This summarizes the attitude of so many Democrats today. Yes, yes they want to win. But even more than that, they want George Bush to lose. And the latest thinking is that a military man with an impressive national security resume, good hair and better posture is the perfect recipe to beat George W. Bush. If next week the computers at the DNC churn out a political analysis that says a mean-spirited sweaty socialist will win, then the party will go nuts for Michael Moore.

The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne is honest about it. He recently noted that Howard Dean's popularity has had far less to do with his positions on health care or homosexuals or anything else - in fact his ideas on these and most fronts are unexceptional Democratic boilerplate, indistinguishable from John Kerry's or Richard Gephardt's except to anyone but the most committed policy wonk. Instead, Dionne plausibly argues that the support for Dean represents a desire among activist Democrats to crush George Bush. Ideology and issues are secondary.

"What Dean understood earlier than his rivals," writes Dionne, "is that Democrats wanted someone who did not seem intimidated by Bush. Iraq became both a substantive issue and a symbol. If Dean was willing to fight Bush on Iraq, many Democrats reasoned that he'd be tough enough to take him on across the board."

This of course makes sense considering the loop-the-loop inconsistency of the Democratic Party on foreign policy these days. Democrats are against nation-building in Iraq, because Bush is for it there. They're in favor of it in Afghanistan, because they think Bush is against it there. They're for multilateralism and the U.N. in Iraq because that's where Bush is seen as "unilateral," but at the same time they're aghast that Bush won't deal unilaterally with North Korea, ridiculing his insistence that regional partners and the U.N. be in on the talks. This is not serious foreign policy. This is "cats must also fail" thinking.

So now we've got the Clark boomlet, complete with a full cast of Clinton handlers behind the scenes. It reminds me of the episode of "The Brady Bunch" where Greg Brady got picked to be a rock star because he fit the costume. Clark the man is irrelevant. He simply fits the costume. Or in this case, the uniform.

He may in fact be a fine man and a potentially good president, for a Democrat. But it's too soon to tell for people like me who actually care about what he's got to say and who don't think beating President Bush is more important than the issues.