That's Clark, nice!

I don't really have strong feelings yet, one way or the other, for General Wesley Clark in his run for the Democratic Presidential nomination, except to hope that maybe by virtue of Clark's candidacy, along with Senator John Kerry's Viet Nam vet-status, we might finally begin to cut away at this idiot idea out there that Democrats are basically peacenik McGovernites who loathe the military and whose discussions of foreign policy involve sitting around a campfire, smoking pot, and singing "Give Peace a Chance". I don't know anything about Clark yet, and I'll end up vocally supporting whoever ends up winning the nomination anyway.

However, I happened to be reading Eric Alterman's blog yesterday, and I found this quote, referring to the idea of a Dean-Clark ticket:

Don’t tell me it should be the other way around. [i.e., Dean-Clark as opposed to Clark-Dean.] Perhaps it should, but Clark’s advantages dissipate in the No. 2 spot. Nobody votes for a vice president except the immediate members of his family, and if I were Mary Cheney, I would have thought long and hard about even that.

Could someone explain to me how Clark's advantages (which I presume heavily involve his military status) "dissipate" if he is the Vice Presidential nominee? Wasn't George W. Bush's pick of Dick Cheney hailed as an illustration of Mr. Bush's intent to surround himself with good and experienced people who would help him overcome his lack of experience in foreign policy and military affairs? I don't understand what Alterman is getting at here, unless it's merely to suggest that Vice Presidential candidates do not, in themselves, make the difference between a winning Presidential nominee and a losing one. But that's a far cry from saying that Clark's advantages "dissipate".