The American Spectator

HAGEL’S CHANGES to his stance on abortion and gun control upset a few moderate Republicans. Former Nebraska legislator Brad Ashford abandoned a fundraiser he had planned for Hagel after hearing about his new positions. “Ashford, who advocated gun restrictions and abortion rights in the Legislature and in his unsuccessful bid last year for the 2nd Congressional District GOP nomination, said he had thought Hagel’s positions were closer to his,” reported the Omaha World-Herald. “He said he based that on a meeting they had six months ago when Ashford pledged his support to Hagel.”

In an interview with TAS, Ashford recalled the controversy. “I remember we had lunch and Chuck had sympathized with my position on gun restrictions. I was pleased to find a Republican who was more progressive,” he says. “It was always my impression that he was a pragmatist. I honestly think Chuck was never an ideological person at all. I don’t think he even knew his positions on things. But he had to firm up his positions against Stenberg. He had to take positions on issues he didn’t care much about. He is not an activist conservative.”

Thinking back on his canceled fundraiser, Ashford says, “I was disappointed. But I should have let it go.” Hagel is “a moderate Republican,” says Ashford, now a supporter, and the “moderate Republicans in Nebraska adore him.” Ashford sees Hagel as akin to his old boss John McCollister and Bob Kerrey.

“He is very much of an internationalist. He is like Bob Kerrey was in Nebraska. He can appeal to both Democrats and Republicans. He can run around the world with Joe Biden,” says Ashford. “And like McCollister, Chuck’s politics are a very pragmatic, Main Street Republicanism, Bob Michel Republicanism. He is pro-business but he is not a conservative who would push the clock back 100 years.”

After defeating Stenberg without much trouble, Hagel faced conservative Democrat Ben Nelson in the general election, an unmemorable race save for a few blips like the Nebraska Right to Life Political Action Committee supporting Nelson over Hagel. Nelson at times tried to run to the right of Hagel. But Hagel didn’t let Nelson beat past him, running a staunchly conservative campaign, which included calls for the abolition of departments like Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Education.

But in a moment that foreshadowed later “growth,” Hagel broke with Bob Dole on a proposed 15 percent income tax cut. “I can’t sign on right now to those tax cuts,” he said, “I can’t be irresponsible about it.” Hagel now regards pledges not to raise taxes as “irresponsible.” Preening as a maverick in the aforementioned Washington Post Style Section piece, Hagel said, “At some point somebody’s going to ask you in a debate: ‘Well, senator, will you pledge if you’re elected president never to raise taxes?’ I couldn’t take that pledge. It would be irresponsible. That may cost me the nomination.”

Once Hagel was safely seated in the Senate, much of his campaign-trail conservative rhetoric evaporated. By 2000, he was reassuring reporters that “we thought it was a good idea to abolish HUD and Education and half of the federal government four years ago. But now we don’t.” Abolishing agencies, he said, was just “part of the dogma that swept Republicans into office… Political parties should be relevant to our times.”

WASHINGTON POST columnist David Broder observed with approval bordering on awe that the new senator from Nebraska was a bipartisan internationalist. Broder crowned him a Washington wise man after Hagel warned his Republican colleagues to lay off Clinton lest “we weaken or neuter the president in front of the world.” Broder was also pleased by Hagel’s willingness to torpedo the campaign of a religious conservative in Nebraska. “Last spring, Hagel did something almost no senator would do: He intervened in a three-way Republican primary for governor, denouncing the campaign tactics of the early favorite, Rep. Jon Christensen, a favorite of the religious right. Christensen lost,” Broder wrote.

Hagel’s most consistent interest in the Senate has been internationalism, an enthusiasm that grew out of his discontent with Vietnam, and his jet-setting as an international businessman in the cell phone industry, say observers. Upon entering the Senate, Hagel immediately took a seat on the Foreign Relations committee, which was easy enough since no other Republican bothered with it.

The seat became Hagel’s platform for a windy and fatuous internationalism that has been mistaken ever since for high-mindedness. Many of his colleagues regard him not so much as thoughtful as an arrogant know-it-all who enjoys uncorking statements like, “Our 40-year policy toward Cuba is senseless” (Hagel praised Jimmy Carter’s message during his inane visit to Cuba.) Hagel is called by some in Washington the “Senator from the State Department” for his regurgitations of the liberal internationalist line popular with diplomats.

Hagel’s internationalism is almost indistinguishable from John Kerry’s. It largely rests on a misplaced confidence in ramshackle international institutions, dubious international alliances, and empty trendiness. In the late 1990s, he joined forces with another Vermont liberal, Pat Leahy, to support an international treaty against land mines. He touted a chemical weapons treaty against the wishes of then-Foreign Relations Chairman Jesse Helms, and he led the charge for $18 billion in funding for the International Monetary Fund.

His internationalism contains a weakness for the fashionable causes of the internationalist jet-set. For example, when TAS requested an interview with him in December, he wasn’t available, said his press office, explaining that he had too much to do before his trip to London to discuss “global warming” with Tony Blair. Hagel is coming around to the view that some global warming science is real if a bit overstated. In a speech last October, he said that “it is likely there has been a human impact on the Earth’s atmosphere, and we should consider steps to mitigate that impact. The sooner we begin, the smaller and less painful the changes will have to be in the future.”

The solution is internationalism, says Hagel, since “global warming does not recognize national borders…. The U.S. alone cannot improve the Earth’s climate…. The only way forward is through international cooperation and collaboration, engaging, helping and partnering with all nations.”

If international issues fascinate Hagel, many domestic ones bore him. But he recognizes that he needs to cobble together some sort of domestic agenda in order to run in 2008, and so is busy forming proposals on semi-privatized Social Security, a good issue to select since it may confuse some conservative primary voters into supporting him.

GENERALLY, HOWEVER, Hagel’s interest in advancing a conservative domestic agenda is negligible. When TAS asked a Nebraskan who knows Hagel if he ever talks about conservative domestic priorities, he replied, “Absolutely not. It is obvious that his intellectual interests are on the international scene. When you have a conversation with him he is not going to bring up things like the marriage amendment.” David Kotok of the Omaha World-Herald detected in Hagel an unusual level of internationalism, even for a candidate running in a farm state dependent on foreign markets, when he saw Hagel on the campaign trail in 1995 deliver an ambitious speech on internationalism. “I can’t remember a Nebraska Senate candidate who ever gave a speech on international issues on the stump,” he says. Conservative activists in Nebraska are loath to criticize Hagel on the record due to his power and popularity in the state. But pressed they will acknowledge that he gives many conservative issues “second-class status.” Hagel has thrown plenty of bones to conservative activists over the years, and makes sure not to blurt out in Omaha what he says at cocktail parties in Georgetown, but conservative “grumbling,” says a former Nebraska GOP chairman, is getting “louder and louder.” Hagel’s sniping at Bush angered conservatives and “there would have been severe political consequences for him if Bush had lost,” he says.