For all Hlinko's stunts, he's been profiled in "Getting Your 15 Minutes of Fame and More!" he boasts proudly on his Web site. A review on Amazon.com says the book will teach readers to "discover the ease of becoming famous" and demystify "the process of obtaining free publicity."

In short, if you want to run an online petition drive coupled with advertisements and get loads of high-profile publicity for an improbable cause, Hlinko is clearly the man to hire.

Today, Hlinko runs his latest foray into the limelight out of a one-room office in a larger suite inhabited by former Clinton White House press secretary Mike McCurry's online public affairs firm Grassroots Enterprise. Three men staff the organization on a regular basis, plus college interns and volunteers. A sign on the wall instructs them to remember the "Three M's: Media, members, money." A giant map of America graces another part of the wall, small American flags stuck into it in every city where there are "local platoons." A banner above the computers reminds, "It's the DRAFT, stupid!" while boxes of Clark bars (a candy that tastes like "chocolate-covered barley," says Hlinko) and DraftClark '04 beer steins have accumulated in corners, waiting for distribution to local MeetUp members.

One of the group's other leaders is Josh Margulies, a Republican attorney from New York City who ran for mayor of Utica, N.Y., at age 24 and voted for Clinton twice. He also happens to be Hlinko's brother-in-law -- and is on friendly terms with Clark's son, Wesley Clark Jr. (Keeping it in the family, one summer intern was Hlinko's cousin.) Chris Kofinis of ISE Consulting signed on in August and has written strategy memos for the group, and Eric Carbone, a previously retired 33-year-old dot-commer who sold his Real Sports Fans Network to AOL, designs and manages the group's online presence.

"There's something about Clark; when he's up there, hardened, cynical people get the sense he should be president," says Hlinko over lunch -- for him, an order of fried liver with onions, at D.C.'s Old Ebbitt Grill. "It's not a question of if we want to be electing a wartime president," adds Margulies. "We're electing a wartime president because we are at war."

Why the drafters are backing Clark is a question that elicits many different answers. Movement members don't just talk about his national security bona fides, his liberal domestic positions, or his formidable logistical expertise, though. They also talk about Linus Torvalds.

Torvalds, the father of the open-source software system Linux, is a hero to the online Clark community, which is developing a new political philosophy called "open-source politics." Stirling Newberry, a 36-year-old computer consultant, is the unofficial theorist of the Clark movement, a regular blogger over at the ClarkSphere, and maintainer of Zuniga's old site, DraftClark.com.

"If you're annoyed about something in the Dean message, good luck going to Joe Trippi and getting it fixed," Newberry says. He expresses frequent annoyance with the Dean campaign, which he says rebuffed his offers of help some 18 months ago. "The Clark movement is a movement based on a person with an idea. Wesley Clark has articulated a vision and it's the job of the Clark movement to put that vision forward in a variety of ways to bring people in and say, 'We do things a certain way here, and if you do things that way you'll be welcome and your work will be disseminated to everybody.'"

In short, the philosophy of the Clark campaign is "into the center and out again." It's not mainframe politics -- the traditional top-down campaign. And it's not Microsoft, which is the Dean campaign, providing an easy-to-download, endlessly modifiable platform for voters but remaining at core anarchic and lacking a strong message.

(Trippi has told Stanford University law professor and blogger Lawrence Lessig, in an interview, that he does see the Dean campaign as the first open-source campaign, but Newberry insists Dean is really running the Windows campaign.) "The Clark campaign does not have a tight campaign," continues Newberry. "Wesley Clark has been running for over a year and he wanted to have time to talk about ideas. He said, I won't run unless I have a chance to talk about ideas. He began a campaign to become a public figure. He founded Leadership for America, he raised his public profile, and once he became a public figure, he wanted to see if that would be enough to run for president.

"Clark, like Torvalds, gave a way of creating a movement," he adds. "You don't need to have this great polished final thing, you need to have a basic thing. People will fill in the other things. It's not about just an individual person; it's about a very simple core of ideas about institution building, about leadership, about people taking responsibility."

In short, the philosophy that has been developed is one ideally suited to a movement without a leader and to a leader without a well-articulated set of policy positions. And so the Draft Clark for President movement -- a movement, on it's surface, that is about a specific man and a specific position -- is held by many of its adherents to be about freedom from the politics of personality and to be more about the systems of governance and their legitimacy.

"Clarkism is not about an individual," explains 25-year-old Matthew Stoller, former Kerry volunteer and recent Harvard graduate who runs the ClarkSphere with Newberry. "It's not Dean for America, it's leadership for America. It's not an embrace of the man, it's an embrace of the ideas he suggests, and an embrace of Clark's vision is an embrace of what we love about America, what we always felt in our hearts was the America we really wanted to live in ... The absence of personality in the Clark movement attracts people who are not interested in personality; they are interested in ideas.

"If you place your faith in an individual," Stoller continues, "then you are not placing your faith in systems like the rule of law. The Clark people place their faith in systems. That's why institutional legitimacy is so important to Clark -- the institutional legitimacy is about systems, about placing ideas in their legitimate forms, which is institutions. America is the actualization of the Enlightenment through institutions."

If all of this sounds a bit academic and abstruse for a movement that's going to need to attract voters, Moulitsas says not to worry. "Dean freaks are the ones who built the whole movement," he laughs. "Don't make fun of the [Clark] freaks. We need the freaks."

The people who sound so fuzzy-headed right now are the same ones who are organizing the mechanisms that may one day assist Clark. That's the paradox of a grass-roots campaign. There is always both more and less there there than there appears to be. Stoller isn't just dragging out his Derrida in conversation, he's mass e-mailing a new daily update about the Clark movement, the Clark Tribune, to anyone who'll sign up for it. And in that forum he's not the Harvard history student, but the chipper Harvard Lampoon writer, as silly as he wants to be. In a recent e-mail, he included a vinaigrette recipe he thought Gen. Clark might enjoy.

"One of the strengths of the Draft movement, of any kind of grass-roots movement, is people can use their own initiative to promote a candidate," says Moulitsas. "The worst thing to do is impose a top-to-bottom organization, because once you do that people will lose their incentive. Nobody likes to be told what to do, especially if you're doing something for free."

And, he might have added, doing it for free for someone who is not yet even a candidate.

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