Chuck Hagel

Conventional wisdom can be and often is wrong, especially when it comes to running-mate speculation.

Maybe you can remember back to 1992, when just about every wise man and woman opined on the supposed importance of Bill Clinton, then a 45-year-old Southern governor, balancing his ticket with a gray-haired Northerner. Clinton, of course, ignored them and picked an even more youthful Tennessean named Al Gore, forming a visually powerful partnership that netted 370 electoral votes and made an utter mockery of conventional wisdom.

But there are times when, just like the proverbial broken clock, conventional wisdom actually gets it right. Case in point: the widely repeated view that Barack Obama needs to compensate for his perceived national security and foreign policy inexperience by selecting a running mate with reassuringly impeccable credentials in those areas.  read more »

When word leaked late last week that Barack Obama would be joined on his upcoming visit to Iraq by Chuck Hagel, it set off an understandable round of Hagel-for-V.P. speculation. But the actual prospects of the Nebraska Republican joining the Democratic ticket can be summed up simply: a bold and brilliant idea that has just about no chance of becoming reality.

In terms of Mr. Obama's general election imperatives, the impact of Mr. Hagel's addition to the ticket would be seismic - easily dwarfing the boost that any other potential ticket-mate (except Al Gore, if you place him in that category) might offer.  read more »

In some ways, Chuck Hagel’s dilemma mirrors the one that independent voters may find themselves confronting this fall.

On the one hand, Hagel harbors an enduring personal fondness for John McCain, his fellow Vietnam veteran and maverick Republican senator. “A good friend of mine—a dear friend, as a matter of fact” is how Hagel described McCain in an ABC News interview over the weekend.  read more »

Though the Democratic nomination has yet to be decided, Barack Obama and John McCain have begun acting very much as if the general election has already started, exchanging direct criticisms and sizing each other up. And, while neither has talked publicly about it at this early stage, both men are doubtless pondering the running-mate question.

In a matchup with Obama, McCain would face two potentially conflicting imperatives with his choice of a vice presidential candidate.  read more »

This weekend the New York Times reported a conversation with Chuck Hagel in which the Senator said he talked to Michael Bloomberg about an independent presidential ticket.

Today, Bloomberg denied that report.

"I never talked to him about being a candidate," the told reporters after a speech at the United Nations in Midtown. "We just never had that conversation."  read more »

I've joined a bunch of New York reporters sitting in the audience right in front of Michael Bloomberg at the bipartisan panel at the University of Oklahoma this morning.

The media outlets here to cover the event include: CNN Lou Dobbs Tonight, The Los Angeles Times, Factcheck.org, Unite for Mike, Al Jazeera, Neo-Indypendents Magazine, BBC World News America, Telemundo, Neither Liberal Nor Conservative Be (we're not sure either), Newsweek and the Oklahoma Historical Society.

Another tidbit from the scene: alphabetical seating means there probably won't be any suggestive photographs of Bloomberg and his much-discussed potential vice-presidential candidate Chuck Hagel...or at least not during the panel.  read more »

NORMAN, Okla.—I was one of a couple of reporters who got a chance to chat with Chuck Hagel last night as he left the house of former Senator David Boren's house here ahead of a bipartisan conference on compromise in politics.

Hagel said that Americans “are going to have to break a very dangerous partisan deadlock in this country in order to face the great challenges that lie ahead. And we think it’s serious."

When asked if Michael Bloomberg, who is at the conference, should run for president, Hagel said, “Well, that’s his decision.”

As for being his running mate, Hagel told us, “Oh, that’s all hypothetical. We’re not about that here and the mayor says he’s not a candidate."

The full exchange after the jump.  read more »

Mike Bloomberg seems intent on not killing the speculation that he might mount an independent presidential campaign. And Chuck Hagel seems equally intent on stoking talk that he’s interested in a spot on a national ticket next year – especially one led by the mayor.

Yesterday brought word that the two have been holding regular get-to-know-you phone calls and that they have discussed potentially running together. The Hagel-Bloomberg dance has been going on for a while.

(Continued after the jump)  read more »

Steve Kornacki draws parallels between the Clinton campaign and Walter Mondale’s in 1984.

Also from the Observer, Niall Stanage reports on Chuck Hagel at the Council of Foreign Relations, where he spoke about the current president, his willingness to consider running on a Democratic ticket, and his (apparently high) opinion of Hillary Clinton.

He also laid into the Bush White House, calling it the "most arrogant, incompetent" administration.  read more »

The dream of a Bloomberg-Hagel presidential ticket next year, as far as the Senator is concerned, is very much alive.  read more »

It looks like Bob Kerrey, the New School’s President since 2001, has backed off just a little from his earlier statements that he wouldn’t head back to Nebraska to run for the Senate next year.

This means several things:

1) Chuck Hagel is not running for re-election: Kerrey, who represented Nebraska with his fellow Vietnam veteran in the late ‘90s, had promised to write Hagel a check if he ran for a third term in 2008. Now Kerrey is saying publicly that he doesn’t think Hagel will run – which probably means that he got something approaching an iron-clad guarantee in private.

2) Chuck Hagel is either running for President or retiring from politics: If he wants to seek the White House, it almost certainly has to be as an independent. Given the shortcomings of the top G.O.P candidates, there’s a theoretical vacuum in the Republican race – but Hagel, who’s been branded disloyal for his war opposition, is unlikely to fill it (even though he would give the G.O.P. its best – and perhaps only – shot of retaining the White House next year). An independent bid would be tough because of Hagel’s modest name recognition and campaign treasury. A teaming with Mike Bloomberg seemed to be his most logical option, but did Bloomberg’s comments to Dan Rather kill that idea? Would a Hagel independent bid now be doomed from the start to Ross Perot ’96-land? Maybe, at 62, he will jut hang it up in ’08.

3) Democrats are poised to expand the ’08 Senate playing field: Nebraska is a red state, but Kerrey is one of the few Democrats who can win it. (He previously won the governorship in 1982 and Senate races in 1988 and 1994 and has never lost in the state.) The Republicans seem poised to nominate Jon Bruning, the conservative state attorney general, who had been planning to challenge Hagel from the right in the G.O.P. primary. Against the other Democrats who have been eyeing the race, Bruning would have been the favorite. Against Kerrey, he’s probably an underdog. Republicans have a lot more turf to defend than Democrats in ’08 – 22 seats to 12 – and Nebraska is yet another G.O.P. seat that the Democrats are primed to pick off. The G.O.P. will obviously brand Kerrey an opportunist and a sort-of carpet-bagger (remember how he flirted with running for mayor of New York in ’05?), but even if they beat him, they will have to expend considerable resources to do it.

4) The New School will need a new President: Is there another retired politician in New York who could take over for Kerrey? Doesn’t George Mitchell live here??

The G.O.P. rebel plays footsy with the Mayor about sharing a presidential ticket.  read more »

The Hagel speculation began more than a year ago, but as he’s dawdled in making up his mind, new obstacles have emerged that block his most logical paths to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  read more »

Michael Bloomberg, a Democrat-turned-Republican who was at one point one of the single biggest contributors anywhere to Republican candidates, told reporters in Albany today that he has no plans to endorse any candidate for President in the primary or general election in 2008.

“I represent the city and my guess would be that I probably stay out of the race on both sides, both parties and in the general election,” Bloomberg said at a press conference about congestion pricing. “I think it is the best thing for New York City. When I’m in the private sector again after December 31, ‘09, I may very well get involved…”  read more »

I've noticed some antiwar politicians describing the terrorism in Iraq as "political" in character. Chuck Hagel has said this. So has Dick Durbin. This is important: they are saying that the terrorism is not based on fanaticism but on feelings of disfranchisement surrounding the emerging Iraqi polity (whatever that is). This idea places them in the Robert Pape camp (the UChicago prof's landmark book is Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide) whose analysis of suicide bombers shows that they are motivated not by religion but by military occupations. And of course it puts them against all the people talking about Islamo-fascists.

It's time to apply the same thinking to the violence in Israel/Palestine, which has grown out of territorial disputes and political rights for more than 80 years now...

The effort to marginalize Chuck Hagel for saying fairminded things about Israel/Palestine is really among the most hateful/disastrous aspects of the Israel lobby's effect in this country. So let's connect the dots.

Note that on the Haaretz panel that is trying to sideline Hagel, one of the "experts" is Dore Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the U.N. who lives in Jerusalem. Note that, as I have reported before, Gold has pulled down $96,000 a year as a stealth "scholar" for the American Enterprise Institute. Note that Irving Moskowitz, a California doctor and backer of the American Enterprise Institute, was also a big supporter of the Netanyahu government. Note that Gold was part of that rightwing government, and note too (per the superb Israeli journalist Gershom Gorenberg in The End of Days, Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount) that Moskowitz was at Netanyahu's side in 1998 when a group of rightwingers sledgehammered open a blocked tunnel in the Old City that leads south from the Muslim Quarter to the Western Wall—a source of great consternation to Muslims. Moskowitz has also bankrolled religious settlers in Arab areas of East Jerusalem, in an effort to solidify the annexation of Jerusalem and frustrate Arab hopes for the city. Note that Richard Perle and David Wurmser, who came up with the "Clean Break" proposal for Netanyahu to turn his back on the Oslo peace process, went from AEI to the Bush Administration, where they helped plan the Iraq war.

The point here is the way in which supporters of Israel's right wing come and go in Washington. The inner circle of Netanyahu's zealots include several people who play a significant role in forming our policies in the Middle East. This little circle has an agenda they are not very straightforward about: defeat the peace process, create "more facts on the ground," i.e., more structures of colonialism in the West Bank, and frustrate Palestinian and moderate Israelis' hopes for an equitable solution. This interest played an important role in the Bush Administration's ideas about Iraq: install "democratic" regimes across the Arab world—Syria was to be next—and we can forget about the Palestinian issue.

The question that must be asked is whether this extremist religious agenda is in America's interest. And why it is, that when Chuck Hagel or any other fairthinking American politician challenges that agenda, we are informed that they're stepping on a political third rail—in the U.S.A. no less?

Ha'aretz's Shmuel Rosner has gathered a panel to rate American presidential candidates on a scale of 1 to 10 on whether they are good (10) or bad (1) for Israel. No surprise that Hillary and Rudy Giuliani are near the top. Something of a surprise that Barack Obama (4.88) and Chuck Hagel (5.38) are at the bottom. There's no real evidence of Obama's alleged badness for Israel—even Rosner is forced to admit that his race plays a factor. Blackness often seems to produce sympathy for Palestinians.

And what's wrong with Chuck Hagel? Well, he said the following last month:

"The core issue in the Middle East is the Israeli/Palestinian issue. And I don't believe you will find stability, peace, opportunity, prosperity ever in the Middle East until there is an awareness and some confidence that we are moving toward the resolution that seemingly everyone agrees with, and that is a two-state solution..."

Horrifying, huh? Maybe that's good for Israel. Or, amazingly, maybe Americans might conclude that it is good for the U.S.

On Saturday, Stonewall Democrats host brunch at Junior’s with Councilmember David Yassky.

Sunday, the 92nd Street Y series, In The News with Jeff Greenfield, continues with Senator Chuck Hagel.

And on Monday the League of Women Voters will host a forum on the status of the equal rights amendment with Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, and the Republican Jewish Coalition will host a reception with Congressman Christopher Shays.

—Nicole Brydson

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