Batfink's Beep -- 02-16-06

Is Chuck Hagel the new McCain?

February 16, 2006

Don't look now, but I think that the left is starting to have doubts about its ability to foist John McCain on the GOP as an '08 presidential candidate. They don't actually say that, of course, but they're doing the next best thing: selecting an alternate Manchurian Republican, and it's none other than Chuck Hagel of Nebraska.

Now, the inclination of the left to try to pick the other side's candidate for it is an interesting subject in itself, one which bespeaks an awareness that one's own likely candidate will need something more than his or her own ideas to get across the finish line first; Maybe I'll get back to that later. For now, though, it is interesting to see the formation of a backup plan to the McCain gambit taking shape; How else to explain this 10-page long hagiographic in the New York Times a couple days ago? All the classic buzzwords are there: 'reflexive, often surprising directness' (surprising to who?), 'strikes fellow Republicans as disloyal' , 'internationalist', 'his own man' (which somehow never gets said of, say, Joe Lieberman), and the absolutely mandatory 'maverick'. So much for selling him to the left, which is not by any means to say that the effort to do that doesn't suffuse the whole article. But the article goes to great lengths at the same time to try to sell him as some sort of conservative, a word that it hopes will endear him to enough Republican-inclined voters to get him in as a kind of trojan horse nominee for the GOP; in short, the same thing they tried with McCain, whom even thousands of Democrats re-registered temporarily as Republicans to vote for McCain in GOP primaries couldn't carry across the finish line. Consider the following, for example:

It can be argued, as David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, pointed out, that Hagel has taken a more conservative position than the Bush administration every time he has broken with it on a major issue. Keene's outfit gave the senator a 100 percent rating for his votes in 2003. His lifetime rating for his first eight years in the Senate stood at 85 on the union's scorecard, which translates into baseball talk as better than a .300 batting average. 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. In today's partisan climate, what are so-called movement conservatives to make of such a man? Facing conservative audiences, he struggles to overcome the suspicion that he's unpredictable, a throwback to old-school G.O.P. moderation, a dissident.

The suggestion seems to be that Hagel is a man certain conservatives don't quite trust because he's MORE conservative than they are rather than less, which would seem to be an odd thing for a New York Times writer to talk up in so admiring a way.

There are other subtle signs that the writer is attempting a con game here, as well: notice how, for example, even while sanctimoniously talking about how non-partisan Hagel supposedly is, the author can't resist throwing an elbow at conservatives, suggesting that moderation is frowned on in their circles. Also notice how much the name of McCain, who many more liberals love than conservatives, comes up. But, most of all, notice how the writer does his best to insinuate that it is the right that has run out of ideas:

[H]e feels strongly, the Bush White House has muffed a chance to demonstrate that conservatives can say something more useful than no, that they can actually advance ideas and programs.

All this comes, hilariously, fast on the heels of Nancy Pelosi's recent assertion that her party is doing just fine without ideas, thank you very much, which she chased quickly with a gloat about how they had stopped the President from fixing Social Security. It would make a fascinating socio-psychological study to examine why a party that comes that close to actually crowing about not needing no steenkin' ideas, should think it can sell the middle, and more importantly, the right, on the notion that the GOP ought to listen to them about who to nominate, so as to become a proper party of ideas. That is, if someone could be found who can stop laughing long enough to actually undertake such a study.

Maybe laughing at it really is the correct response.

top

Visitors since Dec 1, 2005:

Revised: 05/19/08 08:07:07 -0400 .