When Edward Everett Hale served as chaplain to the Senate, he was once asked if he prayed for the senators. “No,” he responded, “I look at the senators and pray for the country.”
If the sight of senators in their own chamber was enough to drive Chaplain Hale to the Almighty, what would he make of a White House where senators run the show? From the presidency (ex- Sen. Barack Obama) and the vice presidency (ex- Sen. Joe Biden) to the offices of secretary of state (ex-Sen. John Kerry) and secretary of defense (ex-Sen. Chuck Hagel), this administration is dominated by escapees from the upper house of Congress.
You have to go back to the 1850s and the unhappy administration of Franklin Pierce for the last time America saw a like array of senators in these same jobs. It provokes an impertinent question: Might the surfeit of senators help explain why the president’s foreign policy is in flames all across the world?
By the nature of the job, a senator shines most when he opposes a president, where his real constitutional powers — obstruction and delay — are best deployed. These negative powers are a strength of our system. But the Senate’s innate emphasis on the deliberative and the collaborative also shields senators from the real-world consequences of their votes.
In other words, there’s a reason the caricature of a senator is an old windbag.
President Obama’s Team of Senators is not immune from this. But to the traditional debilitations of the Senate, they add something even more noxious: a rank, post-Vietnam sensibility rooted in the idea that American force is a bad thing for the world.
Take Joe Biden. Elected to the Senate in 1972 on the tail winds of the antiwar movement, he has spent the decades since being wrong on virtually every issue of national security. The exception might have been his vote for intervention in Iraq — but then he flip-flopped, just like then-Sens. Kerry and Hagel.
From fighting Reagan’s fighting the Cold War to advising Obama against the operation that killed Osama bin Laden, Biden has been a consistent second-guesser when it comes to American might. In the Senate, that kind of thing leads you to the chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; but move over to the White House and you will find yourself defending policies — e.g., Obama’s unilateral action in Libya — for which you threatened to impeach a previous president.
Next is Secretary Kerry. Well before he ran for office, he’d proved himself a master at the self-serving umbrage that marks a man out for a Senate career. He did so in his 1971 appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee where, as the New York Sun has put it, he appeared “dressed in the remnant of his fatigues, on which were mounted the medals he failed to throw way” — and went on to slander his fellow servicemen in Vietnam as war criminals.
This is the same man who later explained his vote for billions in war funding for Iraq and Afghanistan as only a senator can: “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.” A few years later, Sen. Kerry and the missus went to Damascus for a dinner date with Mr. and Mrs. Assad. Now he wonders why, as secretary of state, no one takes his comparison of Assad to Hitler seriously.
Chuck Hagel, the lone Republican here, makes similar contributions. In memoirs written as a senator, he reduced LBJ’s effort in Vietnam to this: “I wish someone had told me when I was sitting on a burning tank in a Vietnamese rice paddy that I was fighting for a lost cause just to save a president’s legacy.” Presumably Hagel is finding war isn’t not as simple when you are the guy making the decisions; if not, he ought to explain how his complaint about LBJ and ’Nam is any different from what Obama is trying to do about the red line he drew for Syria.
Finally there’s the ultimate ex-senator, the president himself. For anyone familiar with the way Washington treats senators like Ottoman-era pashas, it’s not hard to see how Barack Obama might have found plausible the idea that it would only take his election as president to put oceans on notice and lead terrorists to give up terrorism.
We’re told President Obama is a smart man. So you have to wonder if he ever looks around the room and asks himself this: Do the same qualities that help a man rise in the Senate ensure he’ll be a dead weight at the White House?