Politico:
Arms control advocates and anti-war activists are ratcheting up pressure on President-elect Barack Obama to dump Defense Secretary Robert Gates and replace him with a more strident anti-war voice.Hagel is a big enough loser to satisfy code pink? He has certainly been wrong enough about Iraq to be comfortable with Obama and the others in the loser caucus. He will disappoint those who thought for some reason that Obama was going to be more of a moderate on national security.
Nominating Gates to stay, “would be a violation of the mandate for change that Obama says he represents,” said Medea Benjamin, cofounder of the anti-war group CodePink.
A better bipartisan fit for Obama, they say, is Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), who brings out what they like about Gates – his ability to deal with Russia, Iran and Syria – without the direct link to Bush’s policies.
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If by some chance anyone thinks Hagel is going to be seen as a bipartisan choice by conservatives, they can forget about it. In the early primary polls he never got above one percent in surveys of Republicans and he would have lost his Senate seat if he had run for reelection.
He is not a conservative on the war issues. He really does not understand counterinsurgency operations.
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