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Debra Saunders starts off our look at the Hagel nomination.
“Never make an enemy by accident,” housemaid Anna Bates warned her husband in the third season premiere of “Downton Abbey” on Sunday night. That’s what the housemaid’s mother always told her.
If his mother ever gave him the same advice, former GOP Sen. Chuck Hagel – now President Obama’s pick to serve as secretary of defense – seems to have ignored it.
Biographically, the former Nebraska senator and decorated Vietnam War hero makes a great choice. As the president noted, “He’d be the first person of enlisted rank to serve as secretary of defense, one of the few secretaries who have been wounded in war and the first Vietnam veteran to lead the department.”
But temperamentally, not so much. While Obama lauded Hagel for representing “the bipartisan tradition we need more of in Washington,” I think that what the president really meant is that Hagel is his favorite kind of Republican, the self-loathing kind.
Make that: the kind whom Democrats like because Republicans do not.
Hagel alienated some on the right when he turned against the Iraq War, for which he had voted in 2002. A lot of people changed their minds about that war, but Hagel went so far as to say in 2007 that “of course” the Iraq War was about oil.
Hagel angered folks from both parties when he said during a 2006 interview, “The Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here.” …
Krauthammer is next.
The puzzle of the Chuck Hagel nomination for defense secretary is that you normally choose someone of the other party for your Cabinet to indicate a move to the center, but, as The Post’s editorial board pointed out, Hagel’s foreign policy views are to the left of Barack Obama’s, let alone the GOP’s. Indeed, they are at the fringe of the entire Senate.
So what’s going on? Message-sending. Obama won reelection. He no longer has to trim, to appear more moderate than his true instincts. He has the “flexibility” to be authentically Obama.
Hence the Hagel choice: Under the guise of centrist bipartisanship, it allows the president to leave the constrained first-term Obama behind and follow his natural Hagel-like foreign policy inclinations. On three pressing issues, in particular:
(1) Military Spending
Current Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said in August 2011 that the scheduled automatic $600 billion defense cuts (”sequestration”) would result in “hollowing out the force,” which would be “devastating.” And he strongly hinted that he might resign rather than enact them.
Asked about Panetta’s remarks, Hagel called the Pentagon “bloated” and needing “to be pared down.” Just the man you’d want to carry out a U.S. disarmament that will shrink America to what Obama thinks is its proper size on the world stage; i.e., smaller. The overweening superpower that Obama promiscuously chided in his global we-have-sinned tour is poised for reduction, not only to fund the bulging welfare state — like Europe’s postwar choice of social spending over international relevance — but to recalibrate America’s proper role in the world.
(2) Israel …
Then Mark Steyn.
Obamacare at home leads inevitably to Obamacuts abroad.
If you had buttonholed me in the Senate men’s room circa 2003 and told me that a decade hence Joe Biden would be America’s vice president, John Kerry Secretary of State, and Chuck Hagel Secretary of Defense, I’d have laughed and waited for the punch line: The Leahy administration?
President Lautenberg? Celebrate lack of diversity! But even in the republic’s descent into a Blowhardocracy staffed by a Zombie House of Lords, there are distinctions to be drawn. Sen. Kerry having been reliably wrong on every foreign policy issue of the past 40 years, it would seem likely that at this stage in his life he will be content merely to be in office, jetting hither and yon boring the pants off whichever presidents and prime ministers are foolish enough to grant him an audience. Beyond the photo-ops, the world will drift on toward the post-American era: Beijing will carry on gobbling up resources around the planet, Tsar Putin will flex his moobs across Eastern Europe and Central Asia, the Arab Spring “democracies” will see impressive growth in the critical clitoridectomy sector of the economy, Iran will go nuclear, and John Kerry will go to black-tie banquets in Europe.
But Chuck Hagel is a different kettle of senatorial huffenpuffer. And not because of what appears to be a certain antipathy toward Jews and gays. That would be awkward at the Tony Awards, but at the Arab League the post-summit locker-room schmoozing should be a breeze. Since his celebrated “evolution” on marriage last year, President Obama is famously partial to one of those constituencies, so presumably he didn’t nominate an obscure forgotten senator because of his fascinating insights into the appropriate level of “obviousness” the differently oriented should adopt. So, why Hagel? Why now?
My comrade Jonah Goldberg says this nomination is a “petty pick” made by Obama “out of spite.” I’m not so sure. If the signature accomplishment of the president’s first term was Obamacare (I’m using “signature accomplishment” in the Washington sense of “ruinously expensive bureaucratic sinkhole”), what would he be looking to pull off in his second (aside from the repeal of the 22nd Amendment)? Hagel isn’t being nominated to the Department of Zionist and Homosexual Regulatory Oversight but to the Defense Department. Which he calls “bloated.”
“The Pentagon,” he said a year ago, “needs to be pared down.” Unlike current Secretary Leon Panetta, who’s strongly opposed to the mandated “sequestration” cuts to the defense budget, Hagel thinks they’re merely a good start.
That’s why Obama’s offered him the gig. Because Obamacare at home leads inevitably to Obamacuts abroad. In that sense, America will be doing no more than following the same glum trajectory of every other great power in the postwar era. I feel only a wee bit sheepish about quoting my book “After America” two weeks running, since it’s hardly my fault Obama’s using it as the operating manual for his second term (I may sue for breach of copyright and retire to Tahiti). At any rate, somewhere around Chapter Five, I suggest that, having succeeded Britain as the dominant power, America may follow the old country in decline, too: …
We finish Hagel with Michael Barone.
… Hagel has shown an animus against Israel that is in tension with Obama’s assurances that Israel is a valued ally. He was one of only four senators who refused to sign a letter urging the president to express solidarity with Israel and condemn the Palestinian campaign of violence.
In an interview with Middle East negotiations veteran Aaron David Miller in 2006, Hagel said, “The Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people,” and “I’m not an Israeli senator, I’m a United States senator.”
But American support for Israel is not the product of a sinister “Jewish lobby.” It’s a reflection of the strong pro-Israel beliefs of the vast majority of Americans.
Confirmation of Hagel will be taken by the Iranian regime as an indication that the United States will do nothing to stop it from obtaining the nuclear capacity that Israel understandably regards as a threat to its existence.
So it’s not surprising that the Washington Post editorial page, which supported Obama’s re-election, stated that Hagel “is not the right choice for defense secretary.”
Obama’s decision to nominate him anyway suggests a leftward lurch on policy for which voters were given no advance notice.
It’s not surprising that most Republican senators seem likely to vote against this Republican nominee — and that most Democratic senators are avoiding making any commitment. Even the voluble Chuck Schumer is keeping quiet. …
Jack Lew is next. Jennifer Rubin starts us off.
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) has already come out against Jack Lew’s nomination for Treasury secretary based on what Sessions calls “the most direct and important false assertion during my entire time in Washington.” He is referring to Lew’s testimony that the Obama budget “will get will get us, over the next several years, to the point where we can look the American people in the eye and say we’re not adding to the debt anymore; we’re spending money that we have each year, and then we can work on bringing down our national debt.” That just isn’t so, but Sessions should consider whether there are not other contenders for “the most direct and important false assertion.”
There was Lew’s out-and-out misstatement that the Republicans had prevented a budget from being passed in the Senate, which Lew claimed required 60 votes. That earned him four Pinocchios from my colleague Glenn Kessler.
Then there was his out-and-out falsehood that Social Security is “entirely self-financing.” No it’s not, as factcheck.org pointed out.
Let’s not forget when Lew gave the president an assist in earning four Pinnochios for falsely claiming Congress proposed the sequester:
WaPo reminds us Jack Lew had a major position at CitiGroup when it nearly imploded.
Treasury secretary nominee Jack Lew has spent most of his career in government, but during the financial crisis, he was embedded inside one of the country’s biggest banks as it nearly imploded.
From 2006 to 2008, he worked at Citigroup in two major roles, a notable line in his résumégiven that as Treasury secretary, he would be charged with implementing new rules regulating Wall Street.
But Lew did not have just any position at the bank.
In early 2008, he became a top executive in the Citigroup unit that housed many of the bank’s riskiest operations, including its hedge funds and private equity investments. Massive losses in that unit helped drive Citigroup into the arms of the federal government, which bailed out the bank with $45 billion in taxpayer money that year.
The group had been under pressure to compete with similar units at other big Wall Street firms and, some analysts say, took on too many risks as it played catch-up.
“The mismanagement of risk was comprehensive at that organization,” said Simon Johnson, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Details about Lew’s exact responsibilities at Citigroup, where he worked from 2006 to 2008, are scant. He declined to comment for this article. …