I cannot quite peg what Chuck Hagel is planning on doing.\u00c2\u00a0 The word on the proverbial street is that not only is he planning on forgoing a run for the White House — he can’t really figure out an opening from the Republican electorate — but he’s thinking of simply ending his Senate career at the end of his term.\u00c2\u00a0 Mind you, this doesn’t really mean a thing for adding a Senate seat to the Democratic Party — when I hear that Chuck Hagel hates Nebraska Democrats, I realize that basically means he hates Senator Ben Nelson, the sort of half Democrat who is about the only Democrat standing in that state — reportedly we have the most uneasy state Senate delegation relationship with Hagel and Nelson.
\nThis would put a dent in Thom Hartmann’s on-going conspiracy theory which slides Chuck Hagel from stealing an election — the upset of 1996 — by dent of his ownership in a computer voting company, and rising up to take the presidency, perhaps cleverly and counter-intuitively having positioned himself as a sort of anti-war Realist (of the George Herbert Walker Bush camp… he’s Bush Senior’s man because it was in his administration that he came into politics.)<\/p>\n
But then I see that there’s talk that he’s mulling a third party independent run for the Presidency.\u00c2\u00a0 This is unfortunate — he is clearly a Republican, notwithstanding him being at odds with the Republican Party of the moment, and it’s a bad sign that someone squarely fitting in the party under Bush I and Dole doesn’t fit now.\u00c2\u00a0 He would, I suppose, be running under that “Unity” heading that’s seemed to be the vehicle of the wacky New York mayor Bloomberg’s wacky presidential hopes, and ultimately hasn’t much popular support — though it does have some support amongst various elites who would very much like to consolidate the two parties and tidy up politics.\u00c2\u00a0 So maybe Thom Hartmann’s beloved notion hasn’t fallen away just yet, and we’ll still be in the hands of the Bush Presidential dynasty under President Hagel.\u00c2\u00a0 I’ll just have to watch and see.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I cannot quite peg what Chuck Hagel is planning on doing.\u00c2\u00a0 The word on the proverbial street is that not only is he planning on forgoing a run for the White House — he can’t really figure out an opening from the Republican electorate — but he’s thinking of simply ending his Senate career at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2028","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2028","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2028"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2028\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}