Then & Now:
From the Beginning … Part I

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From the Beginning Part I…John Hlinko's story

We thought that it would be appropriate to begin…well…from the beginning.

John Hlinko founded DraftWesleyClark.com in March 2003. If you haven’t met John or read his e-mails from the Draft Clark days, you’ve missed something. John's creative approach generated a number of innovative marketing strategies to bring in new supporters and pledge funds for a potential race. John is a dreamer who turns his dreams into action.

At the time John had several enterprises going, including Extreme Campaigns — a more or less a one-man political consulting firm, specializing in technology and marketing.

John was instrumental in ratcheting up buzz in the media. It was also John (along with Jason MacIntosh, Susan Putney and others) who first aired a radio ad about Gen. Clark, in New Hampshire. That created a buzz as well. Soon after, DraftWesleyClark.com created a TV ad. John is also credited with the idea of using Clark Bars as a way of getting people to listen to them about Clark.

One of the most important things John did from the outset was to install the “please run” facility on the DraftWesleyClark.com home page. People could fill in a form with a letter asking the General to run, by either using a pro forma letter or writing their own from scratch, or some combination thereof. That story will appear in the next issue of “Then and Now.”

John Hlinko -- Then

I asked John when and how he got interested in Gen. Clark:

For me, it was the fall of 2002. I remember seeing a list of potential candidates in some political writing (Hotline, maybe?), and it had a list of literally dozens and dozens of people who “might” run for the Democratic nomination. Well, there was one guy with the first name “General,” so that caught my attention, big time. I started paying attention to him more and more, asking people about him, and then really started to do the effort [the DraftWesleyClark.com site] in February of 2003. What provoked it was a dinner with people, among whom included my friend Dave Wallace, a PR professional in DC, and Samer Shehata, a professor at Georgetown. Interestingly, both had become independently intrigued with Clark, even though he had almost no name recognition. I decided that if three people with different backgrounds and different political viewpoints had all become intrigued, there was an appeal that clearly could “go viral.”

Dave and I had lunch a short time later, talked about it more, and decided that “someone should really start a draft.” And then we started doing it together. Concurrently, Josh [Margulies, John's brother-in-law] was also becoming intrigued in New York City, and started to do some work on his own. [Josh's site was “RepublicansforClark.”] He then joined the DraftWesleyClark effort. It launched initially in March, initially hosted on my “ExtremeCampaigns.com” site.

The main reasons I started it:

• I thought the Dems sorely needed someone with impeccable defense credentials to win in a post-9/11 world.
• I liked some of the folks running, but none appeared to be “the President I was promised as a kid.”
• I didn't know enough about Clark to know if he was that guy, but I knew enough about him to know he was the kind of guy who should be running.
• I didn't see any effort to draft him out there, just some discussion, so I figured I could do it.
• Frankly, from a professional standpoint, I was curious to see if I could do it. I'd worked on a number of efforts in the past online, and had the sense I could do something very big here.

As John and I e-mailed each other back and forth, he continued:

In terms of when the draft movement began, well…that's a good question. :

I think there was a lot of talk about Clark's potential candidacy prior to April of 2003, but no real draft movement. I say this because the Yahoo! group had almost no activity after six months of existence, and the MeetUp group was even lower. Other people may have been talking about a draft, but aside from Cliff's article [Cliff Schechter's March 16 article about Clark published March 16, 2003 -- no longer available on the web], I didn't see any media coverage.

So in sum, if there was a draft, no one knew about it, and it didn't appear to be going anywhere.

I don't know if I can say that DWC.com started the effort, but I will say that the explosion of the movement coincided exactly with its launch, so yes, I do believe it had a significant impact.

Specifically, I think that the fact that I was not working at the time gave me the hours to really build and promote it, and my previous work with MoveOn.org, Ogilvy PR, and CTSG gave me the tools to know how to launch it and generate buzz. So I do think that I and the DraftWesleyClark.com team deserve a lot of credit for really jump-starting the movement. I think I can also take credit for really being the first to push people to build the Yahoo! and MeetUp numbers “specifically as a means of generating buzz.

John Hlinko -- Now

The Draft reached its goal when Gen. Clark tossed his four stars into the presidential ring, John became Director of Internet Strategy in the campaign. He also traveled by Winnebago when the North and South teams competed against each other. After the campaign ended he and his fiancée Leigh Stringer finally had time to get married in October '04. They now have a daughter Katherine Rose (2/21/06), and John is now a Vice President of Marketing with Grassroots Enterprise, a public affairs firm specializing in using the Internet to build grassroots support for causes, products, and companies.

John is one of the true heroes of the entire Clark Movement.

Feel free to comment, but if you have a good story, send it to us privately - we'd like to publish it in a subsequent issue of

“Then and Now.”

Send submissions to me at sdavis8585@msn.com.

Stan