Turning our rhetorical guns back on the bad guys…

John Judis has a profile of Chuck Hagel in TNR this week (available here, free registration required). It’s mostly your standard profile of Hagel, but there’s some good stuff toward the end about Hagel’s state of mind right now.

Two months later, Hagel appears to have concluded that he has little chance as a Republican. When I asked him whether anything in particular had convinced him to consider running as an independent, he predictably said, “No,” but he made clear that he had been stung by his party’s revolt against him. “My loyalty is first to country, and I appreciate some in my party don’t accept that,” he said. Still, no one I talked to believes Hagel will actually run as an independent. Some people who know him think he is going to quit politics entirely, while others believe that he will be loath to turn his back on a challenge from an upstart like Bruning. One person who has worked with him questions whether Hagel has lost his moorings. “I just don’t know what is going on in that guy’s head,” he says. “I can’t tell if he is unusually smart or just lost it.”

There’s times when the conventional predictions, what you would normally expect a politician to do in a given situation, do not apply. This is clearly the case with Chuck Hagel. He clearly wants to run for President. His every action screams it, his ego demands it. But there’s plenty of conflicting reasons for Hagel, not the least of which is he knows for a fact that he can’t win if he runs as a Republican.

Which leaves him with three real options, if you eliminate that from the table:

- Run as part of an independent ticket for President, possibly with NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

- Run for reelection as a Republican.

- Retire from politics altogether.

Maybe I’m too blind to see it, but I just cannot see the third option as something that Hagel - someone who clearly craves attention - could stomach. It’d doom him to irrelevancy. He’d be pushed out of a Senate contest by an ego-driven scumbag and a 3-time loser! But perhaps that could be the preferrable option, rather than losing to one of those candidates. Still, if that were the case, a run for President, even a quixotic one, would provide him with an excuse to bow out of the race gracefully. (We’re not even going to try suggesting that his two-term pledge was serious).

Based on the evidence that’s gathering, particularly Hal Daub’s decision date, I’m pretty sure that Hagel’s decision will come around Labor Day (the area right-wing blogs seem to agree). What that decision will be is anyone’s guess. But the Republicans aren’t waiting for him anymore. I don’t think we should, either.