Hi, this is Michael Graham. Welcome to the Weekly Standard podcast. Our guest is Stephen Hayes, who's doing the yeoman's work of actually watching the Hegel hearings today. And Steve, I think we can safely say that all the rumors about John McCain's man crush on Chuck Hagel are now put to bed.
Yeah, that's certainly true after the dispute that they had today in the early stages of this hearing on Hegel's confirmation to be Secretary of Defense. McCain went after Hagel early on whether the surge was a success. And I suspect that McCain asked the question expecting that Hagel would just say yes and move on. But Hagel, for reasons that this gave me, and I think are not understood by most of the fact, I'm not sure if you're not really sure if you're not really sure if you're not looking at the hearing, refused to acknowledge the fact of the surge, which there are very few people who dispute that at this point.
But Hagel, here's one of them, and that really set McCain off and he sort of bid into Hagel. Right. And he very evidently frustrated and vindicate that he was not like the over. But you know, one of the things about Chuck Hagel is that, and I'm speaking as a guy who gets my information from the media, Steve, so straighten me out.
But he seems to be the kind of guy who happily puts politics ahead of objective reality. In fact, he's one of those guys who just says, I think my ideas work and so I'm always going to defend my ideas even when confronted with contrary information. And so there's some of that, but he seemed to do that on some questions and on other questions, he did precisely the opposite. I mean, he made these arguments over the course of several years, statements that have been controversial and that people have talked about over the week, meeting up to the hearing.
And then today he really backed off of several of them, the comment that he made about the, quote unquote, Jewish lobby and how threatening they were or how much influence they have. He said, I should have said, should have phrased it differently. And then when Lindsey Graham under, I said, glittering, questioning from Senator Graham about who exactly had been undoing, so Pagle couldn't point to anybody and really looked weak and not very smart. Can I say that from the beginning, and not just because I'm a weekly standard reader and something reading or reporting, the ex-reporting that you've been doing in Bill Crystal said, Chuck Kegel's always been a weak nominee, hasn't he?
I just, I keep trying to ask myself, what is the winner here? Does he have like some secret knockout punch? Does he have a rope-a-dope strategy? He was an unimpressive senator with some really ideas to say out of the middle of the mainstream on defense and America's place in the world abroad.
And Obama picked him and I still don't know why. Yeah, and that's one of the things you heard from his former colleagues in the Senate early on in discussions that I had with them about the Hagle nomination. I mean, people, he was sort of always been a prickly guy, not somebody who was close to the many other senators, but that's not a disqualifier. In my view, in fact, in some cases, I should give good things.
Sure. The Senate is very sloppy and I like people who think themselves and don't sort of march and lock that. But, but Hagle never distinguished. He had this record in the Senate where he basically didn't do much.
He wasn't a leader on many issues. And the extent that he was a leader on issues, or at least without spoken on issues, it was on things like the surge where he said that it would be, if any more troops into Iraq would have been the biggest foreign policy disaster since Vietnam, which was not only not the case of search work and as we discussed, he was unable to acknowledge that fact. So there's just not, I mean, he surely has a great record as a hero in Vietnam. I mean, the story is there.
He's reading depth about the kinds of things that he did on the ground there. And it's incredibly impressive. But he hasn't done much in his public life, I would say, to recommend a good fact. Now, Stephen Hayes, one of these, you mentioned Hagle not doing much.
Some people raised questions of whether or not Hagle knows much. There were some unkind comments about his seeming lack of information or having taken away information that doesn't match with the facts. Was that what you saw today? Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, there were several instances today where you said things that I think were just not true. There was one, there was lots of discussion in hearings today about this report that he co-wrote for an organization called Global Zero, which advocates basically eliminating nuclear weapons. And Hagle was asked about this report repeatedly and said, look, we weren't actually making recommendations. We were just laying out possibilities and different scenarios.
And that the kinds of cuts that he was talking about were more illustrative with the word that he used. And nobody really made a few of these arguments. Nobody should really take that silly report. That's seriously what, as reporter John Donnelly from Congressional Quarterly reported, he says, the report itself said that these are, quote, possible and desirable.
And suggested that they should in fact happen. So that either Hagle wasn't familiar with the report or he's misrepresenting its findings. But either one of those, that's not a good thing. Yeah, I know it's bad when the one of the tweets that I got during the hearings was, I don't know if a 10 minute recess is long enough for Hagle to get a brain transplant.
And that's just the unkind of kind of comment we need. So not a great record, not a good hearing. Does Hagle move forward? Are we ever going to reach the Harriet Myers moment where the president simply says, I've offered an unacceptable nominee and withdraws him?
If I were a betting man, I'd still say that the better money is on him confirmed in part because you had Democratic senators who have come out and suggested that they would both go back in before this dreadful performance. And I'm sure some of them would be on what they said publicly. But it seems very clear to me that if we were, if the senator were to take a look at what he did in these confirmation hearings, there was actually no way he would be confirmed. And they started out on him, he was unsteady, he didn't have good answers.
And when he went through some questioning, not all of it's a difficult question by the way. Some questioning from Senator Ayat from Lindsey Graham from Jeff Sessions and others from Ted Cruz. The hearings quickly shifted from non-impressive to disastrous for Hagle. One last question President Obama now says, the sequestration is ruining the economy.
That's why it's economy shrinking. But he's also hiring Hagle to go in and slash defense expenditures, i.e. sequestration. So is sequestration good or bad, Stephen Hayes?
It's not just that the Obama administration has been unclear on this. That Hagle himself and his hearings today was unclear on what exactly he would do. He seemed to acknowledge that cuts to the level that people are talking about with sequestration would be as his predecessors suggested disastrous and catastrophic. But he also doesn't seem very committed to fighting against them anywhere.
We didn't get that impression during these hearings. And if you look at the administration's perspective or argument more broadly, remember the President of the United States said in November of 2011 that he would veto any attempts to replace or delay the implementation of the sequester. And now you've got a White House that's saying, you know, precisely the opposite in fact. So it's hard to follow where the White House is.
And I guess if you're going to defend Hagle, you could say he's been exactly as clear as the administration's selfish. I have squared the circle. You just understand this, Steve. It lies in the phrase, you say disastrous for the defense department, like that's a bad thing.
And once you can figure that out, then it all works out. Steve, thanks for joining us watching and today's hearings on the confirmation of Senator Hagle to be our Defense Secretary. I'm Michael Graham with the Weekly Standard Podcast. Please check Weekly Standard dot com regularly for more podcast updates.