SALON

Joan Walsh

Monday, Jan 7, 2013 9:40 PM UTC

The phony Chuck Hagel fight

Barring an unknown scandal, the former GOP senator will be easily confirmed by the Senate, and that's a good thing

By

Topics: ,

The phony Chuck Hagel fight (Credit: AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

As if reporters don’t have enough to cover, with the House GOP imploding and another game of fiscal hostage-taking coming in two months, everybody’s gone all in on the “controversy” over former GOP Sen. Chuck Hagel’s nomination as secretary of defense. Yes, Sen. Lindsey Graham is shrieking that his foreign policy views are “out of the mainstream,” John McCain has “serious concerns” and Mitch McConnell won’t promise to confirm him, but this will blow over.

The biggest non-story is the threat that pro-Israel Democrats might ally to block Hagel’s nomination. Although New York Sen. Chuck Schumer conspicuously failed to promise to support Hagel’s confirmation on “Meet the Press” last month, allegedly because of his insufficient fealty to protecting Israel, Schumer is unlikely to buck President Obama. The National Journal’s Josh Kraashauer had a slightly odd column about Democratic Hagel skeptics, hyping Schumer’s doubts and pointing to the Democratic Jewish “minyan” of senators, including Dianne Feinstein and Carl Levin, as key to the confirmation. But Levin and Feinstein quickly came for Hagel’s confirmation after his nomination Monday. Schumer and New York’s other senator, Kirsten Gillibrand, both released noncommittal statements praising Hagel’s background and vowing a fair hearing, but stopped short of endorsing him. Still, it’s almost impossible to imagine the two of them going it alone, without Feinstein or Levin, on Hagel.

There are a few progressives who lament that Obama is picking a Republican, squandering the political capital he’d amassed for Democrats with his hawkish foreign policy and killing Osama bin Laden. (Daily Kos ran a campaign to get Obama to pick a Democrat.) While taking those arguments seriously, Obama critic (and my former colleague) Glenn Greenwald nonetheless called Hagel’s appointment “one of Obama’s best appointments and boldest steps of his presidency.”

Others have been irked that the president is ready to fight for Hagel in a way he didn’t fight for Susan Rice as secretary of state. I wish he’d fought for Rice, if indeed he wanted to appoint her, but I’m glad he’s bucking the neocons to fight for Hagel. It might bother me that Democrats are so willing to pick Republicans to head defense, from Robert Gates back to Bill Cohen under President Clinton, except that Hagel is better on defense policy than a lot of Democrats. His skepticism about the war in Iraq as well as a possible war with Iran, along with his unorthodox (for Washington) views about our relationship with Israel is reassuring.  So is his apparent willingness to cut defense; David Sirota notes his public statements calling the defense budget “bloated” and suggesting that it “needs to be pared down,” sentiments you rarely hear from Republicans and not frequently enough from Democrats.

Hagel made dumb comments about Ambassador Jim Hormel being “aggressively gay,” for which he has apologized. Rep. Barney Frank, who first sounded alarms about the Hagel nomination, now supports him. Foreign policy wonk Steve Clemons, who happens to be gay, knows Hagel well and backs him strongly, recently writing that “Chuck Hagel is pro-gay, pro-LGBT, pro-ending ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’” Likewise, Hagel’s maligned comments about “the Jewish lobby,” which is more correctly called the Israel lobby, didn’t disqualify him with the Jewish foreign policy expert who recorded the remarks, Aaron David Miller. Miller recently called the Hagel attacks “scurrilous,” writing in Foreign Policy.

In the end, Senate Republicans may decide to hang together to deny the president a strong defense appointment. Even though McCain hailed Hagel as a good secretary of state choice in 2006, he’s unlikely to back him now, especially given the help Hagel gave Obama in 2008. Having backed Democrat Bob Kerrey in his failed Nebraska Senate campaign, Hagel is barely a RINO anymore, and his former GOP colleagues may relish the chance to rebuke their former colleague as well as the president they loathe. But I can’t see Schumer or other pro-Israel Democrats allying with them.

Honestly, if Hagel were to go down, it would do more to focus attention on the unseemly influence of pro-Israel hawks on American foreign policy than anything in recent memory. That may be why, so far, AIPAC is officially neutral on his nomination. Neutral isn’t an endorsement, and certainly suggests their reservations, but if AIPAC isn’t ready to make this a fight, it’s hard to imagine a major Democrat bucking the president to do so.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 22 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

Joan Walsh is the author of "What's the Matter With White People: Finding Our Way in the Next America."

Joan joined Salon in 1998 to become the first full-time news editor and became editor in chief in February 2005. At the end of 2010, she became editor at large, to

write full time. In the last couple of years she's had the privilege of debating conservative zealots on TV, from Bill O' Reilly to Dick Armey to Pat Buchanan.

As a columnist for San Francisco Magazine, she won Western Magazine Awards in 2004 and 2005 for writing about local politics. She's written for everyone from the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post to Vogue and the Nation.

Before she joined Salon, Joan spent many years as a freelancer. She also ran her own business, consulting to national foundations and nonprofits on education, community development and urban poverty issues. She's a crazy San Francisco Giants fan and co-wrote a book about the ballpark back in 2001.

Continue Reading

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
New Yorker launches tool by Aaron Swartz to protect leaks: Strongbox, co-created by the late technologist, is an open-source drop box for leaked documents
246 points247 points | 10 comments
vote
New Yorker launches tool by Aaron Swartz to protect leaks: Strongbox, co-created by the persecuted late technologist, is an open-source drop box for leaked documents
178 points179 points | 1 comment
vote
Loaded terminology like "entitlements" and "welfare" skews the debate and alters America. How right-wingers use semantic tricks to kill government.
192 points193 points | 45 comments
vote
Obstruction will ruin the GOP: Playing politics and abusing the system can excite the extremes, but it's a recipe for long-term political disaster
56 points57 points | 8 comments
vote
How right-wingers use semantic tricks to kill government -- "...much of the U.S. economic security support system consists of subsidies for the affluent in the form of tax breaks, like those for private retirement savings plans such as 401(k)s and private employer-provided health insurance."
33 points34 points | 3 comments

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Latest Tweets

Recommendations