Everything a Politician Should Be

Lee Hamilton was visibly angry this week, a rare sight in more than 40 years as one of the most admirable figures in American politics.

Reacting to news that the CIA destroyed interrogation tapes, the co-chairman of the 9/11 Commission said, "Did they obstruct our inquiry? The answer is clearly yes. Whether that amounts to a crime, others will have to judge."

In a hero-less age, Americans might want to take a closer look at Hamilton, as the Christian Science Monitor did yesterday in a profile titled, "Washington's Bipartisan Power Broker."

The piece cites his success, as head of the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, in getting Haleh Esfandiari, his director of Middle East Studies, out of a Tehran prison on charges of spying.

After being rebuffed for months by political leaders, Hamilton appealed to Iran's most powerful man, the Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and won her release.

Hamilton, the Monitor says, is "Washington's middleman, the mild-mannered moderate more interested in solutions than sound bites. People who know him well compare him...as a man of pragmatism, to 'that other Hamilton'–-Alexander, the Founding Father famous for his worry about the dangers of faction."

Watching Hamilton chair the House’s Iran-Contra hearings a quarter of a century ago, it struck me he should run for President in 1988.

It struck others, too, but the boomlet soon ended. “He told them he didn’t want to do it,” his aide announced, “he didn’t want to look into it, he just wants to keep doing what he’s doing.” The New York Times called his response “a standard of modesty believed to be extinct on Capitol Hill.”

Hamilton had skewered Oliver North, Bush pere and President Reagan himself with a flat-out “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” simplicity: “Policy was driven by a series of lies...A few do not know what is better for the American people than the people themselves.”

But he resisted pressure for impeachment, saying it would damage the country after the trauma of Nixon's departure a decade earlier.

Lee Hamilton was thinking about what's best for America, He still is.

Giuliani's Glass House

As he hears Fred Thompson’s footsteps in the Republican race, America’s Mayor has gone from polishing his 9/11 halo to photo-shopping it out of all recognition, the Washington Post reports today.

At the same time, Rudy Giuliani has reverted to his prosecutorial roots by impugning the judgment and motives of every Democrat in sight from MoveOn.org back to Bill Clinton.

On terrorism, he charges, Democrats have "the same bad judgment they had in the 1990s. They don't see the threat. They don't accept the threat."

But, the Post reports, the attacks are “undercut by Giuliani's record as mayor and by his public statements about terrorism since the 1990s, which document an evolution in thinking that began with a mind-set similar to the one he criticizes today.”

Before 9/11 and even in the aftermath, Giuliani treated terrorism more as crime, akin to his Mafia experience, rather than an ongoing political crisis, reflected in his decision to locate a command center for the Office of Emergency Management across from the twin towers, which had been attacked in 1993.

John McCain has politely questioned whether Giuliani’s performance after 9/11 "translates, necessarily, into foreign policy or national security expertise. I know of nothing in his background that indicates that he has any experience in it."

The Mayor’s level of interest in international affairs was reflected by his failure to attend meetings of the Iraq Study Group in 2006 that would have interfered with his schedule of collecting $1.4 million in speaking fees, which led to his ultimate resignation from the commission.

Now Giuliani is not only touting his toughness on terrorism and the world it has created but the softness of everybody else. John McCain may be wrong about Iraq and its context, but he knows what he’s talking about, talks straight and doesn’t demean those who disagree with him.

Giuliani is his polar opposite.

The Menace of Mr. Smooth

Not only was Robert Gates an Eagle Scout in his youth but he grew up to become president of the National Eagle Scout Association. Unlike his grating predecessor as Secretary of Defense, Don Rumsfeld, Gates is soporific and therein may lie his menace to America.

Today on Meet the Press, Gates lulled us with his uninflected claim of “positive things happening at the local level” in Iraq, “confidence in the evaluation that Ambassador Crocker and General Petraeus are going to make in early September” and a reminder he had told the Iraqi parliament that “every day that we buy you, we’re buying it with American blood, and the idea of you going on vacation is unacceptable.”

All this sounds sane and plausible, but American blood keeps flowing and Gates, by not being cocky and condescending like Rumsfeld, is enabling it. His intelligence and rationality may doing more damage.

In the subtitle of his memoirs was the phrase “the ultimate insider,” and Gates has certainly been that for almost four decades, most of it with the C.I.A., loyal to the point of almost being prosecuted for his part in the Iran-Contra scandal.

After leaving government to become a college president, Gates in 2005 declined the newly created position of uber-Director of National Intelligence saying he "had nothing to look forward to in D.C.” But he couldn’t refuse the offer to succeed Rumsfeld.

From his demeanor and statements, and as a former member of the Iraq Study Group, Robert Gates clearly understands the futility of the enterprise there. But he has spent his life being a good and loyal servant of those in power, Reagan and both Bushes.

It’s unlikely that he wakes in the middle of the night with pangs over what he is buying with American blood, but it would be comforting to believe he is capable of that.

Bulletin From the Bush Bunker

One of the few lines of communication into the besieged White House is Plame-thrower Robert Novak, who set off l’affaire Libby by naming Joe Wilson’s wife in print.

From the entrails of Novak’s recent columns, things do not go well for the Decider. Today he reports on the pre-holiday “scouting trip” of the President’s Security Adviser Stephen Hadley to check the mood of senior Senate Republicans.

“The tone set by Hadley,” Novak writes, “signaled that the White House did not understand that Lugar, in his fateful speech on the Senate floor the night of June 25, was sending a distress signal to Bush...that it is imperative he act now. Hadley was told that it is not too late to go back to the Iraq Study Group's 79 recommendations, neglected since their release in December.”

Novak’s account suggests that Bush’s deafness continues: “Based on what Hadley said, one senator concluded that ‘they just do not recognize the depth of the difficulty they are in.’”

In his convoluted style, Novak goes around the barn with Democratic Sen. Carl Levin reporting on generals who turned down the war “czar” job because "hawks within the administration, including Vice President Cheney, remain more powerful than the pragmatists looking for an exit strategy in Iraq."

This month, with an appropriations bill and a House anti-war resolution coming up, Congressional Republicans are going to have to join Democrats in speaking louder and more clearly to be heard. All indicators, including their message through Novak today, are that they will.