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Hagel On Palin

Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska is the nation’s most prominent Republican officeholder to publicly question whether Sarah Palin has the experience to serve as president. “She doesn’t have any foreign policy credentials,” Hagel said Wednesday in an interview. “You get a passport for the first time in your life last year? I mean, I don’t […]

Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska is the nation’s most prominent Republican officeholder to publicly question whether Sarah Palin has the experience to serve as president.

“She doesn’t have any foreign policy credentials,” Hagel said Wednesday in an interview. “You get a passport for the first time in your life last year? I mean, I don’t know what you can say. You can’t say anything.” ~The Omaha World-Herald

What’s interesting about this story is not that Hagel doesn’t think Palin has foreign policy experience, since this is just an acknowledgement of reality, but that Hagel remains neutral in the campaign.  As the report says, Hagel will not endorse either candidate.  As a Barr voter, I can sympathize with a refusal to endorse either one, but Hagel is not staying quiet out in protest of the bankrupt bipartisan consensus but simply so that, as usual, he can avoid taking any meaningful action that would oppose the policies he reportedly considers so disastrous.

Admirers of Hagel have told me on several occasions that I criticize him unfairly and don’t give him credit for being the serious foreign policy figure that he is, and I would like to believe them.  I would be very pleased to be wrong.  Nothing would please me more than to see a Republican internationalist not only recognize his own mistakes in supporting the invasion of Iraq, but also come out openly against the candidate that promises to be just as belligerent, reckless and dangerous as the current President.  If Palin’s foreign policy experience is nil and McCain is wrong, one might suppose that this would compel a Republican whose main area of disagreement with his own party has been in foreign policy to support the other major nominee, whose ideas he clearly finds more reasonable and sensible.  Like Gilchrest, whose future in GOP politics is already over, Hagel could take some kind of stand for that “Eisenhower Republicanism” he is always talking about and never actually defending in practice.  I don’t expect Hagel to endorse a non-interventionist and third-party candidate, but if Hagel is at all serious in his critique of the failures of this administration it stands to reason that he ought to take some public stance against McCain, who promises to repeat all of those failures.

Update: To his credit, Hagel warned Secretary Rice about the dangers that would follow from Kosovo independence and U.S. recognition.

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