‘To be or not to be?’ Hagel auditions for Hamlet
by Bob Hoig, Publisher
Midlands Business Journal
Chuck Hagel picked the University of Nebraska at Omaha Alumni Center as the stage for a much-hyped Monday morning announcement about his future.
Is he running for president in 2008? Is he seeking a third term in the U.S. Senate? Is he returning to private business?
All that came out of Hagel’s no-news “news” conference – after a week of over-the-top national and local heavy breathing in the media – was that Hagel is…is…is…still thinking.
A better setting for this performance might have been the University Theater, where an audition for Hamlet, the vacillating prince of Denmark, would have been more seemly.
By flaunting indecisiveness, Hagel, whether he understands it or not, has swept himself from the presidential board for good in 2008.
Nobody wants to hear somebody’s “to be or not to be” soliloquy, especially when the try-out is for President of the United States during times that try men’s souls.
That goes too for the political power brokers who need to get their candidates off the fund-raising mark before the rest of the field moves to the home stretch.
It’s a fact, that the “permanent campaign” launched by Bill Clinton when he took over the White House in 1993 makes the candidate who can’t make up his or her mind look something of a wimp.
Self promotion and opportunism have always been the rap on Hagel. Monday’s stunt did nothing to change that image.
For Hagel, there is also a larger problem – the fact that his only hope of becoming even an historical footnote to the 2008 presidential election requires America to lose in Iraq.
As the first, most strident, highest profile anti-war Republican – the TV and New York Times prophet of doom and second-guesser-in-chief to his own president – everything for Hagel rides on a U.S. military defeat.
And if that happens, there will be more than enough Democrats screaming “Vietnam! Vietnam! We told you so!” to have any need of Chuck Hagel.
Some readers of tea leaves noticed Hagel on Monday mentioning a possible new political alignment in America, and seeing that as a hint he might run as an independent or try to form a third political party.
Unlikely. Either option requires serious political money, which Hagel, moderately rich as he is, doesn’t have. Several television pundits opined Hagel could have a shot as a nominee for vice president on some independent ticket, maybe one headed by super-rich New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Supposedly, Bloomberg-Hagel could draw enough Republican and Independent votes to win, or at least, a la Ross Perot who gave the White House to Bill Clinton in 1993, to guarantee a Democratic victory in 2008.
This speculation breaks down in the face of Hagel-as-albatross. By now, he is far too confirmed as the Democratic Party’s favorite Republican to drain GOP votes.
He has been so cranked into the public mind as an anti-war darling by the liberal media it’s a good bet any vote draining would be from Democrats.
Whether Hagel goes Republican, Independent or even Democrat, he guarantees one thing – a massive Republican turnout of voters, registering anger.
By punting decisions down the road, Hagel in a roundabout way endangers his chances, and possibly those of others, in the 2008 race for the Senate.
A tough, seasoned cadre of Republican leaders seem ready to defer to Hagel’s comme ci, comme ca sense of timing before making their own announcements. High on that list are Mike Johanns, the former Lincoln mayor and governor and currently President Bush’s secretary of agriculture; Hal Daub, former Omaha mayor and congressman, and two-term Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning.
If Hagel stalls too long, that could create resentments.
Hagel is in low esteem among some Nebraska conservatives. If he does run for a third term, he could easily lose to a conservative-enough Democrat, should disaffected Republicans stay home or vote Democratic out of pique.
None of this makes for a pretty picture, but that is where Chuck Hagel’s “I gotta be me” stance over Iraq-as-Vietnam has put him.
March, 2007
