Don Walton: Fahey new piece on chessboard

Or seek re-election.

Or walk away from elective office at the end of next year.

In Hagel’s mind, one would guess, the presidential decision needs to be made first.  Then comes the question of whether to bid for a third term in the Senate.

If Omaha's Democratic mayor might be a candidate for an open Senate seat, suddenly that prize begins to look very vulnerable for Republicans to defend.

A strong Democratic — after a party switch — mayor of Omaha, Ed Zorinsky, swiped an open seat in 1976 when Republican Sen. Roman Hruska retired.

Fahey too would be a formidable candidate.  And if he were to claim the Hagel seat in 2008, suddenly Nebraska again would have two Democratic senators.

And the state's Democratic Party would have its long-awaited breakthrough.

Hagel, who has worked hard to build the Nebraska Republican Party and help fund and elect its candidates, wouldn't be comfortable with that scenario.

So, it's another factor in the mix.

And it could bring new pressure to bear on Mike Johanns if Hagel chooses not to seek re-election.

A full-court press designed to nudge Johanns into a 2006 Senate race against Ben Nelson ran aground.  An effort to get him to leave his cabinet post as U.S. secretary of agriculture to come home to defend Nebraska’s Republican Senate seat in 2008 would seem to be a hard sell.

Mike Fahey, who says he's now at least open to the possibility of a bid for an open Senate seat, is a fascinating new piece on the chessboard.

But the first, and most decisive, move rests with Hagel.

Senators on the rise

  Both Hagel and Nelson got national props last week for their positions on Iraq.

New York Daily News columnist Mike Lupica extolled Nelson in an article entitled: "Big Ben Towers."

Lupica took note of Nelson's tough floor speech in which he suggested Republicans were choosing "politics over progress" in blocking debate on a resolution expressing the Senate's disagreement with President Bush's dispatch of additional troops to Iraq.

"Somebody who comes from a state more red than fire trucks stood in the U.S. Senate and said things Hillary Clinton should be saying about the war," Lupica wrote.

Hagel won his plaudits from Garrison Keillor.

"Amid all the stumbling and spinning and clarifying and angling in Washington, Sen. Chuck Hagel is walking tall these days," Keillor said.

"A man who can look at a disaster and call it a disaster when other people are trying to pretend it's a cabbage or a 1957 Chevy is always admirable, and of course it helps to have that heroic Roman visage of his and that rumbly Nebraska twang.

“If you were casting the role of presidential nominee, he would be it.  He is a Republican dissenter, a rarity in our time, a caribou among Holsteins.”

Although they got there following different routes, Hagel and Nelson now support the same Senate resolution on Iraq.

That resolution disagrees with the president’s troop escalation, seeks to redefine the military mission to get U.S. troops out of the middle of urban sectarian violence and calls for regional diplomacy to  work toward peace and reconciliation in Iraq.

Both Nebraska senators said a few kind things about each other en route to that resolution championed by John Warner and co-sponsored by Nelson.

That led Washington Post columnist Mary Ann Akers to marvel at this comity with tongue apparently planted firmly in cheek.

"Nebraska's senators, pals at last?" read the headline.

"The two lawmakers, while not quite parked on lovers lane, are now working together," Akers wrote.

"What's next?" she quotes one senior Senate staffer asking, "Sunnis and Shiites breaking bread?"

Finishing up

n Political chatter: Yes, Hagel gets a Republican primary opponent if he seeks re-election.  But only 17 percent of 430 likely Republican primary voters polled last December rated Hagel’s job performance as below average or poor. 

n Yes, many Nebraska Republicans are angry with Hagel for opposing President Bush on his conduct of the war in Iraq and his foreign policy.  But 59 percent of respondents gave Hagel a favorable rating; Bush had 68 percent job approval.

n A crisis over U.S. access to Middle Eastern oil, or hostilities over Taiwan, or a number of other unexpected events, could  spark “a cascade of flight from the U.S. dollar” with devastating effects because the United States has made itself so dependent on  foreign debt, says Clyde Prestowitz, last week’s Thompson Forum speaker.

 n Even more dangerous, as the Bush administration confronts Iran, might be a Gulf of Tonkin moment.

Reach Don Walton at 473-7248 or dwalton@journalstar.com.