For the two weeks or so that I had been a volunteer, I had tried, unsuccessfully, to get a rise out of my fellow Clark supporters. Just to see how they would react, I had introduced myself at the first meet-up as an adult-film director named Rondell Abrams. Massachusetts campaign staff member Dave Rubin, a skittish young Brandeis grad, gritted his teeth when I told him I'd just finished making Asian Ass Vixens 6.

"I also did the East St. Louis Street Hookers series," I said.

He nodded. "Well, uh, we're glad to have you."

For this second meet-up, I'd upped the ante, showing up with a friend: She and I were both wearing cervical collars and walking with the stiff posture of personal-injury plaintiffs. I explained to Rubin that I'd been kicked by a donkey, while "Anne" had been thrown off by one. "Wow, that's tough," he said. "But thanks for coming, in that condition."

Dave Yoken, Rubin's former classmate at Brandeis and another Draft Clark veteran, took it more in stride. "Hey, at least it wasn't an elephant," he cracked.

Yoken is quite a character. Brash, loud and energetic, he looks like he came from the same gene pool as Matt Damon, only with some nutrition supplements and a few motivational seminars thrown in. When I asked him how the campaign was going, he gave me a great answer.

"Well, I'll tell you," he said. "We've got the 23-28 white male vote sewn up. I mean, we have that absolutely whipped." He cast a hand around the room: a sea of fleshy males. "But we've got to branch out."

I suggested, sarcastically, that he play up the general's sex appeal. Yoken jumped on the theme, telling me a story about meeting Clark in Knoxville early in the Draft Clark period. "He showed me a picture of himself in a T-shirt," he said. "He's really a ripped guy; his arms were showing. He called that his 'drool shirt.' So I think there's something there."

He laughed and almost slapped my back for emphasis, but remembered my neck injury and held up just in time.

Shortly afterward, Rubin came over again. Thirty-five minutes later, he'd thought of something to say. "Hey, at least it wasn't an elephant," he cracked.

The meeting wore on. It was an amazing experience. Here, ostensibly, were two porn-industry professionals, dressed in identically preposterous cervical collars, attending an organizational meeting for a straitlaced four-star general--and no one so much as blinked.

This is not so surprising, however, because paying close attention is not really what the Clark campaign is about. In fact, it's very much about the opposite: squinting your eyes, blurring out the margins and focusing on the one main goal on the horizon--beating George Bush. In my time around the campaign I got the sense that this "blurring out" is central to the thinking of the Clark supporter--a desire to dispense with the moral nitpicking of the post-1960s era and get behind the man for the Big Win.

A wide spectrum of people has endorsed this idea, with everyone from Southern moderates like former South Carolina Governor Jim Hodges to Michael Moore talking Clark up as a rational human being and responsible world citizen who may have a few warts, but who would be a vast improvement over Bush. The Wesley Clark advertised in these circles is intelligent, educated, respectful of human life and civil liberties, and occasionally a powerful critic of Bush Administration politics. He is the man who sounded like something out of a Frank Capra movie when he told Tim Russert on Meet the Press, "I realized that what we had was an Administration which was determined to take us to war in Iraq, almost no matter what. That's misleading, it's wrong, it shouldn't be permitted, and that Administration has to be held accountable."

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