Great Reads

John Heilemann writes about the great opportunities and the grave risks that an Obama presidency might face.

It requires no prodigious feat of memory, of course, to see how this dream could come a cropper. Back in 1993, Bill Clinton surfed into Washington on a similar wave of enthusiasm and expectation. Democrats then, too, controlled both the upper and lower chambers on Capitol Hill. The party’s agenda was bold, ambitious, far-reaching. And then everything fell to pieces. In something like a heartbeat, Clinton’s reputation as a Third Way centrist was reduced to rubble. The degree of Democratic political malpractice was so severe that it enabled the GOP, in 1994, to snatch the reins of the House and Senate simultaneously for the first time in four decades.

This precedent would be unnerving enough for Democrats by itself, but the truth is that the circumstances Obama will confront are infinitely more daunting than those that Clinton faced at the outset of his administration...

Connie Bruck examines Sen. Hagel's "Republican exile" and his relationship with McCain.

Hagel’s unwillingness to endorse McCain is generally perceived to be a result of their ongoing disagreements over the Iraq war. But he told me that the gulf between them is much deeper: “In good conscience, I could not enthusiastically—honestly—go out and endorse him and support him when we so fundamentally disagree on the future course of our foreign policy and our role in the world.”

... A traditional pro-business, small-government conservative, Hagel is a graduate of a Catholic high school, who is pro-life and supports school prayer. He occasionally broke with his party—on immigration reform, on the No Child Left Behind Act, on a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage—but, according to Congressional Quarterly, in 2006 he voted with the President ninety-six per cent of the time.

Hagel’s heresy on the Iraq war overshadowed the rest of his record, however. In 2002, the Weekly Standard included Hagel (along with Brent Scowcroft and the Times) in its “axis of appeasement.”