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March 22, 2006
Plain speaker from the Plains
The moment was not exactly like Saul’s conversion on the road the Tarsus, but it determined Chuck Hagel’s direction in politics. As he told the Monitor’s editorial board yesterday, he was sitting on top of a tank in Vietnam in 1968 casting his first ballot. He marked Richard Nixon’s name and voted a straight Republican ticket.
His point in telling the anecdote was to say that the party of Nixon, the party he chose, stood for fiscal restraint and limited government – ideals that Republicans still trumpet in word but have abandoned in deed. “We have come loose from our moorings,” he said. As evidence, he cited the escalating federal debt, President Bush’s education program and the new Medicare drug benefit.
By contrast, Hagel, a U.S. senator from Nebraska, has not strayed from the ideals that drew him to the party. He voted against both No Child Left Behind and the Medicare Plan D. He thinks entitlement reform is the nation’s most pressing domestic issue. While appreciative of Bush’s push on Social Security last year, he says the president erred in casting his main message as personal accounts rather than the dire need for reform and in not putting a plan on the table.
Hagel is in New Hampshire this week for obvious reasons: to see how a presidential candidacy might suit him. We spent most of our hour or so talking with him about Iraq, another subject on which he does not conceal his differences with the White House. But in assessing his own potential as a national candidate, Hagel is realistic. He knows that events beyond his control – how the party does in the midterm elections, what happens in Iraq – will determine whether his views might catch the voters' interest during the 2008 campaign.
If he does run, Hagel is bound to get an attentive ear in New Hampshire. The state has wavered between red and blue during recent presidential elections in part because so many Republicans are with Hagel on the issues. They appreciate Bush’s political success but are skeptical of his disregard for a balanced budget, his championing of big federal programs and his war in Iraq.
New Hampshire was, and remains, Nixon Country – not the Nixon of Watergate but the Nixon of fiscal restraint and limited federal government. These are the ideals the 21-year-old Hagel signed up for while sitting on a tank. Now, he says, the party has become “skillful at saying one thing and doing another while blaming the Democrats” for whatever goes wrong.
Whether or not such plain speaking serves a candidate’s ultimate aim, our primary has a long tradition of providing a national platform for it.
Bienvenue au New Hampshire, Sen. Hagel. Live Free or Die.
Posted by Mike Pride at March 22, 2006 10:21 AM
Comments
I hope that Senator Hagel does run for President in 2008. I am encouraged by his vision for our nation.
http://hagel2008.blogspot.com/
Posted by: Charlie at March 22, 2006 11:33 PM