The Year of the Tough Doves?

The American Prospect last year looked at the potential for "tough dove" candidates in the Democratic Presidential race:

Michael Tomasky on the General:

Whether Clark runs or not -- and if he doesn't, he seems like a vice-presidential candidate sent from God, which may be the real angle he's playing -- his mere presence on the national stage, his coming out of the closet, as it were, as a functional Democrat who opposes the administration's war aims and who just happens to have been a NATO commander, could instantly make the Democratic Party more plausible on foreign affairs than it's been at any time since a general named George Catlett Marshall was containing communism and rebuilding Europe with a president named Harry Truman. "I think it's safe to say," says former Clinton Chief of Staff John Podesta, "that the supreme allied commander of NATO has a certain credibility on military affairs that is not usually associated with members of the Democratic Party."

Harold Meyerson on John Kerry:

Kerry is the mystery here: He voted for the resolution yet has spoken consistently against the preemptive and unilateral war that Bush is threatening. Now, Kerry turns to the war, as he did that morning, by talking of America's vast power and what is still our need for interdependence above all in meeting the threat of nuclear proliferation. He marvels at the president's proclivity for estranging allies, and concludes his catalog of Bush's folly with the simplest possible declaration of an alternative policy. "We need to win some friends on this planet," he says. And the room goes wild.

Kerry continues, saying that he's not afraid to use force and that, should Iraq be in clear material breach of the United Nations' resolutions requiring it to disarm, he'd support joint action against the Baghdad regime. "I will do whatever is necessary to defend the United States," he declares. "But one thing I know to a certainty, in my heart, in my mind, in my gut: The United States of America should never go to war because it wants to go to war; it should only go to war because it has to go to war!"