Post by brendywendy on Mar 25, 2007 19:44:44 GMT -5
www.esquire.com/features/chuckhagel0407
LINK ABOVE IF WANT TO WATCH VIDEOS
A multimedia exploration of Chuck Hagel's historic moment, and what it means for a declining presidency. Read the story. See the videos. Watch history happen.
By Charles P. Pierce
3/11/2007, 8:35 AM
Jump to story
The rapier is more silver than the moon. The horse, red eyed and fierce in the California night, is rearing up, and its rider points his sword toward the sky, and its tip seems to touch the lunar surface, dimpling it further between the craters.
On the wall near his desk in the Russell Senate Office Building, Chuck Hagel has hung a painting of Zorro done by his brother Mike. "Isn't that a great effect?" asks Hagel. He is informed that his visitor not only dressed up as Zorro for every Halloween from third grade all the way to his freshman year in college but also credits Johnston McCulley's hero for his ongoing career as an aging epee hack. Hagel's laugh lasts just long enough to be heartfelt, and not so long as to be calculated.
"I always thought he was the best of them," Hagel says.
If Hagel were better fitted for metaphor, Zorro would be an awfully good one, certainly better than that overrated royalist stooge Robin Hood. With his Michael Curtiz pastels and his Merry Men, the former Earl of Locksley fought to restore to the throne Richard I, the bloodthirsty slaughterer of Saracens, who'd left England to corruption and destitution while he went haring off to the Middle East on some damned Crusade. A renegade aristocrat himself, Zorro fought only to free the peons from a tyrannical governor. Zorro wore black. Zorro always rode alone.
But there are no places in Hagel for metaphor. His face is too meaty for poetics, its tectonics shaped by old football injuries and one horrible day in the Mekong Delta when the flesh of it bubbled and burned. His sentences are too often arrhythmic, breaking in the middle, when what he's saying takes an unexpected turn that seems to startle him most of all.
"The president says, 'I don't care.' He's not accountable anymore," Hagel says, measuring his words by the syllable and his syllables almost by the letter. "He's not accountable anymore, which isn't totally true. You can impeach him, and before this is over, you might see calls for his impeachment. I don't know. It depends how this goes."
The conversation beaches itself for a moment on that word -- impeachment -- spoken by a conservative Republican from a safe Senate seat in a reddish state. It's barely even whispered among the serious set in Washington, and it rings like a gong in the middle of the sentence, even though it flowed quite naturally out of the conversation he was having about how everybody had abandoned their responsibility to the country, and now there was a war going bad because of it.
"Congress abdicated its oversight responsibility," he says. "The press abdicated its responsibility, and the American people abdicated their responsibilities. Terror was on the minds of everyone, and nobody questioned anything, quite frankly."
He is developing, almost on the fly and without perceptible calculation, a vocabulary and a syntax through which to express the catastrophe of what followed after. Rough, and the furthest thing from glib, he's developing a voice that seems to be coming from somewhere else, distant and immediate all at once.
Listen to him calling out his fellow senators in committee.
"If you wanted a safe job," Hagel said memorably, "go sell shoes."
Watch Sen. Chuck Hagel tell Congress to "go sell shoes" on January 24, 2007. Via YouTube.com.
No pricey Beltway word sleeper could come up with "Go sell shoes." Not enough poetry. No Churchillian carillon ringing through the image. But the language is changing as the country's calling, because the war's gone bad.
Country's calling now. War's gone bad and nobody's listening, and the country's calling the way it always does, like the moan of a train whistle, soft and distant at first, but with increasing power behind it, the way the trains come through all the small places where Chuck Hagel grew up in Nebraska. All the little towns, where everyone knew if your father was drunk and smashed up the car or lost his job, where every family kept secrets that every other family knew anyway but were too polite or kind to mention. Rushville and York and Ainsworth.
And Columbus, too -- the City of Power and Progress -- founded in 1856 by men of grim visage and considerable chin whiskers, where Bill Cody first worked out the rough parts of his Wild West show before taking it down the line to the bright lights of Omaha. The old man, a veteran of the Pacific war who never quite made it all the way home, died in the little house on Woodland Avenue in Columbus on Christmas Eve 1962. Five years later, his sons went off to war. A train whistle blows in Columbus and it could be calling from four blocks away or 150 years ago. Country's calling from places just like that, louder and louder, demanding in a new, plainer language an end to incompetence and vainglory, creating one of those moments that find the man through which the moment finds its voice.
Go sell shoes.
Slowly, then, too slow, too late, maybe, but with inexorable purpose, the country begins to move.
His face has darkened and his eyes seem to have turned to stone. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has come before the Foreign Relations Committee of a radically different Senate to try and explain, among other things, how sending twenty-one thousand additional United States troops into a meat grinder of a ground war is somehow not an escalation of the conflict. She keeps calling it an "augmentation." She crawfishes on the subject of what will happen if the new strategy somehow sends American troops across the Iranian border. Chuck Hagel is having none of this.
"Some of us," Hagel says, "remember 1970, Madam Secretary, and that was Cambodia, and when our government lied to the American people and said, We didn't cross the border into Cambodia. In fact, we did. I happen to know something about that.
"I have to say, Madam Secretary, that I think this speech given last night by this president represents the most dangerous foreign-policy blunder in this country since Vietnam -- if it's carried out.
"I will resist it."
Rice sits there like an ice sculpture. The committee room erupts in applause.
I will resist it.
Watch Sen. Chuck Hagel grill Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice before the Foreign Relations Committee. Via YouTube.com.
Hagel speaks only for himself, but he clearly feels the force at his back. The country was divided, but not the way it was divided over Vietnam. That war split families. It got brothers storming away from each other at the dinner table and beating each other bloody on the front lawn. This war is different. It is massively unpopular in the country the way Vietnam never was; in the latest Gallup poll, 74 percent of the people surveyed disapproved of Bush's conduct of the war, and its only fervent supporters seem to be a cadre of Washington think-tankers, a couple of senators, and the president of the United States, and they seem to be the only ones who matter.
"You don't have the draft," Hagel says, "so you don't have that many people touched. This is a more sophisticated political divisiveness. It divides people from their government. 'They don't care what we think, so they're not accountable to us.' That's the kind of thing that's going to widen and deepen." A rock-ribbed Reagan conservative, he's become the voice of uncompromising dissent on this war. "If all these new troops get in there and the casualties start mounting, you're going to see that 74 number go to 80 and higher," he continues. "You can't do anything about the president. He's gone. But you can do something about your congressman. That's why all these Republicans are so nervous."
The Congress of the United States -- the 110th of that name -- is walking on eggshells this morning. It was elected the previous November in large part out of revulsion against a war in Iraq that was built on fraud and that thereafter was prosecuted by an executive branch that seemed to combine the giddy certitude of a sociopath with the geopolitical acumen of the Marx Brothers. A whopping 18 percent of the country believed it to be a good idea to send more American troops there -- and just the night before, the president of the United States had announced that he would do exactly that and that, if need be, he might just have to send some troops into Iran and Syria in order to make his new plan work.
The president had announced this even with the country so revolted by the whole business that it had decided in what was obviously abject desperation that the Democrats might even be a better bet, and it handed over to them both houses of the Congress. At first, there was a lot of talk about "civility" and "bipartisanship." The senators even got together before the opening of the new Congress -- no staff, no press -- in the old Senate chamber in the Capitol building to talk about getting along with one another. It was a rather ill-omened place to talk about bipartisan amity, the chamber in which a South Carolina congressman named Preston Brooks once caned abolitionist senator Charles Sumner into insensibility. Some issues are irreconcilable. The voters want Congress to function, but they also clearly want somebody's head on a stick.
Which is the reason why the Congress of the United States is walking on eggshells this morning. They're going to have to do something, and Rice is sitting there, the implacable face of an administration that believes its powers in this regard are limitless. Many of these people spent the previous six years enabling those powers, or folding in the face of them. The committee's new chairman is Joe Biden, who inveighs at Rice as though armoring himself in his own ambition, a blowhard who's choked at critical moments almost his entire career. He throws the Constitution at Rice, and she all but hands him a lollipop in return. Hagel sits to Biden's left, glowering and impatient.
Elected in an upset in 1996 over popular Democratic governor Ben Nelson, Hagel was as reliable a Republican as there was in the Senate. He voted for all the tax cuts. He proposed his own plan to monkey around with Social Security. He voted 100 percent of the time with the National Right to Life Committee, and 93 percent of the time with the United States Chamber of Commerce, and 5 percent of the time with the League of Conservation Voters. He wanted to protect the womb-babies and drill for oil in Alaska.
(Even Hagel's upset win over Governor Nelson in 1996 was tinged with what have become de rigueur charges of Republican jiggery-pokery. Prior to the campaign, he had been the chairman of the company that manufactured the machines that counted most of the votes. Nelson subsequently got elected to the other Senate seat from Nebraska anyway. The best anyone can say about their relationship is that their staffs get along well.)
He even voted for the resolution authorizing George Bush to use force in Iraq in 2002, but he did so in a speech shot through with dark ambivalence. He warned against believing in cakewalks. "Imposing democracy through force," he warned, "is a roll of the dice." Then Hagel voted aye.
"I was watching it," says his brother Tom, a law professor at the University of Dayton who's tied to Chuck by blood in every sense of the word. "And it was an excellent speech on all the reasons not to go to war. I thought, Here's a guy who's thought this through, who's clearly agonized over it, and he's set down on paper all the reasons for his ultimate act, which is to vote against it. But then he couldn't pull the trigger."
"There were two reasons I did it," Chuck Hagel explains. "I believed what the administration said, that war would be a last resort, and the second thing is, at a critical time like this, the president needs a strong hand, and to some extent, you've got to trust him, until he lies or screws up or something. Is there a gamble in that? Sure. But there was a gamble in sending Hagel to the Senate." Tom believes that Chuck "has a history of being too loyal for too long to people who don't deserve it." Chuck disagrees. It is not the first time.
However, the way George W. Bush operates always has made Chuck Hagel concerned. He saw close up how the Bush campaign savaged his friend John McCain in the South Carolina primary. In 2000, he said he favored a statewide recount of the disputed presidential ballot in Florida, which was the last thing the Bush people wanted. Then the planes hit the towers and the country got scared and a whole lot of things happened that made Hagel even more concerned. "It was what Churchill called a 'jarring gong,' " Hagel says. "The country got knocked off balance for a long time."
He spoke out against the excesses of the Patriot Act and the cavalier disregard of constitutional guarantees it embodied, becoming one of only four Republican senators to vote against its renewal in 2005. He fumed against what he saw as a country ill served by an indolent press, an impotent Congress, and its own shell-shocked acquiescence.
The Republicans had found an issue they thought they could ride to power for the next fifty years. The Democrats apparently thought so, too, curling up into a ball, whimpering their opposition. Out in the country, the American People -- that fragile flower of an entity that everyone claimed to be working so hard to protect -- seemed to function largely as set decoration. Out of this, inevitably, came the Iraq war.
However, as the evidence piled up that the original casus belli was a complicated farrago of lies, bureaucratic grandiosity, wonkish wet dreams, and wishful thinking, and the bodies piled up -- infantry, most of them, as he and his brother had been -- Hagel engaged in dissent. He called for the American troops to be redeployed, removed from the middle of a running sore of a civil war in which the only thing all sides seemed capable of agreeing upon was that it was a good thing to kill Americans, a burgeoning Belfast with sand. He also found himself an audience. The louder he spoke, the bigger the audience became.
Then the president gave his speech, and Rice came to the Hill to defend it, and Chuck Hagel said what he'd been building up to say for two years and what the country -- the fragile American People -- had been telling pollsters and shouting into the wind for somewhat longer.
I will resist it.
Here's another thing about that committee. A whole clutch of them are now -- or have considered -- running for president in 2008. Biden's in, and so are Barack Obama and Christopher Dodd. Feingold thought about it and, after contemplating how well a twice-divorced Jewish person from Wisconsin would play south of Kenosha, abandoned the idea. And then there's Chuck Hagel, who isn't even sure at this moment whether he'll run for reelection to the Senate but who, in his own dogged, deliberately anticharismatic way, has found a cause with an audience.
The Republican field is wide and eccentric. There is Newt Gingrich, once again running for emperor of his own private universe, and Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, who seems to be bucking to be the national archbishop. Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts has good looks and a thin resume, and he's stuck in the mud because he had to promise to treat gay people like human beings to get elected in Massachusetts, which isn't playing well in Jesusland. Rudy Giuliani has been taking his sweet time.
And there's John McCain, Hagel's great friend, who attached himself hip and thigh to the new policy in Iraq and who, even prior to that, had appeared to be on the verge of becoming a very ridiculous man. But it was after he signed on to the surge that, according to one poll, his support among his core independent voters in New Hampshire tanked from 54 to 27 percent.
And then there's Chuck Hagel, who's not sure of his future but who's positioned at this moment in history to be a presidential candidate of strange historical resonance: a Reaganite version of Eugene McCarthy, who, forty years ago, determined that he would run against a president of his own party in order to stop the misbegotten war in which Tom and Chuck Hagel were at that moment fighting.
"I don't think it's the same thing, because McCarthy was strictly an antiwar candidate," Hagel muses, turning the comparison over and over in his mind. "That wouldn't be what I would be."
Oh, but it's already pushed him there, because the war is going to be the only issue for the next two years, both the hammer and the anvil that pounds out the next president, the one who is going to have to deal with all the wreckage. It is going to redefine American politics for at least the next decade, and that one sentence -- I will resist it -- has marked Hagel as something he might never otherwise have become: the vehicle through which the country found a voice for its anger and discontent. A true maverick.
I will resist it.
The voice of a country, moving.
The Real McCain.
LINK ABOVE IF WANT TO WATCH VIDEOS
A multimedia exploration of Chuck Hagel's historic moment, and what it means for a declining presidency. Read the story. See the videos. Watch history happen.
By Charles P. Pierce
3/11/2007, 8:35 AM
Jump to story
The rapier is more silver than the moon. The horse, red eyed and fierce in the California night, is rearing up, and its rider points his sword toward the sky, and its tip seems to touch the lunar surface, dimpling it further between the craters.
On the wall near his desk in the Russell Senate Office Building, Chuck Hagel has hung a painting of Zorro done by his brother Mike. "Isn't that a great effect?" asks Hagel. He is informed that his visitor not only dressed up as Zorro for every Halloween from third grade all the way to his freshman year in college but also credits Johnston McCulley's hero for his ongoing career as an aging epee hack. Hagel's laugh lasts just long enough to be heartfelt, and not so long as to be calculated.
"I always thought he was the best of them," Hagel says.
If Hagel were better fitted for metaphor, Zorro would be an awfully good one, certainly better than that overrated royalist stooge Robin Hood. With his Michael Curtiz pastels and his Merry Men, the former Earl of Locksley fought to restore to the throne Richard I, the bloodthirsty slaughterer of Saracens, who'd left England to corruption and destitution while he went haring off to the Middle East on some damned Crusade. A renegade aristocrat himself, Zorro fought only to free the peons from a tyrannical governor. Zorro wore black. Zorro always rode alone.
But there are no places in Hagel for metaphor. His face is too meaty for poetics, its tectonics shaped by old football injuries and one horrible day in the Mekong Delta when the flesh of it bubbled and burned. His sentences are too often arrhythmic, breaking in the middle, when what he's saying takes an unexpected turn that seems to startle him most of all.
"The president says, 'I don't care.' He's not accountable anymore," Hagel says, measuring his words by the syllable and his syllables almost by the letter. "He's not accountable anymore, which isn't totally true. You can impeach him, and before this is over, you might see calls for his impeachment. I don't know. It depends how this goes."
The conversation beaches itself for a moment on that word -- impeachment -- spoken by a conservative Republican from a safe Senate seat in a reddish state. It's barely even whispered among the serious set in Washington, and it rings like a gong in the middle of the sentence, even though it flowed quite naturally out of the conversation he was having about how everybody had abandoned their responsibility to the country, and now there was a war going bad because of it.
"Congress abdicated its oversight responsibility," he says. "The press abdicated its responsibility, and the American people abdicated their responsibilities. Terror was on the minds of everyone, and nobody questioned anything, quite frankly."
He is developing, almost on the fly and without perceptible calculation, a vocabulary and a syntax through which to express the catastrophe of what followed after. Rough, and the furthest thing from glib, he's developing a voice that seems to be coming from somewhere else, distant and immediate all at once.
Listen to him calling out his fellow senators in committee.
"If you wanted a safe job," Hagel said memorably, "go sell shoes."
Watch Sen. Chuck Hagel tell Congress to "go sell shoes" on January 24, 2007. Via YouTube.com.
No pricey Beltway word sleeper could come up with "Go sell shoes." Not enough poetry. No Churchillian carillon ringing through the image. But the language is changing as the country's calling, because the war's gone bad.
Country's calling now. War's gone bad and nobody's listening, and the country's calling the way it always does, like the moan of a train whistle, soft and distant at first, but with increasing power behind it, the way the trains come through all the small places where Chuck Hagel grew up in Nebraska. All the little towns, where everyone knew if your father was drunk and smashed up the car or lost his job, where every family kept secrets that every other family knew anyway but were too polite or kind to mention. Rushville and York and Ainsworth.
And Columbus, too -- the City of Power and Progress -- founded in 1856 by men of grim visage and considerable chin whiskers, where Bill Cody first worked out the rough parts of his Wild West show before taking it down the line to the bright lights of Omaha. The old man, a veteran of the Pacific war who never quite made it all the way home, died in the little house on Woodland Avenue in Columbus on Christmas Eve 1962. Five years later, his sons went off to war. A train whistle blows in Columbus and it could be calling from four blocks away or 150 years ago. Country's calling from places just like that, louder and louder, demanding in a new, plainer language an end to incompetence and vainglory, creating one of those moments that find the man through which the moment finds its voice.
Go sell shoes.
Slowly, then, too slow, too late, maybe, but with inexorable purpose, the country begins to move.
His face has darkened and his eyes seem to have turned to stone. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has come before the Foreign Relations Committee of a radically different Senate to try and explain, among other things, how sending twenty-one thousand additional United States troops into a meat grinder of a ground war is somehow not an escalation of the conflict. She keeps calling it an "augmentation." She crawfishes on the subject of what will happen if the new strategy somehow sends American troops across the Iranian border. Chuck Hagel is having none of this.
"Some of us," Hagel says, "remember 1970, Madam Secretary, and that was Cambodia, and when our government lied to the American people and said, We didn't cross the border into Cambodia. In fact, we did. I happen to know something about that.
"I have to say, Madam Secretary, that I think this speech given last night by this president represents the most dangerous foreign-policy blunder in this country since Vietnam -- if it's carried out.
"I will resist it."
Rice sits there like an ice sculpture. The committee room erupts in applause.
I will resist it.
Watch Sen. Chuck Hagel grill Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice before the Foreign Relations Committee. Via YouTube.com.
Hagel speaks only for himself, but he clearly feels the force at his back. The country was divided, but not the way it was divided over Vietnam. That war split families. It got brothers storming away from each other at the dinner table and beating each other bloody on the front lawn. This war is different. It is massively unpopular in the country the way Vietnam never was; in the latest Gallup poll, 74 percent of the people surveyed disapproved of Bush's conduct of the war, and its only fervent supporters seem to be a cadre of Washington think-tankers, a couple of senators, and the president of the United States, and they seem to be the only ones who matter.
"You don't have the draft," Hagel says, "so you don't have that many people touched. This is a more sophisticated political divisiveness. It divides people from their government. 'They don't care what we think, so they're not accountable to us.' That's the kind of thing that's going to widen and deepen." A rock-ribbed Reagan conservative, he's become the voice of uncompromising dissent on this war. "If all these new troops get in there and the casualties start mounting, you're going to see that 74 number go to 80 and higher," he continues. "You can't do anything about the president. He's gone. But you can do something about your congressman. That's why all these Republicans are so nervous."
The Congress of the United States -- the 110th of that name -- is walking on eggshells this morning. It was elected the previous November in large part out of revulsion against a war in Iraq that was built on fraud and that thereafter was prosecuted by an executive branch that seemed to combine the giddy certitude of a sociopath with the geopolitical acumen of the Marx Brothers. A whopping 18 percent of the country believed it to be a good idea to send more American troops there -- and just the night before, the president of the United States had announced that he would do exactly that and that, if need be, he might just have to send some troops into Iran and Syria in order to make his new plan work.
The president had announced this even with the country so revolted by the whole business that it had decided in what was obviously abject desperation that the Democrats might even be a better bet, and it handed over to them both houses of the Congress. At first, there was a lot of talk about "civility" and "bipartisanship." The senators even got together before the opening of the new Congress -- no staff, no press -- in the old Senate chamber in the Capitol building to talk about getting along with one another. It was a rather ill-omened place to talk about bipartisan amity, the chamber in which a South Carolina congressman named Preston Brooks once caned abolitionist senator Charles Sumner into insensibility. Some issues are irreconcilable. The voters want Congress to function, but they also clearly want somebody's head on a stick.
Which is the reason why the Congress of the United States is walking on eggshells this morning. They're going to have to do something, and Rice is sitting there, the implacable face of an administration that believes its powers in this regard are limitless. Many of these people spent the previous six years enabling those powers, or folding in the face of them. The committee's new chairman is Joe Biden, who inveighs at Rice as though armoring himself in his own ambition, a blowhard who's choked at critical moments almost his entire career. He throws the Constitution at Rice, and she all but hands him a lollipop in return. Hagel sits to Biden's left, glowering and impatient.
Elected in an upset in 1996 over popular Democratic governor Ben Nelson, Hagel was as reliable a Republican as there was in the Senate. He voted for all the tax cuts. He proposed his own plan to monkey around with Social Security. He voted 100 percent of the time with the National Right to Life Committee, and 93 percent of the time with the United States Chamber of Commerce, and 5 percent of the time with the League of Conservation Voters. He wanted to protect the womb-babies and drill for oil in Alaska.
(Even Hagel's upset win over Governor Nelson in 1996 was tinged with what have become de rigueur charges of Republican jiggery-pokery. Prior to the campaign, he had been the chairman of the company that manufactured the machines that counted most of the votes. Nelson subsequently got elected to the other Senate seat from Nebraska anyway. The best anyone can say about their relationship is that their staffs get along well.)
He even voted for the resolution authorizing George Bush to use force in Iraq in 2002, but he did so in a speech shot through with dark ambivalence. He warned against believing in cakewalks. "Imposing democracy through force," he warned, "is a roll of the dice." Then Hagel voted aye.
"I was watching it," says his brother Tom, a law professor at the University of Dayton who's tied to Chuck by blood in every sense of the word. "And it was an excellent speech on all the reasons not to go to war. I thought, Here's a guy who's thought this through, who's clearly agonized over it, and he's set down on paper all the reasons for his ultimate act, which is to vote against it. But then he couldn't pull the trigger."
"There were two reasons I did it," Chuck Hagel explains. "I believed what the administration said, that war would be a last resort, and the second thing is, at a critical time like this, the president needs a strong hand, and to some extent, you've got to trust him, until he lies or screws up or something. Is there a gamble in that? Sure. But there was a gamble in sending Hagel to the Senate." Tom believes that Chuck "has a history of being too loyal for too long to people who don't deserve it." Chuck disagrees. It is not the first time.
However, the way George W. Bush operates always has made Chuck Hagel concerned. He saw close up how the Bush campaign savaged his friend John McCain in the South Carolina primary. In 2000, he said he favored a statewide recount of the disputed presidential ballot in Florida, which was the last thing the Bush people wanted. Then the planes hit the towers and the country got scared and a whole lot of things happened that made Hagel even more concerned. "It was what Churchill called a 'jarring gong,' " Hagel says. "The country got knocked off balance for a long time."
He spoke out against the excesses of the Patriot Act and the cavalier disregard of constitutional guarantees it embodied, becoming one of only four Republican senators to vote against its renewal in 2005. He fumed against what he saw as a country ill served by an indolent press, an impotent Congress, and its own shell-shocked acquiescence.
The Republicans had found an issue they thought they could ride to power for the next fifty years. The Democrats apparently thought so, too, curling up into a ball, whimpering their opposition. Out in the country, the American People -- that fragile flower of an entity that everyone claimed to be working so hard to protect -- seemed to function largely as set decoration. Out of this, inevitably, came the Iraq war.
However, as the evidence piled up that the original casus belli was a complicated farrago of lies, bureaucratic grandiosity, wonkish wet dreams, and wishful thinking, and the bodies piled up -- infantry, most of them, as he and his brother had been -- Hagel engaged in dissent. He called for the American troops to be redeployed, removed from the middle of a running sore of a civil war in which the only thing all sides seemed capable of agreeing upon was that it was a good thing to kill Americans, a burgeoning Belfast with sand. He also found himself an audience. The louder he spoke, the bigger the audience became.
Then the president gave his speech, and Rice came to the Hill to defend it, and Chuck Hagel said what he'd been building up to say for two years and what the country -- the fragile American People -- had been telling pollsters and shouting into the wind for somewhat longer.
I will resist it.
Here's another thing about that committee. A whole clutch of them are now -- or have considered -- running for president in 2008. Biden's in, and so are Barack Obama and Christopher Dodd. Feingold thought about it and, after contemplating how well a twice-divorced Jewish person from Wisconsin would play south of Kenosha, abandoned the idea. And then there's Chuck Hagel, who isn't even sure at this moment whether he'll run for reelection to the Senate but who, in his own dogged, deliberately anticharismatic way, has found a cause with an audience.
The Republican field is wide and eccentric. There is Newt Gingrich, once again running for emperor of his own private universe, and Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, who seems to be bucking to be the national archbishop. Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts has good looks and a thin resume, and he's stuck in the mud because he had to promise to treat gay people like human beings to get elected in Massachusetts, which isn't playing well in Jesusland. Rudy Giuliani has been taking his sweet time.
And there's John McCain, Hagel's great friend, who attached himself hip and thigh to the new policy in Iraq and who, even prior to that, had appeared to be on the verge of becoming a very ridiculous man. But it was after he signed on to the surge that, according to one poll, his support among his core independent voters in New Hampshire tanked from 54 to 27 percent.
And then there's Chuck Hagel, who's not sure of his future but who's positioned at this moment in history to be a presidential candidate of strange historical resonance: a Reaganite version of Eugene McCarthy, who, forty years ago, determined that he would run against a president of his own party in order to stop the misbegotten war in which Tom and Chuck Hagel were at that moment fighting.
"I don't think it's the same thing, because McCarthy was strictly an antiwar candidate," Hagel muses, turning the comparison over and over in his mind. "That wouldn't be what I would be."
Oh, but it's already pushed him there, because the war is going to be the only issue for the next two years, both the hammer and the anvil that pounds out the next president, the one who is going to have to deal with all the wreckage. It is going to redefine American politics for at least the next decade, and that one sentence -- I will resist it -- has marked Hagel as something he might never otherwise have become: the vehicle through which the country found a voice for its anger and discontent. A true maverick.
I will resist it.
The voice of a country, moving.
The Real McCain.
