Matt Yglesias

Hagel on McCain and Russia

Connie Bruck takes a look at Chuck Hagel’s steady alienation from the GOP national security mainstream. Iraq, of course, played a big role but apparently in was John McCain’s decision that he wanted to take neocon policy and start applying it to great powers like Russia that was really the last straw:

Hagel, citing McCain’s repeated calls for Russia to be expelled from the Group of Eight, the association of major industrial democracies, said, “You’re not going to isolate Russia—that’s completely crazy!” He told me that McCain’s approach to Russia was one of the reasons that he could not endorse him. [...]

Critics have suggested that McCain’s League of Democracies could diminish the role of the United Nations. When I mentioned this to Hagel, he said, “What is the point of the United Nations? The whole point, as anyone who has taken any history knows, was to bring all nations of the world together in some kind of imperfect body, a forum that allows all governments of the world, regardless of what kinds of government, to work through their problems—versus attacking each other and going to war. Now, in John’s League of Democracies, does that mean Saudi Arabia is out? Does that mean our friend King Abdullah in Jordan is out? It would be only democracies. Well, we’ve got a lot of allies and relationships that are pretty important to us, and to our interests, who would be out of that club. And the way John would probably see China and Russia, they wouldn’t be in it, either. So it would be an interesting Book-of-the-Month Club.”

It’ll be interesting to see where traditional Republican realists go over the next couple of years. At the moment, an awful lot of the most prominent and most committed of them — Hagel, Jim Leach, Colin Powell — are neither de facto or de jure supporting Obama. Will they be able, post-election, to take control of their party again and steer it off the neocon course? At this point, it seems more likely that they’re going to wind up defecting en masse to the Democratic coalition, even as the Democratic Party’s own neocons-lite scramble aboard the bandwagon.

Sen. Hagel’s Wife For Obama

It came up at dinner tonight that neither Chuck Hagel nor Colin Powell yet seems to have made a presidential endorsement and was all set to do a post on the subject, when along comes word that the Hagel striptease is moving forward a bit with his wife stepping forward to endorse Obama, while the Senator himself stays on the sidelines. Weird.

Shadow Cabinets

You sometimes hear, most recently from Ezra Klein, that it would be illegal to appoint a shadow cabinet during the campaign because of the law against “directly or indirectly” promising anyone government jobs. In practice, though, it’s easy enough to leak that you’d appoint “someone like Chuck Hagel” as Secretary of Defense if you want to signal that you’ll appoint Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense. The reason not to do that isn’t the legal problem, it’s the other consideration Ezra brings to bear — you don’t want to re-enforce the idea that progressives can’t handle the job. If you’re going to go the route of putting a politician in the Secretary’s chair (which, paired with a Deputy Secretary from the policy world, seems pretty likely) then pick a progressive politician.

It would be much more productive, I think, to take someone with a solidly conservative domestic record but internationalist views on foreign policy and make him (or her) UN Ambassador or something. That sends the message that the liberal approach to world affairs has appeal that transcends party lines or debates over tax policy or whatever else. Or, similarly, if you could find someone with a generally conservative record but sound views on climate change and give that person an environmental policy role. Those are ways of co-opting conservative politicians in order to broaden the appeal of progressive solutions, rather than a way that draws attention to alleged weaknesses in the progressive approach.