Senator Chuck Hagel is a prominent Republican war hero, a social conservative and staunch realist on global affairs. He often crosses party lines in the Senate, and has been a vocal critic against the handling of the Iraq war. Hagel’s no-nonsense pragmatism, particularly in foreign affairs, have gained him the respect of Americans in Nebraska and around the country. So he has been closely watched, first to see if he would run for president, and when he did not, whether either John McCain or Barack Obama might tap him for the VP slot. And, the media has been asking, who will Chuck endorse?
Well he has stayed on the sidelines until now. While Hagel didn’t come right out and endorse Senator Obama, he has done something actually more valuable: he has raised serious doubts about the readiness of Sarah Palin for the vice presidency, and by extension, the judgment of John McCain for selecting the governor as his running mate.
“She doesn’t have any foreign policy credentials,” Hagel said in an interview published Thursday by the Omaha World-Herald. “You get a passport for the first time in your life last year? I mean, I don’t know what you can say. You can’t say anything.”
“I think it’s a stretch to, in any way, to say that she’s got the experience to be president of the United States,” Hagel said.
“I think they ought to be just honest about it and stop the nonsense about, ‘I look out my window and I see Russia and so therefore I know something about Russia,'” he said. “That kind of thing is insulting to the American people.”
“But I do think in a world that is so complicated, so interconnected and so combustible, you really got to have some people in charge that have some sense of the bigger scope of the world,” Hagel said. “I think that’s just a requirement.”
The latest poll numbers show that undecided voters may be thinking the same thing.
Inform Your Consent 