When a President's party suffers catastrophic midterm losses, you can always count on one thing: That President will reflect on his tenure, and then take responsibility in a series of rational, measured admissions of failure.
Ha!
No, of course that's not what happens. What really happens is that the President finds a scapegoat to blame, and he tosses that person overboard as quickly as possible. It has to be someone who's high enough within the administration that the move appears to "hurt," but it also needs to be someone who's easily replaceable.
In the case of the Dems' historic 2014 implosion, that person is the sole Republican member of Team Obama - Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel.
As the New York Times reported this morning:
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel is stepping down under pressure, the first cabinet-level casualty of the collapse of President Obama’s Democratic majority in the Senate and a beleaguered national security team that has struggled to stay ahead of an onslaught of global crises.
The president, who is expected to announce Mr. Hagel’s resignation in a Rose Garden appearance on Monday, made the decision to ask his defense secretary — the sole Republican on his national security team — to step down last Friday after a series of meetings over the past two weeks, senior administration officials said.
The officials described Mr. Obama’s decision to remove Mr. Hagel, 68, as a recognition that the threat from the Islamic State would require a different kind of skills than those that Mr. Hagel was brought on to employ. A Republican with military experience who was skeptical about the Iraq war, Mr. Hagel came in to manage the Afghanistan combat withdrawal and the shrinking Pentagon budget in the era of budget sequestration.
In other words, Hagel is "resigning" in much the way old Soviet dictators used to leave office "due to heart problems."
Since Obama can never accept the fact that the midterms were about his policies, he's decided to claim that the losses were generated by the administration's handling of ISIS and Ebola. Both of those are problems they can - at least publicly - pin on Chuck Hagel.
There are two interesting things about this, and they both appear in the excerpt above.
The first is that Hagel was hired because he was a Republican who criticized the Bush administration's handling of foreign policy. As ISIS spread, the administration wallowed in doubt and willful inaction. Now they've realized that they actually have to do something about the problem, and they're trying to claim that Hagel's "skills" aren't up to par. What did they expect? When you hire someone who's "skills" revolve around criticizing action, inaction is what you're going to get.
Honestly, we'll never really know if Hagel was up to the task because it's been clear since 2009 that Obama himself has been charting his party's foreign policy course. From day one, we watched the apology tours, the Muslim Brotherhood soft-sell, and a pattern of rejecting our former allies. These were all Obama-spearheaded objectives. As for ISIS, he was briefed on the emerging threat, but was content to label them the "jayvee team" until they became too big to ignore. Hagel or no Hagel, in the end we all know exactly who was really steering the administration's Mid-East ship.
The second interesting thing is that the New York Times - a slavishly Obama-friendly media outlet - is making it clear that Hagel didn't merely "step down." He was fired. They also lay the blame squarely on Obama's need to explain the midterm loss, and they admit that Obama's ISIS policy will need to change if he's actually going to deal with the problem. That's a shocking level of truth from the Grey Lady.
Unfortunately, all of this honesty was too much for the New York Times. They've now altered the article to make it sound less like Hagel was the victim of a political hit.
Here's the new version:
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel handed in his resignation on Monday, the first cabinet-level casualty of the collapse of President Obama’s Democratic majority in the Senate and the struggles of his national security team to respond to an onslaught of global crises.
In announcing Mr. Hagel’s resignation from the State Dining Room on Monday, the president, flanked by Mr. Hagel and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., called Mr. Hagel critical to ushering the military “through a significant period of transition” and lauded “a young Army sergeant from Vietnam who rose to serve as America’s 24th secretary of defense.”
Mr. Obama called Mr. Hagel “no ordinary secretary of defense,” adding that he had “been in the dirt” of combat like no other defense chief. He said that Mr. Hagel would remain in the job until his successor is confirmed by the Senate.
Administration officials said that Mr. Obama made the decision to remove Mr. Hagel, the sole Republican on his national security team, last Friday after a series of meetings between the two men over the past two weeks.
The officials characterized the decision as recognition that the threat from the militant group Islamic State will require different skills from those that Mr. Hagel, who often struggled to articulate a clear viewpoint and was widely viewed as a passive defense secretary, was brought in to employ.
Same author, same headline, but quite a bit kinder, no? Everything now seems so amicable. Maybe the New York Times received word that the King was displeased with the use of unfortunate language like "beleagured."
Regardless, the facts remain. Obama himself is this administration's foreign policy leader. Hagel may not have been up to the challenge, but he's still exiting as little more than a fall guy for Presidential incompetence.
