Senator Chuck Hagel making sense in an interview with the Council of Foreign Relation's president, Richard Haas:
So the point being, to answer your question, this next president will reach out for consensus. I think the next president, regardless of who it is, will make a very conscious effort to put a Cabinet together that is bipartisan. I think the Republican and Democrat consensus is - there'll be enough of that consensus to govern. The president will have to do that. He doesn't - he or she - won't have a choice.
Why does Hagel believe a bipartisan cabinet is all but inevitable? Because Americans are sick and tired of Washington's malignancy.
The question of "Is America going in the right direction or the wrong direction?" Seventy to 75% of Americans all say consistently, across the board, regardless of poll, America's going in the wrong direction. Now that should tell all of us in this business things aren't that good.
When 75% of Americans - not just Republicans or Democrats or independents, all Americans - and then you can take that down into subdivisions of that question, that tells me if the next president has any hope of governing this country, that president is going to have to bring a consensus of governance together of common purpose....
While I applaud Hagel's optimistic analysis (albeit driven by Bush's disastrous foreign and domestic policies), I find no evidence of increased bipartisanship in DC these days or any move to reach across the aisle to rip this country out of the doldrums of its chauvinistic politics.
No doubt Hagel makes perfect sense, but in today's political climate, just asking each party's members to be rational is synonymous with wishful thinking.
Hatred is the prime currency in the nation's capital for the foreseeable future. To change this, we're going to need some heroic politics - something in scarce supply on Capitol Hill.
