Gen. Wesley Clark's Campaign Manager, Donnie Fowler, quit today citing differences in the direction the campaign was headed. USA Today reports, Fowler "was leaving over widespread concerns that supporters who used the Internet to draft Clark into the race are not being taken seriously by top campaign officials."
Reuters reports that Fowler left because he was asked to take a lesser role in the campaign. The shake-up may have been caused by some early Clark clumsiness, especially with his early flip-flop over whether he would or would not have voted for the war resolution. Many campaign insiders felt that things could have been handled better. "Clark needs some more experienced political hands running things," a campaign source told Reuters.
Fowler felt that many of the new staff, mostly old staffers from the Clinton/Gore days, as was he, were focusing far too much on Washington and not on key primary states. It is crucial for Clark to win in South Carolina, and it is certainly not a freebie just because he is a Southerner. He has Edwards to contend with, and Edwards looks strong in South Carolina, and Sen. Edwards should be the front-runner seeing as he is from neighboring North Carolina.
It is hard to see how Clark will win this race from Washington. His senior advisers have been through a couple of these Presidential elections before and maybe they know something the rest of the front-runners don't know, or maybe they're desperate. His advisers might be trying to garner support for the retired General by grabbing endorsements from Democratic Congressmen, getting them to endorse Clark in their districts. Perhaps, they are realizing that Clark got in the race too late to aggresively campaign in the key primary states: Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. Maybe, they think they can win the small but important Washington D.C. primary, get the free press from winning so early in the primary season(Washington D.C.'s primary is the first), and with the steam from the media attention and key endorsements from Congressmen in crucial primary districts, grab support in fringe states to pull off a miracle victory. Nah, I don't think that will happen.
Clark's advisers, though, proved how savvy they were today by having this story break on a day when they knew it would get buried by the Recall election in California. Traditionally, a resignation of a presidential candidate's Campaign Manager signals a serious problem within a campaign, but this story will hardly register a whisper in the next few days.