Uh oh?

Seth makes some good points about Wesley Clark's campaign manager quitting:

I think this bodes horribly for ol' Wes on a number of levels. First, on a perceptual level, it just sucks. ("Clark's campaign manager quit." "Oooh, that's bad.") Then, if people dig deeper, they immediately see the reasons Fowler quit, which makes the Clark campaign look pretty slimy and not very populist, which is key to energizing the base. Third, if the campaign really is doing what Fowler claims they're doing, I think that it greatly diminishes their chances in the primary and in the general.

To which I will add that I agree. I got a bad feeling about this. Remember how we all latched onto Clark because he said the right things with no bullshit? And said them rationally and intelligently. I liked him because he seemed — and I believe he is — so smart, and he spoke his mind with logic at the base of what he was thinking, not a shred of partisan political hoo-ha. Now, with these Clinton-Gore hired hands, he launches his campaign and we get "The New American Patriotism," which — let's be honest — is fucking lame, and such hard-line statements as "I'm pro-education" (at his Austin appearance). What? The Wesley that excited me was the one who showed up in Josh Marshall's TPM interview. He ran up in there and shut it down, really leveled with Marshall, and addressed him as an INTELLIGENT FUCKING HUMAN BEING, not a sound bite receptacle. No sir, I don't like it.