Behold Movement Conservatism’s Information Disadvantage: Chuck Hagel Edition
Behold Movement Conservatism’s Information Disadvantage: Chuck Hagel Edition
FEB 27 2013, 6:00 AM ET
His confirmation was widely anticipated. Yet Jennifer Rubin and other neocons repeatedly published analysis that led their readers astray.
When Chuck Hagel was confirmed Tuesday as the secretary of defense, garnering 58 Senate votes from 52 Democrats, four Republicans, and two independents, most political observers were unsurprised. President Obama began this process with a comfortable Democratic majority in the Senate. The executive branch is generally afforded wide latitude in its cabinet selections. As Dan Drezner argued in a January 18 piece in Foreign Policy, “The moment Chuck Schumer endorsed Hagel’s selection, this ballgame was over. No Senate election two years from now will hinge on this confirmation vote because — just to remind everyone for the nth time — voters don’t care about international relations.” By January 28, Roll Call was reporting that so far, “Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin said that he has not counted a single Democratic ‘no’ vote on the question of whether former Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel should be confirmed as Defense secretary.”
As January ended, Daniel Larison was declaring the anti-Hagel campaign failed, explaining in The Week that “despite the concerted efforts of a few outside Republican interest groups and a steady stream of hostile coverage from conservative media outlets, Hagel has received the public support of numerous former national security officials, diplomats, and retired military officers, as well as securing endorsements from several senators even before his hearing began.” It appeared that, at the very worst, Hagel would go through with unanimous support from Democrats, and the presumption from the very beginning that he’d be confirmed would be vindicated.
But Americans who get their news from anti-Hagel conservatives discovered Tuesday that much of the analysis they’ve long been fed on this subject left them as misinformed about the likely course of events as they were about Mitt Romney’s prospects for victory during Election 2012. Of course, a single nomination battle isn’t nearly so consequential as a presidential election. This is nevertheless another reminder for the rank-and-file on the right: Demand better from the journalists whose work you patronize, or remain at an information disadvantage relative to consumers of a “mainstream media” that is regularly outperforming conservative journalists.
During the election, Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post was the the quintessential example of a conservative writer letting what she wanted to happen affect her take on what was happening. Sadly, she did her readers the same disservice in the Hagel fight. Her opposition to the former Nebraska senator is grounded in earnest disagreement with his approach to foreign policy. She is a hawkish neoconservative in the model of Bill Kristol. Hagel is not. That she constantly argued against his confirmation is fine.
But Rubin’s distaste for Hagel has caused her to make a series of dubious assertions about the likelihood of his being nominated and confirmed to the cabinet post that he’s just now secured. “If Obama’s pick for ambassador to Syria couldn’t get through the Senate, how would Hagel?” she asked in August 2010, when Hagel’s name was mentioned for the Pentagon job. “Maybe this is a trial balloon. If it’s more than that, it will go over like a lead one.” (That appeared in Commentary, before she moved to her Washington Post perch.)
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