October 27, 2008

Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.): Palin’s Not Ready

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In an interview with his home-state paper, the Omaha World-Herald, Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), says Sarah Palin “doesn’t have any foreign policy credentials.”:

You get a passport for the first time in your life last year? I mean, I don’t know what you can say. You can’t say anything…. I think they ought to be just honest about it and stop the nonsense about, ‘I look out my window and I see Russia and so therefore I know something about Russia.’ … That kind of thing is insulting to the American people…. [I]n a world that is so complicated, so interconnected and so combustible, you really got to have some people in charge that have some sense of the bigger scope of the world. … I think that’s just a requirement.

Hagel, who is retiring, is perhaps the most outspoken Republican critic of the Iraq war in Congress. Hagel traveled with Barack Obama and Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) when Obama visited Iraq earlier this year. And Hagel’s wife, Lilibet Hagel, endorsed Obama earlier this month. Now the Senator himself has become the most prominent Republican critic of Sarah Palin, his own party’s VP pick. Could a formal endorsement of Obama be coming before the election?

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