The
Washington Post reports Chuck Hagel is seriously considering competing for the Republican Party's presidential nomination in 2008. On August 27th, I pondered the possibility of a race between the rhetorically anti-war Republican Chuck Hagel and the mealy mouthed Hillary Clinton in a post entitled,
"Reminiscing About the Future: Chuck Hagel vs. Hillary Clinton." I was innudated with emails from people who considered me crazy for even suggesting such a scenario. In a crossposting at
Daily Kos, many commenters from that community also rejected the possibility. It doesn't seem so crazy anymore does it? I stand by what I wrote then,
"Hillary is the wrong messenger for Democrats to defeat him. She’s too mealy mouthed, too corporatist and too insincere. True strength stems from authenticity combined with a record of clarity and sound judgment. Hillary Clinton embodies none of those virtues. Preposterous as it sounds, a Hagel vs. Clinton race means Republicans prevail on a platform to exit from Iraq. We can’t let them get away with it."
4 comments:
Yeah. You are right. So was I. Republicans better hope that Chuck Hagel runs for president. After GWB's impending "surge", the election will be about the war and little else. There is exactly one Republican candidate who has been on the right side of this war since the beginning, and that is Hagel, and that makes him the only electable Republican in 2008.
Chuck is prominently featured in my most recent YouTube effort "It's the war, stupid." and blog post of the same name.
If you want to really appreciate how far Hagel was ahead of the curve on Iraq, check out this video of his speech at Kansas State University in February of 2003 (Landon Lecture Series - warning it is long some 50 minutes).
Filmed a few weeks before we went into Iraq, Hagel warns about almost every single thing that has happened as a consequence over the last three years. Not hindsight, real foresight. It's scary how on-target he was - He sounds like a friggin' prophet now. It makes you want to cry to watch it. Nobody was listening to him. Not in the administration. Not the American people. Just a voice lost in the winds of war fever. I include myself among the deaf, as I was as gung-ho as every other yahoo at the time.
Hagel, from my perspective, would be, by far, the best prospect for Republicans. But his independence on the war doesn't extend to anything else, I read somewhere he has a 95% voting record with Bush. I'm sure that's a statistic Hillary would beat the drum on. But I hope it's not her. I really, really do.
If Ms. Clinton doesn't dramatically change her position on the war, it will hurt her no matter who the GOP picks. The Greens must be excited over the possibility that the Democrats might choose a pro-war candidate.
Speaking of greens, it looks like Nader will be running again...
I'm not very worried about Clinton. She won't make it past New Hampshire. She really won't.
All this hype about Clinton is the height of absurdity.
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