Better in congress or on the football field?
I thought he was a very effective for a freshman congressman. For someone who hadn’t been around here, I thought he was very effective. He brought a great amount of stature with him and that was significant, but what was more significant was how he used that stature. He used it in a very positive and forceful way.

How much of the current economic meltdown do you think is due to government mismanagement and how much due to a natural market correction?
Well, markets always self-correct and go through ups and downs. Governments can get in the way. Governments can make things worse. I think one of the issues that we will be looking at—and that will be debated for some time—is whether our regulatory institutions, with responsibility for regulating the various financial institutions in our country, the banks, investment banks, etc., whether they were paying attention, especially to the subprime mortgage arrangements that were being made. But the fact is, when you have a free society and when you have markets that are very open, you are going to see cycles of people taking advantage of situations. In abuse of credit, what we saw in the last few years is a classic example of over-leverage, over-mortgage, over-borrow, over-billed and abused credit. And governments can’t do a lot about that. They can provide standards and of course the Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulatory agencies, but that’s what free markets are about. It will self-correct, and that’s what is going on right now. And it’s going to be painful.

Wasn’t that nice of the President to send us a tax rebate while simultaneously paying for two wars? He’s the greatest!
I voted against the stimulus package because I thought it was meaningless and ridiculous that somehow you’re going to expect our economy to come back when you’re going around the country and handing out rebate checks. First of all, the government has had to borrow that money anyway, because we don’t have it. We’re the largest debtor nation in the world. So someone is going to have to pay for that money. And that means we’ll have to go to Asia and the Persian Gulf where we have to go every day to finance the interest on the national debt. Second, the point here is to be more careful and prudent with our consumerism, then what is the message that the President is trying to send when he says go out and spend, spend, spend and bring the economy back. Well, that’s what has gotten us into a lot of trouble. We have record-high individual debt per family per individual. Our credit cards are maxed out. We have record-low savings rates and we’ve mortgaged everything. So, what is the message we’re sending here? And it’s meaningless anyway, $150 billion in rebate checks going out. That’s not going to do anything.

The second part of your question is a far more serious question of tax cuts in a time of war. We’ve never been at war and at the same time had tax cuts. We’re not paying for these two wars that we’re in. We’ve run up a third of our national debt in the last seven years, we have financed—as I say in my book—the Iraqi war very dishonestly in not going through the budget process. We do it through the so-called supplemental emergency spending, so it doesn’t show up on the budget, just the bottom line. And so, we’re going to have to come back to an orderly balance sheet, and the American people are going to have to make some determinations and some tough choices. If we Americans want to maintain being in the two wars that we’re in now, and having our national security apparatus eat up more than half of our discretionary spending each year and continue to make tax cuts, then that is going to drive this country further and further into debt and we will be less and less competitive in the next few years. I don’t think we’re going to be able to do that. We’re going to have to pay for the wars and pay for everything else that we want and we expect. Entitlements is the biggest expenditure that we have, and we have done nothing about Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid, with the baby-boom generation starting to retire. So, this next President and the next Congress over the next four years—along with the American people—are going to have to make some tough choices.

Well, the Vice President said—I think a while ago—that the insurgency was in its death throes. So we won’t have to finance the two wars for much longer, right?
[Laughs] Well, he’s said a lot of things over the last few years which have not been quite accurate. I would start with the banner on the aircraft carrier when the President flew in his fancy jumpsuit with “Mission accomplished.” Well, all of these irresponsible slogans and sayings from Rumsfeld and Cheney and all of them, “death throes,” “dead-enders,” “they’ll greet us as liberators,” of course have not turned out that way. It has actually turned out to be quite the opposite. But we know that, through history, our nation can sustain a foreign policy or involvement in a foreign war without the support of the American people. And the Iraq War does not currently have the support of the American people. With a new President, that person will have to decide how we unwind this thing in Iraq. We know we can’t sustain the rate of redeployments. We don’t have the man power. Just as General Petraeus said, last week, that this so-called surge has been a tactical, military victory, which is predictable. But not strategic, because there has no been any commensurate Iraqi political reconciliation. In the end, that’s all that counts. As he said, and every general will tell you, there’s no military solution here.

Obama claims he wants a trans-party cabinet. Rumor has it he means you. Truth?
I have said—and I said it the morning I announced my retirement—that I do not plan to be a candidate for any office this year. I intend to serve my last year out here being as forceful and engaged as I can possibly be. I don’t expect to be involved politically on any ticket or in any government next year. By the time I leave the Senate, my daughter will be graduating high school—she was in kindergarten when I started. Twelve years is enough for me.

They grow up fast don’t they?
Yeah they do! You turn around and she’s graduating high school.

In your book, you talk about a recalibration of our party system. This doesn’t mean the Bull Moose is coming back, does it?
Well, I think we are living through a very significant political realignment in our country. Today, politics only reflects society. We respond to and react to what’s going on in our world and in our country. You often hear the question asked, “Who has inherited or will inherit the Reagan coalition?” Well, the Reagan coalition is gone. Political coalitions never live much beyond 25 years, whether it’s FDR’s coalition, whether it’s the Nixon South, the silent majority. We’re living through such a new time in American politics. And I don’t think you need to look much beyond the three presidential candidates. One, we know for sure, John McCain. John McCain will be the oldest presidential candidate we’ve ever had and oldest President elected if he’s elected. Now that’s a bit of a reorientation in the 21st century. On the other side of the political spectrum, we will either have an African-American man, or a woman. Both would be precedent-setting. Those are certainly parts of reorientation. When you consider that women in America 100 years ago could not vote. Consider it: Up until the ’60s, an African-American in this country had very little possibilities of doing anything in any significant way politically. So, this reorientation that’s swirling here is manifesting itself, not only in the different candidates, but because you’ve got, by every measurement, the latest Gallup poll numbers showed 81 percent of the American people think America is going in the wrong direction. Well, when you see numbers like that, and those numbers have been like that in the 70s for two years, and then you see that the President of the United States has the longest-running and lowest approval ratings of any President, the Congress even lower than that, political parties even lower than that. Registered independents now represent the plurality of registered voters. That tells you something very clearly, that there is a reorientation of American politics going on because Americans have lost confidence and have lost trust in their current political system. We’re not relevant. People don’t think we’re doing the job. They don’t think we’re relevant to the times, to the challenges. And they’re looking for something else. To add to this, Mike Bloomberg’s interest in running for President. It was very real, I believe. And there was a very interesting receptivity to that by a lot of people around the country. And that tells you also, as much as anything else, that you have got a very large segment of the American people that are dissatisfied with the choices and with the two parties. All that, in my opinion, leads me to make the judgment that we are living through this very significant reorientation of American politics. And it probably doesn’t stop in November, either. In four years, I think you could see a very credible independent presidential candidate.

Is it messed up that journalists failed so badly in the run-up to the Iraq war but are all over the Spitzer scandal, leaving no stone unturned?
Well, I think we are all captive to a certain amount of sensationalism in our lives. The media is not immune to that. Everything is market driven, especially the media. For example, today look at the three or four main networks outside of cable. ABC, NBC, CBS; they are not independently owned anymore. They are owned by big conglomerates. And what has happened is that our media has become captive to entertainment. And they’ve become captive to ratings. Look at all the cable channels. Look at all the different talk shows. You get them on the left and you get them on the right. So, valid, legitimate hard news is, in my opinion, very hard to come by. The newspaper reporters are about the last refuge of real hard news and real hard journalism. The electronic media, TV, radio, cable, all the rest, are driven completely by ratings and by the numbers. Now, when you look at the run-up to the war, that takes some analysis. And I don’t blame the media for all of that, because we all, going in, have to have some confidence in our government officials. Certainly, you have to have some confidence in our President, our intelligence people and our defense people. And I think most of us, when it comes to our national security in this country, would give the benefit of the doubt to our defense specialists and our intelligence specialists. But then when we find out later that there was not just a significant abuse but an intentional misuse of intelligence and information to carry out an agenda that wasn’t quite the way this administration said it was, then that breaks the trust and confidence of all of us. So I think it’s a lot of those things together that have put the media in a tougher spot. I think the American people will drive us back to more responsible news and journalism, but it’s hard to do because we live in a kind of segmented world today.

Sen. Hagel discusses his book, America: Our Next Chapter at the 92nd St Y on Mar 27, 2008, and the Oxonian Society on Mar 28.