Chuck Hagel: Ready For His Close-Up

Today's New York Times Magazine contains as in-depth a profile of Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel as you're likely to find anywhere. As Hagel looks to the 2008 presidential campaign, this sort of exposure is his only real shot at buidling the name recognition and financial resources to be competitive.

All in all, the NY Times provides a very positive portrayal of Hagel, "The Heartland Dissident." The question now becomes whether that's actually an asset in Republican Party politics, where right-wing blow-hards make their bones by most creatively denouncing and calling for the destruction of the NYT and the entire "mainstream media" of which it is largely considered a standard-bearer.

And, here in Nebraska, besides our hunger for a President to call our very own, those Republicans who are already ranting and raving against Hagel in Letters to the Editor for betraying President Bush by speaking his opinions, aren't going to find much to like in Hagel's most recent string of criticisms that are much of the reason for the attention (and the cover photo above showing off those almost sorrowful baby blues).

Following are some of the highlights of the article, though I strong advise all Nebraskans to read the full story for themselves. It paints a picture of a complicated man whose obvious ambitions have not completely over-shadowed common sense and principle as has been the case with so many of his fellow Republicans:

With a bluntness that seems habitual — and more than occasionally strikes fellow Republicans as disloyal — Senator Chuck Hagel started voicing skepticism about the Bush administration's fixation on Iraq as a place to fight the Global War on Terror more than half a year before the president gave the go-ahead for the assault...

The Nebraskan...felt the White House wasn't going to be diverted from its drive to topple Saddam Hussein. When he rose on the Senate floor that October to explain his vote in favor of the resolution authorizing force...he gave a speech that would have required no editing had he decided to vote against it. What sounded then to the venture's true believers like the scolding of a Cassandra sounds fairly obvious three and a half years later:

"How many of us really know and understand Iraq, its country, history, people and role in the Arab world?. . .The American people must be told of the long-term commitment, risk and cost of this undertaking. We should not be seduced by the expectations of dancing in the streets." The president had said "precious little" about post-Saddam Iraq, which could prove costly, Hagel warned, "in both American blood and treasure."

As the months and years wore on, Senator Hagel's public musings on Iraq became less measured, as if his gorge rose a little higher with each day's casualty report. He would say that the White House was out of touch with reality, that the reconstruction effort in Iraq was "beyond pitiful," that he had lost confidence in Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, that we were losing the war and had destabilized the Middle East, that the United States was getting "bogged down" in Iraq the way it had been in Vietnam...

At the Republican grass roots in Nebraska and in the upper reaches of his party in Washington, the senator's candor was not universally viewed as refreshing. His timing was held against him even more than his dissent. ("Maybe his criticisms are valid," a letter to The Omaha World-Herald said, "but why showcase them and lend credence to the liberal opposition?") Obviously, this was not a team player. Some of his closest friends and supporters fretted that he was killing whatever small chance he might have had to be the national candidate he plainly aspired to be. Now — 33 months before a presidential election, two years before the first primaries — his chances aren't merely discounted; he's seldom even mentioned in Republican circles, as if he has been sidelined by his independence on Iraq.

The fact that Hagel himself emerged with two Purple Hearts from Vietnam, where he served as an enlisted man in the infantry, has often been mentioned in news reports quoting him on Iraq...Compelling as it is, Chuck Hagel's history as an ordinary soldier, a grunt from small-town Middle America who grew up to be a senator, is more layered, less simple...Unlike his own younger brother Tom — with whom...he walked point in the same infantry unit — he supported [the Vietnam] War to the bitter end....

Chuck Hagel never became a dove, but he became a bird that's nearly as rare in the Republican aviary. He became an internationalist...A singular Great Plains Republican, in other words, who cares about the rest of the world for reasons that don't begin and end with agricultural exports...An instinctive and unwavering conservative on most issues — in particular, big government and deficits — he was the antithesis of a neocon....

The senator from Nebraska broke with his party leadership to vote against the new prescription-drug program under Medicare, the No Child Left Behind bill and a big farm bill stuffed with incentives for corporate agriculture...Only on the Bush tax cuts — all of which he has supported — has he been deaf to warnings about the consequences for the federal deficit....

Here's a certified conservative, then, who has regularly decried partisanship — even during the do-or-die Florida showdown in 2000, when he suggested a statewide recount — and doesn't go on about "values." (He has them; most people have them, he says, so seeking to impose one's own values on others isn't right.) A regular churchgoer, an Episcopalian who sends his two children to Catholic school, he thinks religion is a private matter....

None of this easily adds up to a mandate to seek the presidential nomination of the Republican Party, even if you're the senator and happen to believe strongly that the party has lost its way at home and abroad. Hagel leaves no doubt that this is how he feels..."I sometimes question whether I'm in the same party I started off in," he will say. "This party that sometimes I don't recognize anymore has presided over the largest growth of government in the history of this country and maybe even the history of man"....

I asked how he thought history would judge George W. Bush. He said it would be "rather harsh" if things continued for the next three years the way they've gone for the last five. The verdict would depend on Iraq, "on what happens to the deficit and the debt and some of these issues we've not paid attention to over the last five years"....

A Republican campaign pro, after an astute analysis of Hagel's virtues and drawbacks, zeroed in on a factor no one else had mentioned, one that he seemed to feel said a lot about the reason Hagel's party hasn't warmed to him, and therefore about his limited prospects. "He doesn't have a happy face," the pro said....

He toyed briefly with the idea of running for governor of Virginia, then returned to Nebraska in 1992...Having resided full time in Nebraska for only 7 of the last 34 years, he's not apt, in any event, to present himself as a Prairie independent....

In 1996, in his first race, he took on a Republican attorney general in the Senate primary and won by nearly two to one. In the general election, he upset a popular Democratic governor, Ben Nelson, by a margin of 14 percentage points. Realizing too late that he was trailing, Nelson ran attack ads portraying Hagel as a Washington insider who'd used his connections to enrich himself in the cellphone business....

Stung by Nelson's barrage, Hagel countered with an ad in The Omaha World-Herald calling them "the most scurrilous and false attacks ever made in Nebraska politics." Not the forgiving sort, he has never quite forgotten his grudge against Nelson, who, for the last five years, has been the state's junior senator. Senator Nelson has since been heard to ask how it could be that he managed to get over a big loss while his colleague has yet to get over a big win....

He may not have become a leader of his caucus, but, to the likely dismay of the White House, he's also not an outcast...In addition to John McCain, he gets along well with the chairmen of his key committees — Pat Roberts of Kansas on Intelligence and Richard Lugar of Indiana on Foreign Relations — and counts Democrats Joe Biden of Delaware and Jack Reed of Rhode Island as among his best friends on the Hill. "I've been in the Senate a long time, and there's nobody I've liked more than Chuck Hagel," Biden told me....

[In the 2000 Presidential race] John McCain knocked on the Nebraskan's door, divulged his own ambitions and asked his friend to be co-chairman of his campaign...He was sitting with McCain when the South Carolina primary returns came in following a campaign in which McCain's mental stability was questioned and calls were made to likely Republican voters telling them the former P.O.W. and his wife had a black baby, without mentioning that the little girl had been adopted at an orphanage in Bangladesh.

Reached by Don Walton, the respected political reporter of The Lincoln Star Journal, Hagel said Bush had "sold his soul to the right wing." He called it "the filthiest campaign I've ever seen."

"I'd say the same thing today," he said when I asked about South Carolina, nearly six years later....

Today the war is so much in the front of the senator's mind that it pops into just about any answer he gives to a political question, sometimes more than once. When I asked whether he saw himself as a maverick, his reply boiled down to saying he was a consistent conservative. But here's how it began: "When I think of issues like Iraq, of how we went into it — no planning, no preparation, no sense of consequences, of where we were going, how we were going to get out, went in without enough men, no exit strategy, those kind of things — I'll speak out, I'll go against my party"....

A candidate who worries about the price he may have to pay for anything he says would not have called for active engagement with Iran and Cuba as Hagel has regularly done in foreign-policy speeches...And he would probably not be displaying, as Hagel has recently done, a newfound sensitivity on civil liberties matters. Through the end of 2004, Hagel's rating on the legislative scorecard of the American Civil Liberties Union was an anemic 22 percent. But at the end of December, as Congress rushed to adjourn, he was one of only four Republican senators whose votes held up an extension of the Patriot Act, arguing for checks on federal powers to invade homes and private records that had passed the Senate unanimously but then had been dropped in conference.

"When government continues to erode individual rights, that's the most dangerous, dangerous threat to freedom there is," he said, calling it "far more dangerous than terrorism"..."I think Congress has failed the country in many ways," he said at a forum in California last month. One way was to allow the administration "to completely overpower the debate based on, 'I'm the commander in chief, and I know what's best"....

He's still at the stage of testing audience responses, of looking into faces to see if they give back any hint of encouragement, even recognition. "Hello," he'll say, sticking out his hand to a receptionist or a registration clerk, "I'm Senator Chuck Hagel." He has done it often enough to know that the likely response is a blank stare, but still he persists as he travels beyond Washington and Nebraska, to Los Angeles, New York, Iowa, New Hampshire...trying to identify potential donors and supporters.

Whatever he concludes, he promises he'll go on saying what he thinks a senator should say about issues as they arise. "I don't have to be president; I don't have to be a senator," he said over dinner in an Omaha steakhouse. "I have to live with myself."

In a way, Hagel's private ambitions have become an essential check on the larger Republican Party's ambitions for total one-party supremacy no matter the cost to the truth or the nation's well-being. For that, I am grateful to Hagel and, though he does not vote my interests or principles, I am glad he at least represents Chuck Hagel so very well in the U.S. Senate.

I'm sure we will all watch intently Hagel's continued attempts to get a fire going under his campaign in the coming months and years. This article should cetainly attract some love from corporate Republicans with fat checkbooks (who would actually read the NY Times), but its effect on the party base who vote with Fox News rather than their paycheck seems likely to be a different story.