The American Spectator

After senator Jim Jeffords deserted the Republican Party in 2001, Chuck Hagel was furious. Not at his Senate colleague but at Republicans for not accommodating Jeffords’ liberalism. Hagel had plead with Jeffords to remain a Republican, promising to help him advance his liberal “dreams” for the GOP.

“Jim, do you really believe you can further your dreams and aspirations by doing this?” Time quoted Hagel as saying to Jeffords. “We can fix this. Give us a chance.” Unpersuaded, Jeffords switched parties, and Hagel proceeded to blast the GOP to reporters in terms they like to hear. “We need to take some inventory and to look into ourselves and our party and how we have handled things,” he said. The party has a “perception problem in this country, that we are a narrower-gauged party, that we are less tolerant.”

Hagel proposed that the GOP pump air into the Big Tent by junking moral philosophy. “The Republican Party should be a multifaceted party representing many interests and many views, but generally should be anchored with a philosophy about government,” he said. “It shouldn’t be a philosophy about morals.”

“Is our party in tune with America?” he asked fellow Republicans. Grassroots Republicans, many of whom voted for George Bush on “moral values” and oppose Jeffordsizing the party, will likely turn this question on Hagel should he run in the Republican presidential primary of 2008: Is he in tune with America? And why should the conservative grassroots vote for an anti-Republican Republican who isn’t in tune with them?

In what looks like a half-baked Hamlet act, Hagel speaks of running for president to “redefine” a party that “has lost its moorings,” a project unlikely to resonate with Red-State Republicans. Like John McCain, Hagel is known as a Republican “populist” even though his agenda to reform the party appeals not to the grassroots but to the tony talk-show set.

THE GROWING CHATTER about a Chuck Hagel presidential bid isn’t bubbling up from grassroots Republican activists. It is corning from elite journalists in Washington who repeat ad nauseam Hagel’s assertion that the Republican Party is adrift. They regard Hagel as a tertiary John McCain—an “independent” and “maverick” Republican they can book for their talk shows if the Arizona senator isn’t available.

To these journalists, who are always looking for surrogates to “reform” the GOP, a Hagel run sounds like a very promising idea. “Could Chuck Hagel Take the White House?” asked the Washington Post Style section hopefully last November. “On the Road to 2008, He’s Not Walking the Party Line,” it burbled, betraying its primary interest in Hagel as a critic of fellow Republicans. The Post’s Style section was impressed enough with Hagel to bestow upon him one of its highest compliments—that he does his “own reading, thinking, and even writing.” It also admired Hagel’s “capacity to charm Nebraskans, foreigners, even Democrats,” neglecting to include journalists on the list of the charmed.

When journalists in Washington, D.C. assert that a Republican is capable of “thinking” without assistance, it means he thinks like them, parroting their program for the GOP. During the 2004 presidential campaign, Hagel became an indispensable voicebox for the dominant media, frequently echoing reporters’ thoughts on Bush’s incompetence and insufficient regard for the feelings of “the world.” A decorated Vietnam veteran who looks back upon that war as an act of “dishonesty,” Hagel also served the media as an invaluable weapon against John O’Neill and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

“I am very disappointed not just as a Vietnam veteran, but as a Republican U.S. senator, as a citizen of this country, with this kind of nonsense put on the air,” Hagel said after the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads appeared. “The fact is John Kerry served honorably and served with courage.” Hagel, basking in the media’s appreciation of his “bipartisan” largeness of spirit, would for good measure emphasize that Kerry is “certainly qualified to be president. He’s smart, he’s tough, he’s capable.” Journalists noticed that Hagel was almost rooting for Kerry and trotted him out to defend Kerry after Bush attacked his embarrassing record on national defense. The Kerry campaign noticed too. A Democrat who worked on the Kerry campaign tells TAS that Hagel was seen as a potential “secretary of state or defense under Kerry.”

LIKE McCAIN, Hagel’s voting record appears solidly conservative. The American Conservative Union gives him an 85 rating (McCain’s is 86). But Nebraskans who have followed Hagel’s career attribute his conservative votes to pragmatism, not philosophy. One conservative activist in Nebraska describes him as a faux populist in the mold of Bob Kerrey (another favorite son of the Cornhusker state), “far more interested in self-promotion than promoting a conservative agenda.”

Nebraskan journalists who followed Hagel’s first political run remember him as a moderate—a moderate who became a conservative after finding himself the underdog in a Republican primary against Don Stenberg, a prominent Nebraska conservative and sitting attorney general. “The thought going in was that Hagel was going to set himself up as the moderate candidate in that race,” says one journalist. But when that proved problematic, he says, “Chuck’s philosophy was that he wasn’t going to be outconservatived by this conservative.”

David Kotok, an Omaha World-Herald reporter who covered the Republican primary in 1995, says that “Hagel made sure that there was no light between him and Stenberg. He needed to win the primary.”

Raised in small-town Nebraska, Hagel worked in government and business before running for the U.S. Senate. He was a radio DJ, staffer to moderate former Nebraska Congressman John McCollister, an administrator at the Veterans’ Affairs Administration, head of the World USO, a lobbyist for Firestone, and deputy director of the 1990 G-7 Summit, among other jobs. But his most successful venture was in the cell phone industry, striking it rich after using $5,000 to start up Vanguard Cellular Systems.

Don Stenberg, highlighting that Hagel had donated $1,000 to Democrat Bob Kerrey, cast him in the Republican primary as “the candidate of the East Coast establishment”—a liberal carpetbagger who had only recently returned to his home state after living for 20 years in Virginia. Colin Powell, fresh from rebuking Republicans for evacuating the “sensible center,” gave $1,000 to Hagel, which became another stick for Stenberg. “The Colin Powell support fits the pattern we are seeing here in Nebraska,” Stenberg said. “More and more liberal Republicans are supporting Chuck Hagel.”

Worried that he needed to siphon off conservative votes from Stenberg, Hagel “tightened” his stance on abortion, as he put it. He also repudiated his previous support for an assault weapons ban, a faux pas committed early in the campaign when Hagel, asked if he could support Bill Clinton’s gun ban, said, “I probably would have voted for it.”