79 JFK AND BEYOND

Drafting a President

HE SAW HIM AS THE PRESIDENT we were all promised as kids. A Rhodes Scholar and a general. Someone larger than life. So instead of waiting to see if his ideal president would run for the oval office in 2004, John Hlinko MPP 1994 decided to get the ball rolling himself.

He drafted Wesley Clark, a man he had never met before.

Clark had no idea he was doing it.

Crazy enough, it actually worked.

Less than five months after Hlinko and a handful of friends started the draftwesleyclark.com campaign in early 2003, Clark threw his hat into the ring and announced that he would run for the Democratic nomination.

Hlinko doesn’t take all the credit for Clark’s decision, but admits that the campaign, which got a lot of media attention and is even rumored to have made it into a conversation between Bill Clinton and Clark, did make an impact on the former general.

“He told me afterwards that he was thinking of running, but this campaign made it conceivable,” Hlinko says, citing the 50,000 letters that were generated by people asking him to run. “The campaign told him: This is real. People want me.”

Hlinko, a former comedy writer, political consultant, and grassroots organizer for efforts like MoveOn.org and justsayblow.com, came up with the idea while having lunch with a friend in a restaurant in Washington, DC, where he lives.

“I had been reading this list of possible Democratic candidates, a list of about 100 people,” Hlinko says. “There was one guy on there, a General Wesley Clark. I didn’t know anything about him, but it struck me as, ‘Wow!’ You don’t see that very often. A general. I started researching him and realized he was exceptionally bright. I thought he’d make one heck of a candidate.”

Someone, they realized over lunch, should draft this guy.

“Then we looked around the room and said, ‘Why not us?’ We put up a Web site and started asking people to write to him.”

Eventually, a simple Web site turned into a full-blown campaign with an office a block from the White House (although it was primarily operating on the Internet.) They raised $2 million, ran savvy TV and radio ads, and stumped all over the media for their “candidate.”

And it was all done the Hlinko way: creatively. First they connected interested “Clarksters” and “Clarkettes,” as they came to be known, online. Then they organized in-person, “meet-up” gatherings all over the country. Clark bars were handed out at events. Dinners were auctioned on ebay. “Wire-side chats” were used to keep the interested informed.

Hlinko, now vice president of marketing and creative engagement for Grassroots Enterprise, a Washington, DC, public affairs management company, says creativity is the only way to go.

“I looked at this intuitively. The most popular kid in the class is the stand-up comic,” he says. “Corporate ads are much more creative than political ads, so why not adapt the same techniques for political activism? I realized that when I did things like hand out Clark bars, that’s the stuff that would end up in the New York Times or the Washington Post. People were drawn to that.”

Now that it’s all said and done — Clark ran and eventually dropped out of the race — does Hlinko believe that one individual, or one draft movement, can make a difference?

“Absolutely. We’ve gotten to the point where individuals have a lot more power than they used to,” he says. “One vote doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. That’s a fact. But an organized individual has the power to influence hundreds and thousands of votes, and that does matter.

“I can bet that the average Kennedy School student right now has more addresses in his or her e-mail address book than Paul Revere did on his entire ride. And he sparked a revolution.” — LH