I know it's a bit early to call the GOP presidential primaries, especially in favor of someone who hasn't officially announced, but Chuck Hagel's the guy.
Here's why: Hagel is the only candidate with both impeccable social reactionary credentials and a credible basis for supporting a withdrawal from Iraq by the time the actual presidential campaign begins. Although he supports the occupation, he's been a harsh critic of the administration's conduct of it; the other leading contenders have been falling all over themselves to support it and, for the moment, the president. He can win the primaries because he hasn't done anything to alienate the base and because he'll be seen as electable by Republican party heavyweights who recognize that as things now stand, Iraq will dominate the campaign. Take Iraq off the table, which a Hagel candidacy might do, and suddenly Democrats are confronted with a whole new landscape.
The current GOP front-runners, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani and John McCain, all have serious problems within the GOP base. Romney's newborn social conservatism arouses suspicion, plus a good chunk of that base views Mormonism as a cult. McCain actually is a social conservative but two decades of adulatory press have convinced many Republicans that he isn't, his loyalty to the party is suspect despite his years of sucking up, and his campaign to woo the religious right after dismissing them, in the person of Jerry Falwell, as "agents of intolerance" will hurt him. Giuliani is, as we've noted before, a cross-dressing, homo-loving serial adulterer, things his opponents or their surrogates are sure to point out during the primaries. None of those problems would be fatal in the general election in terms of the GOP vote, but the primaries are a different story. Activists dominate there, and they'll have the knives out for blemishes they'd let slide afterward.
I'm sure Hagel will take his lumps in the primaries, but nothing like the beatings that await Romney, McCain and Giuliani. None of those men are stupid, so far as I know; the combination of hubris and self-delusion propelling them toward their respective dooms must be one unholy high.
Candidate Hagel presents some challenges for Democrats. The Chris Matthews wing of the press is always on the lookout for their next man crush, and with McCain having voluntarily relinquished the maverick iconoclast crown, Hagel looks to be a good successor. A fair number of Democratic voters seem to suffer from Matthews Syndrome as well— remember the bizarre outburst of support for McCain as Kerry's running mate after the consultancy class floated the notion?
By the time the campaign rolls around, Hagel's position on the occupation won't be all that much different from Hillary Clinton's: it was the right thing to do but Bush screwed it up and we have to find a way to cut our losses. A Clinton-Hagel matchup would be tough, particularly with the inevitable swarm of Democratic "strategists" counseling the Democratic candidate to out-hawk the Republican one and to move right on social issues, on the still-ascendant-in-some-circles theory that the way to beat the opposition is to render one's self indistinguishable from them. Call it the Trojan Mirror strategy.
The other Democratic candidates might fare better against Hagel on the war, but they have their own difficulties to overcome. Obama and Edwards are inexperienced — Hagel himself is only a second-term senator but he looks experienced, which is what counts — Joe Biden comes with a hair-trigger self-destruct button and with the exception of Dennis Kucinich, the rest of the pack haven't really defined themselves. All of them will have to contend with a political press predisposed to finding fault with them, whether real or imagined, and undisposed to delve too deeply into actual issues [1].
When The Associated Press asked the presidential candidates about their bad habits, they did not fess up to anything that would sink the republic.
John Edwards drinks his bad habit out of a can or bottle - he is a voracious consumer of orange soda. Barack Obama is chewing nicotine gum these days to beat his bad habit and chose something else to mention here. Joe Biden, known for being gabby, was a model of brevity on this matter. But another candidate owned up to a talkative trait.
Orange soda, by the way, is quite the populist beverage [2].
The Democrat best positioned to take on Hagel is Al Gore, should he run, who was emphatically right about the Iraq invasion from the start, and who has serious credibility on virtually every issue on the public radar. Whether the press could forgive him for winning the 2000 election and being consistently prescient on the issues is another question.
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Romney seems set to win the Phil Gramm award for the candidate combining the most money and the worst chance for success. Gramm ran for the GOP nomination in 1996, but dropped out before the New Hampshire primary despite having raised (and blown through) more money than any other contender except Bob Dole, the eventual nominee. Romney doesn't bear Gramm's striking physical resemblance to Yertle the Turtle, and he's a bit more lively on the stump — his self-confessed vice in that AP story was "fidgeting" — but his other liabilities will do him in.
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