill yesterday. It’s very informative.
On politics and the military:
The old military tradition was that people in the armed forces didn’t vote at all. Guys like George C. Marshall, they made a passion of not voting. The reason is, they said, “It’s really up to the people, the electorate, to choose the president. I’ll work for whoever, I don’t want to get involved in trying to pick sides. Whoever the president is, I support him.”
In the 1950s it became acceptable and expected — well I shouldn’t say expected because no one ever knew — but acceptable to vote.
On getting by in America:
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.
On education:
Schools aren’t businesses. 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. And you don’t measure that either in terms of popularity of the school, or in terms of the standardized test scores in the school. You measure it child-by-child, in the interaction of the child with the teacher, the parent with the teacher, and the child in a larger environment later on in life.
On foreign policy and the Middle East:
But, why is it impossible to take an authoritarian regime in the Middle East and see it gradually transform into something democratic, as opposed to going in, knocking it off, ending up with hundreds of billions of dollars of expenses. And killing people. And in the meantime, leaving this real source of the problems — the states that were our putative allies during the Cold War — leaving them there.
It’s a solid introduction to Clark.