A Laughable Piece of AnalysisBy
Margaret Carlson.
With no Secretariat in the stable, there's room for a dark horse. Galloping in is Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel. I went to a small dinner with Hagel last week to see how he's faring, which is well, despite bags the size of steamer trunks under his eyes. They make him look sad when he isn't.
As Bush-Cheney Enemy No. 1, he's the go-to anti-surge Republican who, although he voted for the war, warned President George W. Bush from Day One about the peril of governing Iraq.
If party activists could see past his sharp criticism of Bush's foreign policy, they would like his life story. Hagel's father died when he was a teenager, and young Chuck helped look after the other children and worked as a carhop at a hamburger joint. He and his younger brother joined the infantry and nearly died in Vietnam. He worked several jobs before starting a hugely successful cell-phone company. It made him a millionaire.
Let me just point out that if a conservative pundit were to pen a column suggesting that Joe Lieberman was the best candidate for the Democrats, he or she would get a horselaugh, and would be considered toast as a political analyst. Margaret Carlson used to be a White House reporter for Time Magazine, and will probably be feted for this effort. Hagel's a dead horse, not a dark horse, and no amount of whipping from Carlson is going to get him anywhere near the finish line.
Labels: Chuck Hagel, Margaret Carlson
