Is General Clark Karl Rove's Nightmare?

Karl Rove had a bad moment here the other night. It came as Wesley Clark was speaking to a packed hotel ballroom, when the retired general derided the president of the United States for what was supposed to be his supreme, cinematic moment: landing on the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln. "I don't think it's patriotic to dress up in a flight suit and prance around," Clark bellowed. The men had been separated from the boys.

For Clark, it was a monster evening. His campaign raised upward of $300,000, and the once-stiff speaker brought his audience out of their chairs several times. He was forceful and occasionally eloquent. But what really mattered was that Clark was prepared to go at President Bush in the one area where he once seemed unassailable: his leadership as a wartime president.

At the fundraiser here, Clark stood before a huge American flag like George C. Scott in "Patton." And when he talked about Bush and the war in Iraq, it was not as some Democrat who could be caricatured as a peacenik, but as a warrior who felt that the president had fought the wrong war at the wrong time -- and then pranced all over a flight deck reserved for Clark's genuine heroes, "the men and women who serve."