Who’s the Real Peace Candidate?
Debating in Ronald Reagan’s shadow in Simi Valley, there were plenty of Republican presidential hopefuls willing to deviate on social issues like embryo-destructive stem-cell research, but only one dissenter on the Iraq War—ten-term Congressman Ron Paul of Texas. It’s a role Paul reprised this week in South Carolina and, with any luck, will throughout the 2008 campaign.
What’s more, Paul has even begun to get some serious media coverage—albeit with the usual condescension toward principled “longshot” candidates.
That’s still a big improvement from when Paul declared his candidacy in March. Back then, the media was focused on another Republican with heterodox Iraq views. With headlines blaring “Chuck Hagel expected to announce 2008 bid,” reporters trekked out to Omaha with the expectation that the two-term Republican senator from Nebraska would toss his hat into the ring.
Instead Hagel merely announced that he would make another announcement—later. Members of the Fourth Estate weren’t amused.
The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank penned a column panning the senator’s performance under the title “When No News Is Strange News.” His colleague Howard Kurtz commented, “Boy that was strange.” National Public Radio called Hagel’s press conference “March Madness.”
So the media got their Hagel for president story wrong. But subsequent coverage compounded the error by exaggerating the senator’s import to conservative critics of the war in Iraq. The Associated Press called him “one of the more forceful Republican voices in opposition to the Iraq war.” Agence France-Presse dubbed Hagel a “fierce Iraq war critic” with an “anti-war posture.”
A report in The Politico before Hagel’s bizarre hurry-up-and-wait statement claimed that “his candidacy will test whether an anti-war—and sometimes defiantly anti-Bush—contender has a viable constituency in the Republican Party.”
There’s just one problem with all this: Chuck Hagel isn’t all that anti-war.
In 2002, Hagel joined a majority of the Senate—and all but one senator in his own party—in voting for the war. Until this year, he has supported every appropriation and fulfilled every Bush administration request concerning Iraq.
At the March 12 media event in Omaha, Hagel specifically eschewed the anti-war label, saying “that to have a different position than the president’s on a war doesn’t qualify anyone to be an anti-war candidate.”
For years, Chuck Hagel has been willing to complain about the war in speeches and on the Sunday morning television talk shows. Only recently has his voting record begun to catch up.
By contrast, Paul has consistently backed up his talk with action. He voted against the war at the height of its popularity, only one of six House Republicans to do so. He has taken the politically risky—fellow Republicans might say risky and foolish—step of voting against every appropriation funding the war. He voted against a resolution saying Iraq was part of the broader war on terror. Paul has even voted for withdrawal.
In fairness, Hagel’s resolve on the war has stiffened this year. He co-sponsored with the Democrats a resolution opposing the surge, but it was non-binding. Hagel also helped hand the Bush administration a political defeat by voting to impose a withdrawal timeline. But the same legislation also funds the war, substituting constitutionally problematic micromanagement tactics for Congress’ unambiguous power of the purse.
If Paul is the stronger anti-war candidate—and his run a better barometer of the GOP’s openness to debate on Iraq—why doesn’t he tend to attract the same fawning profiles as Hagel? Maybe it has a little bit to do with their differing political outlooks.
Paul’s opposition to the Iraq conflict stems from his general libertarianism, since he agrees with Randolph Bourne that war is the health of the state. He has always opposed big government and continued to vote against expansions of Washington’s reach—long after it became unfashionable to do so within the GOP that gave us No Child Left Behind and the Medicare prescription drug benefit.
In fact, Paul believes that the Constitution set up a limited federal government with enumerated powers. And he doesn’t always see the either party’s spending wish list enumerated in the text of that founding document.
Hagel has a generally conservative voting record with much to recommend it. But his independence can easily be overstated. He is critical of the administration while the cameras are running, but usually votes the party line once inside Senate chambers.
Sound familiar? Not for nothing did colleague George Neumayr designate the Nebraskan “Chuck McHagel.”
Neither man has much chance to win the Republican presidential nomination. Both are stuck at 2 percent in a recent CNN poll. Hagel has irritated the GOP base with his shtick, Paul with his consistent voting record.
Ron Paul is finally having his big media moment. But will he be forgotten again if Hagel decides on an independent run, either at the top of the ticket or as New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s running mate?
Let’s hope not.
W. James Antle III is associate editor of The American Spectator.
Comments
Rep. Ron Paul is clearly, far and away, the best of the ten announced Republican Presidential candidates (I like Hagel better than the author of the above essay does, but he’s not running as yet; one thing I do prefer about Hagel is the fact he could actually win), but Rep. Paul has almost no chance of getting the Republican nomination, and of the five Democrats with any chance of getting their nomination (Clinton, Obama, Edwards, Richardson, and also Gore), he would have an outside chance of defeating only the weakest candidate within that field (Barack Obama). Plus he’s too old (he’ll be 73 or 74 come Inauguration Day) and not a very good public speaker (one reason he won’t be the GOP nominee). With all that said, you probably think I’m going to urge a vote for one of the other Republican candidates. Not a chance! For all Paul’s flaws, the other nine are much worse. I’d go so far as to say that Ron Paul is a great American, and Tommy Thompson, Duncan Hunter, and Tom Tancredo seem sort of OK, I guess (and probably all have even less of a shot than Paul), but the other six are just despicable. I’d rather see the Democrats win that have Giulianai, McCain, that horrible Romney, idiotic Brownback, the Gilmore girl, or Rev. Huckabee get elected. They ought to hang a sign on the White House: “No Neo-Cons Need Apply.”
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Tancredo is my guy but I do like Paul as well.
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Good piece, Mr. Antel. You save your best stuff for the paleo outlets and the Remnant has made note of it during the present crisis.
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Doubtless the powers that be have the means to keep themselves such, insisting it a given we are obliged to an empire whose sons (& daughters) are to die ad infinitum in pursuit of such glory. Yet since that is their position, and the position of every candidate save Paul that the powers are offering, and since all that is so manifestly antipathetic to the good of the American people themselves, perhaps there is a doubt.
Only Paul has understood the folly of this nonsense from the start, & only he proposes a principled alternative to it. Given that all the others are but a collective gaggle & will continue to be so, surely it is just possible Americans might recognize this and vote their own interests once the season begins in earnest next year.
Should they, then said powers will throw everything they can at Paul – in the end not impossibly including bullets if nothing else works – but though I suppose only prayer can protect him from the latter, one wonders if his homespun want of “charisma” might not even prove to his advantage. Since Paul’s motivations are patriotic & not personal, it could be that this too will resonate against the pathetic glitz of his opponents.
Inasmuch as managing our descent into empire is the only other concern, talk that Paul can’t be elected is surely premature. Regardless, it is obvious there is nothing of even remote interest in the coming election, except for Paul’s candidacy.
And none for the republic either, save to put him in the White House. That, allow me to suggest, ought accordingly to be the concern of any Taki reader, or any other patriot.
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Jim has picked up the same annoying point that I have.
Theliberal establishment is less interested in making
common cause with the antiwar Right than it is in
using the war issue to get leftwing Democrats elected.
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If Hegel got the nomination, not only would I not vote for him, I’d encourage everyone I know to vote against him. Hegel essentially is a neoliberal globalist, who disagrees with the implementation only of the war in Iraq, and he supports the third-world invasion of the U.S.
http://grades.betterimmigration.com/testgrades.php3?District=NE&VIPID=510
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Errg, Hagel rather. I doubt Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel would have supported the third-world invasion of the West.
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With respect to Sen. Hagel’s non-press-conference back in March, the word in the back offices and espresso bars of Lincoln was that he had indeed intended to announce his candidacy but had a late-night visit from some rather persuasive Repub illumunati. I have heard it said that Chuck basicaly woke up at 2 a.m. with a “bleeding elephant’s head on the pillow next to him”....as it were. The Family had an offer that Sen. Hagel couldn’t refuse, and it was too late to call off the press conference, so, he just said what he said, to the consternation of the press and making himself look ridiculous…
That’s what I heard at Buzzard Bily’s in Lincoln anyway.
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What? Someone from American Spectator who isn’t a true-blue warmonger? Puerile (Blair really is the new Churchill) Tyrrell’s reign of neoconservatism must be slipping.
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Ron Paul is the only choice -for either party. I look forward to Taki’ and Buchanan’s magazine -The American Conservative -officially endorsing him before the primaries start. They will lose much credibility if they do not.
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It was pretty clear that Rudy’s people had made plans with the Faux News organizers to have Ron Paul tee’d up nicely as an unpatriotic, blame-America straw man; just ripe for Guiliani to knock out of the stadium with a well-rehearsed zinger (sure to be re-run ad nauseum).
It was sickening to hear Rudy’s macho but thought-free reply wildly cheered on cue. OK, if macho Mayor Guiliani was such a total genius hero on 9/11, then why didn’t he order both WTC Towers evacuated right after the 1st plane hit the North Tower?? Instead, Rudy looked the other way while hundreds of WTC South Tower workers (those attempting to leave the building) were told by WTC Security to just go back to their offices (and their certain deaths). And, all of this after Rudy must have known an attack was coming (or should have). Willie Brown (in SF), Netanyahoo(sp?) from Israel, numerous Pentagon top brass, and many Wall St. stock traders all seemed to know a good deal about what was going to go down on 9/11? Not to mention the Art Student “High-Fivers” cheering the WTC attack in real time from just across the river.
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Yes Indeed. This country has made mistakes in the past. Berry Goldwater once lost to LBJ. LBJ was re-elected on the platform that he would not escalate the war in Vietnam. After being re-elected LBJ staged the Gulf of Tonkin incident, using it to force through congress The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution declaring war on Vietnam.
If we wish to break that precedent, it will take even more than Ron Paul as president.
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Ron Paul has integrity. Period. Who cares about his age? Not I. Would you want a 48-year-old, without integrity, running the country? Not I.
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“In 1920 Mr. Churchill [age 46] had published in one Sunday newspaper an article about ‘the schemes of the International Jews,’ in which he had warned against the ‘the adherents of the sinister confederacy,’ and called them a ‘world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society.’ By the 1930s all such ugly phrases had been tailored out of his writings.”
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